Mike's theory of photography is that no matter how hard you try to curry favor with the gods of success, most of your pictures will suck (because we're essentially dealing with chance)...but a few won't.
But it's important to divide photographing into its components. On the one hand, you have the people who make the work: that's the "creativity" side of the divide. On the other hand, you have the big constellation of issues around how those people somehow intersect with the audience; that's what I intend by using the rubric "accomplishment."
Creativity
My basic idea of photography (indeed all art, craft, and endeavor) is this: most of it is bad or indifferent or tasteless or worthless, and a small amount of it isn't. No matter what the media, as long as it's viable at all, a few people will find creative and rewarding things to do with it. No matter what the style, it will suit a few practitioners. No matter how good or bad the equipment might be, it doesn't matter—the same rules hold. The reductio ad absurdum of this is the so-called Sturgeon's Law—"90% of everything is crap." I'd rather look at it from the positive side, because, when you think of it, it's incredibly uplifting...10% of everything—or let's say "a little bit," since using hard percentages benefits us nothing—a little bit of everything is not crap. Especially with photography. A fact that is amazing and encouraging.
Creativity in photography is mainly a matter of chance and taste. Broadly, chance determines what the raw material looks like; taste determines what we make out of it. (Skill, knowledge and strategy are all influential but not determinant.) You can try to "game" both sides of that—it's human nature to pretend we're in control—but the essence remains.
That's the "Gone Fishing" nature of photography—equip yourself, go to where you think the fish are, and put your line in the water, and you might catch one. If you keep at it, you certainly will.
Accomplishment
There are so many aspects to accomplishment that it makes the mind spin. Public perception, reward and support for the creators, difficulty or ease, levels of competition or just background noise, the interest of the audience, access to the work people want to look at, value, who gets fame, renown, and publicity and who works in isolation being ignored, all the various gatekeepers and "bars" that all together sort and sift the work we get to see from great work that will never be seen—you can't fit all these issues in a simple little blog post.
The point here is simply that creativity and accomplishment are separate, from the creator's perspective. I can assure you with 100% certainty that there are people out there right now for whom the camera in a smartphone or tablet was a revelation, and who are deeply immersed in the creative activity of discovering what they can do with it and getting what they want from it such that it satisfies their need to make what they're making. And I can all but guarantee that there are at least a few people showing their work on Instagram whose work will someday be treasured and valued by the culture. Just like the culture belatedly recognized the formerly obscure work of Fred Herzog, Vivian Maier, or Robert Bergman.
Granted, you're more likely to get good work when you encourage accomplishment—not for nothing did Shakespeare come along when theater was at the height of its popularity (maybe of all time—has there ever been a time or place when theater was more popular than it was in Elizabethan London?); there's a reason the Beatles came along when music was absolutely central, and crucial, to youth culture, a period that came and now has gone. At the other extreme, if you persistently ignore genius, well, yes, it will wither, probably. It will meander off and find something else to do. We don't work in a vacuum. And of course there's the issue of support—more people will be photographers if they can make a living from it, or get some other sort of non-remunerative reward from it that's meaningful to them. Purpose has to have a purpose.
Billions and billions
Most of the chaos in photographic culture right now comes from the "accomplishment" angle—how the work of creators intersects with the audience. As a member of the audience, I find it much harder to find good work right now than it was thirty years ago. Just the sheer numbers are agonizing—someone mentioned the other day that a single stock agency offers 36,000 images of the Eiffel Tower, and I did a calculation a few years ago that if you looked at three images per second for every waking hour for the rest of your life, you could look at all of the photographs uploaded to Facebook in one single 24-hour period. It was bad enough in the '80s when Kodak estimated that six billion pictures were taken worldwide every year—now, in the words of a 2017 article on Mylio.com, "...conservatively, if only one billion people have cameras or phones, and take less than 3 photos per day/1,000 pictures per year, that’s still 1 trillion photos captured every year."
On phones alone.
So attentiveness is simply completely inadequate to the task of keeping up with what's going on. Of course it always was; it just wasn't so bad, or so bald (obvious). Roland Barthes recognized years ago that when we talk about "photography," each of us is extrapolating from an exceedingly tiny subset of "all photographs," the subset being "the ones I've seen." It does seem fairly counterintuitive that I've been assiduously looking photographs my whole life and yet have seen only a vanishingly small percentage of all the photographs ever taken, but it's as true for me as it is for everyone.
There was a book that came out a few years ago that I think will be important in the history of photography: A New American Picture by Doug Rickard. Rickard intensively edited huge amounts of raw material taken by Google Street View and presented his selections as artworks. (He wasn't the only one working that way, of course—there are many people doing the same thing.) He received widespread criticism for the basic claim that the results were "his," since we draw a hard line at who pressed the shutter button (a concept highlighted at around the same time by David Slater and the so-called "monkey selfie copyright dispute." Trust us primates to haggle over ownership like it was the most important thing!) But really, Rickard's project and others like it offer a great analogy for the rising problem of the digital age: namely, that we need more editors, and more levels of editing, winnowing the mass of raw material potentially available to us into manageable form, if we are to stand any chance of actually seeing some fraction of the small percentage of it we want to see.
Same as always
But for creators, none of that really matters. The challenge is still the same: how do we decide what we like? Of that, is there anything like it that's available to us to do? Within that, how do we game the situation to stand a better chance of success? After that, did chance favor us? Were we able to recognize our success (that is, do we have taste)? If chance did favor us and we did recognize our success, how do we present our results in coherent and sympathetic form so that others might appreciate them too?
Smartphone or 8x10 view camera loaded with B&W film, Instagram or fine handmade prints in a box—none of that is really important. As long as you're doing what turns you on.
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Rob de Loe: "The importance of the accomplishment side of the equation in photography can’t be overemphasized. It’s crucial in any creative endeavour, but the way it works in photography is something else.
"Contrasting photography today to academic publishing today is instructive. Academics are creators too—and like all creators they live or die based on exposure. Academics will whinge that getting published is hard, but it’s a matter of perspective. In most fields, you have access to dozens if not hundreds of outlets. There’s gatekeeping, but it’s not difficult to work around. If you’re persistent, you’ll get published. You can get exposure at conferences large and small. Specialized search tools exist to help you find kindred spirits, and to make your work easily findable. Today you also have access to various social media platforms; you can be your own agent, promoting your work through a huge range of channels. It’s still possible to languish in obscurity as an academic (and many do!) But there’s a huge infrastructure in place you can use to become known (so obscurity is basically a choice).
"Photography, in comparison, is missing most of the necessary infrastructure. Academic artists can tap into the academic infrastructure, but that’s closed to non-academics. What’s available to someone who wants to use photography to make art today, and wants to become known (i.e., successful)? Anyone can put their photos on the Internet on their own website; most of these web sites end up as vanity projects nobody knows about because unlike journal articles, there's no database. You can hand over your life’s savings to a photo book publisher and hope some critic mentions you positively. Maybe the local coffee shop will put up your pictures? Perhaps a gallerist will take a liking to your work (but don’t hold your breath). Platforms like Instagram and Flickr are usually just a different kind of obscurity—your pictures are lost in a sea of similar-looking work. Is it still possible to become known through old-fashioned person-to-person networking?
"I wish I could close this dreary comment with a clear path forward for the photographer who wants to be 'successful.' Unfortunately, I’m not seeing one. The best advice I can give is what Mike said: make photographs that make you happy, to please yourself; conversely, don’t link up your happiness to 'accomplishment' in photography. And if you’re going to ignore that advice, make sure you’re gifted at the things you will have to do on the 'accomplishment' side of the equation."
Charles Rozier: "An essay that deserves to stand out, even among the millions (thousands?) of essays written every day...."
Mike replies: Made me laugh, like when I quoted Maria Popova the other day saying "letters about lunch items have been supplanted by Instagram photographs of lunch items" and a friend sent me a snapshot of his lunch.
Andrew Molitor: "I have come to the conclusion that the billions and billions of photos taken are in fact irrelevant on the consumption side. We look at about as many photos as we ever did. We take far more, collectively, and so now everything and everyone has been photographed in a fairly literal way, but in terms of looking at pictures much less has changed.
"Part of the sense that 'we are lost in the sea' is a failure of the gatekeepers.
"We used to be able to rely on certain random souls, selected more or less at random, to draw out from the mass of stuff an interesting subset for us to look at. Curators, critics, publishers, and so on. So-and-so got a monograph, you say? Well, perhaps worth looking at!
"Not any more. There are a lot of monographs being made and most of them are, even to my thoroughly catholic tastes, complete trash. They are conceptual art without a concept, for the most part (I like conceptual art, but much less if it lacks a discernible concept.)
"Galleries, museums, all this stuff seems these days to be driven by politics and personality, which I suppose isn't much of a change. Still, it seems as if in The Good Olde Dayes you had to know someone, sleep with someone else, and also have something to say in your art. That last bit seems to have been dropped, or at least converted into 'eh, any sort of dumb political stance will do.'
"There are, of course, still the last stalwarts of the tail end of the 20th century holding down major shows here and there, but among the up-and-comers I see good work that's going nowhere, and terrible boring trash being pushed forward as the next big thing for what appear to be purely social reasons.
"The gatekeepers, at least the ones running what you might think of as the minor leagues, seem to simply not care much. They're interested largely in extracting fees from artists to do a book, put on a show, carry work to a fair. The ones that are not extracting fees are mostly just promoting their MFA own students, or friends of same. They're supposed to be sifting out the best of the new crop, and feeding them upwards to the major leagues, but they're not. They're sifting out the ones with a proven ability to fundraise, either out of their own pockets, or on Kickstarter, which circles back around to social influence rather than any kind of artistic strength.
"Of course, it could be that I am simply not seeing the merit in what I characterize as trash being pushed forward. Despite what I believe to be earnest and thorough efforts to find something to love in this work, I am unable to find any depth in the bulk of what is being offered to me.
"I do, from time to time, run across what I think is real depth is other work that's out there, but such work seems woefully unsupported by the gatekeepers. The good stuff, I feel, is out there. It's just made by people who are rather too busy making art to go raise $10,000 for a book or a show."
Ernest Zarate: "Re 'It was bad enough in the '80s when Kodak estimated that six billion pictures were taken worldwide every year.'
"And back in the '80s who, pray tell, looked at all those six billion photos? No one. What really is the difference between six billion and 100 trillion photographs, when it comes to the number of images a person can look at, to say nothing of the much smaller number of photographs a person will look at, willingly? How many of those billions or trillions are viewed by an audience?
"My point being, the vast majority of those unimaginable number (and unimaginative) of photos are slapped onto social media for the 'enjoyment' of a very minuscule group of persons, commonly referred to as 'friends.' And their friends spend all of a millisecond glancing it before they scroll onto the next posting, mercifully never to look at it again. How many smartphone photos of lunches are you actively seeking out in a given day, or week, or month, or year? I’d say most likely zero. I know I am not.
"So, the defining characteristic then, in my humble opinion, is who is out there actively and intentionally pursuing the goal of putting his/her photographs in front of a large, discerning audience on a consistent basis? Certainly, this is still a large number, but compared to the number who simply post everything they shoot onto social media, this number is quite small. A tiny fraction.
"I think we can safely ignore nearly every single one of those billions/trillions of images posted on social media. They are not a threat. Instead, let’s turn our attention to those who work with purpose and intention. For those who are working with sincerity, but in the shadows and without notice (like myself), the satisfaction of the work and the product is enough. I’ve enjoyed and found satisfaction with the notice my work has attracted, but I’ve continued to do the work even in its absence. If at some point after I’m gone, my work gains attention (not likely), then so be it. I won’t be the first, nor will I be the last. But it’s not a driving force that compels me to keep working."
Rob Campbell: "I empathise with the notion that we may, rather than be celebrating/mourning photography as she was in her virginity, be thinking, instead, of the decline of the once-envied successful photographer.
"Well, I had my golden years, and it hurt like hell for them to pass into memory, but I did continue to make pictures. Trouble is, making pictures does not equate with making pictures one wants to make; it more easily falls into the open trap of making them just because one can't stop the urge, a frustrated urge where the original desire is for a genre now unavailable to the individual. The result can go two ways: either frustration continues unabated or, with luck, something new comes up to replace, partially at least, the lost love. I have found a mid-point that keeps the artist inside sane, but fails to silence the voices of regret.
"The good bit is that it means I can be totally selfish in whether or not the results please anyone, yet...yet, there is no killing of the memories that only mental illness or death will ever dispel.
"I've suggested this before, but perhaps love always contains the seeds of its own destruction."
