[This is the second part of a three-part post.
Part I is here.]
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...So then the next question is, how does one "work hard" on a photograph? What does that mean, exactly?
We all have some idea of answers to this question, I think. But I wonder if these ideas for a lot of us aren't actually quite vague and based on assumptions we haven't looked at very hard.
Robert Frank, who I sometimes think of as the J.D. Salinger of photography (there are some interesting parallels), created pictures for his book The Americans that looked like no more than casual glances or glimpses, some of them so apparently offhand that they resemble the accidental shots at the beginning of a roll of film when the film is being wound-on. Surely Frank's random-looking shots are not "worked on," right? They're as effortless as can be.
Did Robert Frank work hard for this photograph from The Americans?
But think about it for a minute. Frank crisscrossed the continent and took 28,000 pictures to end up publishing 83 of them. That sounds like working hard to me. Actually it sounds like working exceptionally hard...it's just that it's not what most of us first think of when we use the phrase "working hard on a photograph."
There are all sorts of ways to work hard on a photograph. Consider a still-life photographer who collects objects continually and spends days arranging some of them for a still life. Taking the picture might then be the trivial part. Or a portraitist who works for weeks to get access to a famous subject who she is then given ten minutes with. She's not going to work very hard in ten minutes, but that doesn't mean she didn't work hard to get the portrait. Or a fine printer who has invested in expensive equipment and worked for hundreds of hours to master digital post-processing techniques and to understand color theory. A single print might be routine for him, but he's worked very hard to make the printing routine. Or a travel photographer who arranges a shoot like a military campaign, planning itineraries, checking the times of day and the angles of the sun, and packing extensive bags and boxes of equipment. I worked for a studio advertising pro for months before the light bulb went off...his major talent was problem-solving. Art directors from advertising agencies would present him with a problem, and he had to solve it within a certain budget and in a certain time-frame. The pictures were usually slick and trival—anonymous ad photographs meant to be readable at a glance and to live very short lifespans. It was the problem-solving that he was good at and that he enjoyed.
Work it!
Another way to work hard is to "work" a subject, scene, or motif—take pictures of it from all kinds of angles, trying everything, spending lots of time, really looking—or coming back again and again to shoot the same motif in different light or at different times of the day or the year. I like that kind of working hard...it continues to be engaging for me. (And that's a plus, I think. I resist some kinds of hard work and embrace others. Maybe that isn't a reliable guide to what's going to help and what isn't, but it's nice to spend your hours and days on Earth in ways you enjoy.)
You'll might notice that this is a motif you've seen before.
It's the same sign you saw in the picture in this post.
Different camera, season, angle, light, and day.
How about just spending a great deal of time with a camera in your hand? I think that counts. I was once told that jogging benefits you in proportion to the amount of time you spend doing it, never mind how fast you go or how much ground you cover. For some, lots of time spent shooting is perhaps a good way to work hard.
A lot of photographers in the old days even "practiced" with their cameras, like musicians practice with their instruments, to quicken their reflexes and help them be ready for anything. I don't know if people do this any more. It might have been part of his legend (or legendizing, let's say), but supposedly Cartier-Bresson shot two rolls of film before he ate breakfast every morning just to get himself going for the day.
Sometimes, no doubt, working hard can be counterproductive. When I was a photo teacher, one phenomenon I saw again and again was when a beginning student would take an inferior negative and become determined to make an exceptional print with it. They'd struggle and struggle trying to make a silk purse of a sow's ear. (Heroic efforts in the darkroom were respected at that time.) I usually wouldn't discourage this at first, because it might have been part of what they need to learn, namely, that good negatives print easily and that even heroic measures with bad negatives usually aren't enough to save them. I'd put a stop to it if they were getting too frustrated or wasting too much time. Anyway, that's not the way to work hard on a photograph. I suspect the same thing happens now with students diving into excessive post-processing in attempts to make something more out of pictures that just aren't quite good enough, but I don't teach any more so I don't know.
Ambivalence
And my own experience? I admit I've had an ambivalent relationship with "working hard" on photographs. Success for me hasn't always corresponded to the amount of labor, time, or care I front-load any project with. Plenty of times I've started an ambitious project only to discover halfway through that a lot of hard work just isn't leading to the pictures being any better.
I'll give you one example. After admiring and studying Joel Meyerowitz's book St. Louis and the Arch long ago, I decided to try a similar project. Meyerowitz's book consisted of about a hundred large-format cityscapes of St. Louis, in many of which the arch or part of the arch could be seen. I planned to try something similar in Washington D.C. using the National Cathedral as the landmark. Spending most of my free time, day after day, week after week, I lugged my 4x5 all over the area around the Cathedral trying to find arresting photographs that had the Cathedral in them somewhere. It was frustrating because either the views of the Cathedral didn't come along with scenes I thought were pictures, or the pictures didn't contain any traces of the Cathedral. Of course, a big part of the problem might have been that I'm no Joel Meyerowitz.
Anyway, at some point I got the idea that a unique perspective of the Cathedral might be visible from the top of a certain building a mile or so away. So I started to try to get permission to take my camera to the building's roof. It took days. I had to go through all sorts of red tape, talk to one person after another, explain myself and my purpose again and again. Finally, I got permission to get on the roof of the building. The time was negotiated. And...the light was wrong. It was one of those glarey, hot, white-sky Summer days. And I was wrong about the viewpoint, too—the picture was just nothing special. Several days, all that work...and pffft. Nothing really to show for it.
Over the years I have noticed, let's say, a very imperfect correspondence between willfully working hard at photographing and whether or not the pictures are any good. But it really does beg the question of what you consider "working hard" to mean.
A friend of mine, a peer, a long time ago was in a photography graduate program. The big-name instructor believed in extremely heavy shooting. He shot a lot himself. I think his students were required to shoot 10 rolls of 120 a day, if memory serves. So, trying to learn vicariously through my friend, I experimented with it—I went to some gathering on the Mall in D.C. and forced myself to shoot eight rolls of 136, 280 frames, in an afternoon, much more than I would normally shoot.
It didn't help. I didn't get any more good shots than I usually do with one roll, or two. I liked what Jane Bown said—she's one of my favorite photographers—something to the effect that she noticed the first and the last pictures she took on a portrait shoot were the best ones, so she stopped taking all the ones in the middle. I still shoot lightly, even in digital.
Everyone approves...in theory
The amount of hard work I've seen poured into photographs and photographic projects over the years is mighty impressive. Some of it pays off and a lot of it doesn't. But there are all kinds of way photographers work hard on photographs. It's not just fastidious post-processing; not just careful printing; not just money or time expended; not just any one thing or any one particular strategy. There are all sorts of ways to work hard.
Yes, discipline is good, and everyone approves of hard work in theory. But surely, the thing to do is to learn what kinds of hard work pay off for each of us, and which kinds don't.
Next in this series, I'll finally get to the reason I started writing this triplet of posts in the first place!
Mike
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Michel Hardy-Vallée: "Failures are actually part of the work that goes behind a 'successful' photograph. You showed with the Cathedral story that many actions performed can produce nil result; now, you have to consider that not doing something is actually crucial to the making of a good work. After this failure, what are the things that you didn't do anymore, which thereby allowed you to succeed otherwise?"
Kenneth Brayton: "It took me many years to understand it is not about working hard. Hard work is cheap, everybody can work hard. It is about working smart."
James Weekes: "A friend of mine's father, in reaction to his son's whining about doing an assigned chore every day, told him to 'do it until you get used to it.' That is really effective. Once you are used to it it is no longer work, just part of your day. The only way that I photograph every day is because I'm used to it."
Mike replies: When I think of all the work that people like George Tice and Elliott Erwitt did for years as a matter of course it's quite humbling. They definitely must have made hard work routine.
Ronny A Nilsen: "'Chance favors the prepared mind.' —Louis Pasteur (1822–1895). Without having done some hard work to be prepared, you will not be able to take advantage of the 'easy to get' pictures.
Stan B.: "You can be as focused, imaginative and determined as possible—but if it ain't there...it ain't there."
Artistwithlight: "Myself, I worked so hard as an amateur that when I turned pro it it was like retirement."
Michael Fewster: "I enjoyed this post immensely and I have sent it to to many friends. Regarding your conclusion that a photographer needs to learn which areas of hard work pay off. I am reminded of the old advertising industry statement (and I am not quoting this accurately, you'll get the idea), 'I know that 50% of our advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which 50%.'"
Working hard - or making it diffucult?
W. Eugene Smith spent a lot of his time making it difficult.
Posted by: Daniel | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 11:37 AM
Thinking of Robert Frank, aren't there lots of alternative photos of the "lift operator", which show that it wasn't as spontaneous is it appears? So in his case, he was working hard to get just what he was looking for.
Posted by: James Shackleton | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 11:43 AM
Re: No one cares how hard you work.
I certainly think that it IS true and should be true, It should also be coupled with your admonition that you still have to work as hard as necessary to get the result you want.
No one (but you the Photographer) will ever know if you got tired, went home early, failed to go back, or didn't keep looking for something better. But I have found over and over that those efforts, known only by ourselves, are often rewarded.
The insidious part of artistic laziness is that there are no clear or obvious 'consequences'. We never know what we missed.
There is no way of knowing what might have been.
I like your Jogging analogy, the benefit comes from time doing it, not from form or speed, or distance covered. Good photographs come from being out there, open and ready to find what is offered. The camera, lenses, or number of exposures made don't matter. Only the results matter. Once you know the basic technical parts, you can't read or think your way to better pictures. It is only the relentless 'doing' over time (and ruthless editing) that make us better.
Thanks for stimulating the thought.
Posted by: Michael J. Perini | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 12:10 PM
I would think these days it would be even more important to spend lots of time practicing with your camera, to be able to recognize in advance which mode was right for a particular scene, and quickly go to it. I find I don't do that enough.
Posted by: Clay Olmstead | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 12:40 PM
700 ~ 800 rolls of film on that trip? And then sorting through that many to select 82 shots? Yow! And I thought I was bad with my "usual suspects" barns and trestles that I was shooting again this week to try and get in some nice evening light. Didn't work but it was worth it and I've got an image I like but can't quite get right in post. It's flat and dull and I can't quite get my finger on the issue. Doesn't help that I'm using new software (Capture One Express Nikon) and am still learning it as well.
Posted by: William Lewis | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 12:52 PM
I'm enjoying this series a lot. Thanks for the topic and for the thorough exploration of it.
Posted by: Bill Tyler | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 01:46 PM
Advances in technology have made it much easier to reach my personal threshold for adequate image quality, defined as sufficient sharpness, tonal smoothness and color rendition to express what I'm trying to show in a print. But it hasn't made any difference in my success rate in terms of worthy photographs per day in the field.
30 years ago this meant a heavy tripod, good glass, a cable release, mirror lock-up, and slow slide film meticulously exposed in low contrast light to stay within its unforgiving narrow dynamic range. When all the stars were aligned, I could just barely get what I wanted with 35 mm film. And this required many pre-dawn visits to my subject to get just the lighting I wanted. It was always a lot of work, hopefully seasoned with a dose of serendipity. The harder you work, the luckier you get.
With digital capture using a reasonably modern sensor, it's all so much easier. Sharpness and tonal smoothness are a given at any reasonable ISO. It's not difficult to get a hand-holdable shutter speed and adequate depth of field in any reasonably good light. And dynamic range is far better. So far I have mostly employed the same low ISO, tripod-mounted meticulous technique and used the technical gains to print larger with the same quality. I have not found casual hand-held photography to permit any reduction in effort. Composition doesn't get any easier, and shooting lots more frames adds greatly to the editing chores without (at least for me) noticeably improving my success rate per day. I spend just as much time scouting, checking out maps, studying sunrise/moonrise apps, and in Photoshop after image capture.
I also find to my dismay that, at best, I only seem to have two or three good photos in me per day, no matter how beautiful the landscape or how stunning the light. I can spend 10 minutes of intense mental effort composing and carefully exposing (say) a series of frames for a planned large panoramic print. When it works out, when I'm sure I've got what I want on the memory card, it feels like somebody has cut my puppet strings. I'm out of energy and done for the day.
Posted by: Geoff Wittig | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 01:57 PM
One of my projects is to shoot several favorite locations in a variety of conditions. This includes all four seasons, different times of day, different light and, especially, the full gamut of weather. It's far from being complete — if completeness is even possible or desirable.
I suppose this could be considered working hard except that it is so enjoyable that it does not seem like work.
Posted by: DavidB | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 02:18 PM
I'm one of those photographers, when seen by someone else, might be labeled a "spray and pray" type. When I'm out with the camera, I try to let my eye make decisions, not my brain. That generally results in me arriving back at the computer (or darkroom long ago) with many, MANY photographs. Now comes the "hard" part... being a ruthless editor; being willing to toss the junk. And being willing to give the process time enough to let the good ones bubble to the top. I suspect photographers like Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand did that kind of hard work.
Posted by: Jamie Pillers | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 03:02 PM
Oh dear!
". . . who she is then given ten minutes with."
". . . with whom she is then given ten minutes."
At least, "whom", pretty please?
Pedantic Moose
[...with whom she is then given ten minutes" is more strictly correct, but this sort of thing is right in the middle of what you might call the transition zone. The question is, which construction is more likely to interrupt the reader's flow and take his or her attention away from the sense of the sentence? That is, which is more likely to be a distraction? The question is answered in your own case, but my sense is that the construction I used is less likely to impede the greater number of readers.
Always a judgement call, though. Sometimes it might be better to simply work around it by finding a different way to say it, but I started this essay last night and finished it this morning, so I don't get a lot of time to rewrite and revise. --Mike]
Posted by: Moose | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 03:16 PM
IMHO working "hard" at photography only produces technically better photographs. As far as producing something inspiring, that takes talent. Either ya got it, or you don't.
Posted by: Eric Rose | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 03:18 PM
Wonder how many Ansel took in a day?
In my youth I shot weddings with a speed graphic and #2 flash bulbs. Talk about working hard!
Posted by: Herb Cunningham | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 03:37 PM
Your comments presented in paragraph nine about expending inordinate amounts of energy on lackluster negatives/files brought me back to a valuable lesson learned in one of Fred Picker's Zone VI Workshops during which we had the unique opportunity to attend a printing session in Fred's beautiful darkroom (custom cherry cabinetry, etc.). Fred racked up one of his signature 4x5 b&W negatives and proceeded to go through a rigorous dodging and burning process, documenting each modification and eliciting comments/suggestions from the ten of us gathered around the enlarger. After an extensive round of alterations to the original image, Fred kept trying to draw more suggestions out of we enraptured students. Finally, when everyone was fresh out of ideas, he said we had all missed the most important thing. We had created a wonderful print of a totally lackluster image - an image containing nothing to render it worthy of viewing. We had created a "mastercrap". I've been on the lookout for mastercrap's ever since.
Posted by: Bob Rosen | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 04:59 PM
"Working hard" on an individual photo is probably part of the job description for commercial photographers. It is probably less useful for "fine art" photography, where forcing an image is typically counterproductive.
Taking numerous images can work if the curation process is disciplined and focused as with Robert Frank's work.
Posted by: Joseph Kashi | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 04:59 PM
My best pictures have always been ones that I worked hard *mentally* for ... by being prepared, or in the right place, or extra aware of interesting things going on.
This is harder work, usually, than the actual technical work of capturing/printing the picture once you are set up to do so.
The only (maybe) good landscape picture I ever took I shot from the parking lot of a Utah hotel a few hours after having driven into Capitol Reef Park at sunrise only to find clouds and gloom. I went back, took a nap and saw this walking to a late breakfast
https://www.flickr.com/photos/79904144@N00/8454137790/in/album-72157632708477093/
so went back for the tripod and shot a couple of rolls of film.
In the darkroom I used work hard to not work hard. I had a rule where if I could not get a decent print of a negative in 4 or 5 tries I would declare the picture no good and go and print something else. This serves me well in Photoshop and Lightroom as well. Although these days you tend to not have to tweak things so much to make them look decent.
Posted by: psu | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 05:06 PM
Years ago I worked on an assembly line. A certain essential electronic sub-assembly was manufactured elsewhere and had to be "tweaked" to meet stringent specs. Some were easy and quick, some required hard exhausting work (many interacting adjustments), and many met their fate in the dumpster. I was particularly proud of one that I wrestled into compliance and told my supervisor. His response: no one cares which were easy or hard: they're all the same as far as the next station is concerned.
Posted by: wts | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 05:09 PM
"Anyway, that's not the way to work hard on a photograph. I suspect the same thing happens now with [anyone] diving into excessive post-processing in attempts to make something more out of pictures that just aren't quite good enough . . ."
How about an informed combination? In a way I like to think of as grown out of St. Ansel's practice, I often take shots that I know will be compromised, but with a vision in my head of both what it will look like out of Raw conversion and what the end result will look like.
Sure, there's sometimes work on either end, sometimes a lot, getting the shot and in the digital darkroom.
No one cares how hard I worked, but they do care what the photo looks like when they see it. \;~)>
Posted by: Moose | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 05:57 PM
"The question is, which construction is more likely to interrupt the reader's flow and take his or her attention away from the sense of the sentence?"
Blew this reader right out of the essay. I went back and read the rest later. I don't know about anyone else.
Still, "whom", pretty please?
I do know what it's like to write until the words swim on the page. Current project is at 67k words. Still, with no external deadline, I can come back later and clean it up; "What was I thinking?"
Posted by: Moose | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 06:11 PM
All right, if we're going to be style and grammar pedants, why not rewrite the sentence as, "Or a portraitist who works for weeks to get access to a famous subject, and then is allowed a mere ten minutes with her subject."
This is getting a little meta. We're working hard at writing, editing, and criticizing Mike for trivial points in a piece on working hard.
[ :-) --Mike]
Posted by: Bill Tyler | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 06:17 PM
This sort of reminds me of the old "left brain/right brain" thing.
One person can be analytical, methodical and scientific... picking the exact perfect lens, position, aperture (for DOF) and exposure to make a "perfect" rendering of the scene, while another can simply be an open channel, snap reacting when something makes them point the camera and hit the shutter... technical aspects be damned.
I am about 75% in the first category trying to extract perfection via my understanding of the process. Yet, some of my favorite images are from a quick reaction to a mental "wow, look at that!"
Posted by: Albert Smith | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 06:31 PM
Old rule: A preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with.
Posted by: MikeR | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 06:31 PM
If you’ve ever seen a vintage Robert Frank image up close, you can see he was’t very interested in, “working hard” in the darkroom. Like many great photographers, it was all about capturing the moment.
Posted by: K4kafka | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 07:38 PM
As a photographer, I work my hardest when I'm not carrying a camera. It's in those moments, walking quietly, following my breath, & easing into my senses, that I remember the world is not a flat rectangle. Some people think photography is about stillness. When one understands the true nature of stillness, then one realizes a photograph is about as still as it is two-dimensional.
Posted by: Feral Zen.art | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 09:33 PM
Hmmm, working hard. Is that what the machine gun set does when they take a few hundred images of the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel tower? A gent above mentioned "mastercrap." I see a lot of elevator music mastercrap nowadays.
Posted by: kodachromeguy | Thursday, 18 June 2020 at 11:04 PM
"Chance favors the prepared mind."
- Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895)
Without having done some hard work to be prepared, you will not be able to take advantage of the "easy" to get pictures.
Posted by: Ronny A Nilsen | Friday, 19 June 2020 at 07:34 AM
Robert Frank may have made 83 images or 28,000 to complete his masterwork but the hard work was not the photography. He and his editor wove a story about his chosen subject using a minimum number of the ‘right’ images. No doubt his story was refined over time and the images changed to match his idea. For me the decisive moment represented by the book is not about pressing the shutter button at the right time.
Posted by: Ken White | Friday, 19 June 2020 at 09:08 AM
Supposedly, Churchill annotated a speech he was going to give which had been “corrected” by an official. He wrote this comment on the correction: “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put!”.
Posted by: Tom Burke | Friday, 19 June 2020 at 09:14 AM
Moose gave me the courage to be pedantic too 😁👊: speaking of Robert Frank's travels creating The Americans, you referred to the United States as a "continent." Forgive me because my sentence above probably has a million mistakes 🖐️😷.
[You can cross the North American continent and also have crossed the United States, since the US itself spans the continent (cf. "from sea to shining sea"). That's not the same as conflating the two, I don't think.
Now see what you started, Moose? --Mike]
Posted by: Jeff1000 | Friday, 19 June 2020 at 12:21 PM
As you and others here suggest, there are different practical meanings to the concept of "working hard on a photograph". None is more correct than others. Each depends heavily on what type of photography you're doing. Watch some of the features and interviews in this terrific collection of free films to really land that assertion. In general, most of the "work" in professional and vocational fine art photography happens long before a camera is involved.
In my own photographic projects, especially
"To Build", a great proportion of the "work" consists of anticipating the processes and waiting for them to present the opportunities...and waiting...and waiting.
Posted by: Kenneth Tanaka | Friday, 19 June 2020 at 12:23 PM
But if Frank had travelled from Chicago to Laredo, he wouldn't have cross cut the continent (just the United States), but you're correct about your usage, and I'm irrelevant again 😂👍.
Dang you Moose! 😂
Posted by: Jeff1000 | Friday, 19 June 2020 at 08:43 PM
I have been accused by a friend as being "80% guy." He says it from the point of view of a person trapped in the 110% guy mentality. As a former body builder, now in his mid-forties with four kids, he opts to not work out at all if he can't work out hard every day.
For better or worse, I have always worked pretty hard at many things - maybe 80%. Graduated high school and college with a 3.04 gpa - did what I needed to get above that 3.0.
Photography, as my profession and hobby, is without a doubt the activity that I have spent the most time with, but I'm not sure I would say I "work hard" at it. I love it. I work very hard as a commercial photographer. But I'm not sure I work hard at photography.
In a way, I have assumed and adapted the theory of diminishing returns to this subject. As an example, I typically hover around a 4 or 5 handicap in golf. While I am playing much more this year because of Covid, I typically don't play very much - maybe 10-15 full rounds per year. Many golf addicts that I know will say, "why don't you play more? You could be really good."
But to what end? I can be a 4-5 handicap with no work - just enjoying the game when I want to play. To get to a 2 or a 1 would require a great deal of time and effort. I would have to schedule my life around practicing golf. I have too many other things to do! Too many photographs waiting to be made!
Posted by: JOHN B GILLOOLY | Saturday, 20 June 2020 at 09:36 AM
There’s something interesting about the 12 degrees of twist in Robert Frank’s picture. I don’t normally like images skewed in that way but the twist combined with all the other elements make the scene seem otherworldly. Frank’s worked hard to develop that eye.
When you hold a camera in your hand all the time what you’re really doing is building a unique eye over a lifetime of looking. If you’ve spent a lifetime developing your own approach to photography, or painting, or whatever…you have worked hard.
On a side note, I just sent Ronny A Nilson’s Pasteur quote to my sister and brother-in-law. A wildfire roared through their forest neighborhood this week and because of my brother-in-laws earlier efforts to clear acres of scrub oak and undergrowth from around their home, the airtankers were able to drop fire retardant farther from the house. My sister called me yesterday as she returned to the house for the first time in days and I was able to listen in as she passed through a checkpoint where a firefighter complimented their preparedness. To my sisters relief she found that their home was intact and sits on lovely patch of green in an otherwise charred landscape. It seems that even a wildfire sweeping through a drought stricken Colorado pine forest can be swayed by a little preparation…and at least one kick-ass hotshot crew. Those guys are amazing. My sister said that in a town meeting the hotshots were asked if they would work an area that was unusually steep and they said sure, as long as we are guaranteed air support and an ambulance sitting in a specific spot on a no name road (my sister’s road). It’s always good to be prepared.
Posted by: Jim Arthur | Saturday, 20 June 2020 at 10:00 AM
When I was in school there was a well-known avant-guard filmmaker who had a visiting teaching gig. After a few weeks of what turned out to be a pretty run of the mill film production course one of the students said "we know all this stuff, what we want to know is, how you make the kind of films you make?" Her answer was "I just sort of go into a trance for three weeks and then I have a finished film and I have no idea how I did it"
Years later, when I was getting my MFA, some student asked the artist how they made their work look the way it did and the answer was "I don't know how not to"
One way of "working hard" is to make the sacrifice and commitment to structure your life so that the work "just happens" and your job is to recognize it.
Posted by: hugh crawford | Saturday, 20 June 2020 at 04:57 PM