Here are a few suggestions for curing photo-related perfectionism.
First, a few words about the words. The other day in the "Level With Me" post, I wrote, "...a fair number of photographers are meticulous or fastidious (the more pejorative words might be fussy or picky)...."
It's tough terminology all right; a lot of the available words have negative connotations. And if not connotations, associations. To be technical-sounding—and also neutral—it's become common to refer to the characteristic as "OCD" or "obsessive" or "compulsive" or those latter two words linked together. I confess I've been guilty of this me own self.
Well, wrong, wrong, and wrong. The word is perfectionism—and "control issues" and perfectionsim are not OCD. I finally got around to reading up on OCD recently—at a reader's recommendation I read Judith L. Rapoport's The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing: The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. OCD is a serious (but curable, or at least manageable) mental disorder that manifests itself as extreme, insistent personal superstitions that the sufferer tries to cope with by means of private and personal ritual behaviors, usually concealed from others, the most common of which, in the early stages, are repeated washing (as of the hands) or repeated checking (to see if a door is locked or a stove is off, for example), but which can proliferate in all sorts of wild ways and can be extremely bizarre. It is a distinctive malady and is not in any way the same as being fastidious about level horizons or enjoying careful craftsmanship.
As an aside to my aside, In some outlier cases perfectionists deserve pejorative terms! I once helped a friend to sell a particularly superb example of a Leica M4—he had searched high and wide for it, and it was a survivor, without blemish or defect. We located a German collector who paid top dollar—er, deutsche mark—for it, and we shipped it off to Germany. A month or two later it was returned along with anxious importunings for a refund. Obviously with the use of a magnifying glass, the collector had identified a "pinhole" defect in the chrome plating of the top plate, which a.) was not visible to the naked eye at a normal eye-to-hand viewing distance, and b.) the collector admitted was very likely a factory defect—meaning, Leica made the camera that way and the pinhole was there when the camera was brand new.
Now that dude—er, der Kerl—had a problem! But it was a problem with perfectionism. Not necessarily OCD.
Anyway (a former editor of mine once said, "you do go on, don't you?"), maybe I'll try to find a different technical term.
I like persnickety.
Slider anxiety
Level horizons and rectilinear lines are hardly the only persnicketyness related to pictures. One I've written about before is "slider anxiety"—defined as the fear that you haven't pushed that slider hard enough, and that maybe a little more might help. Could that picture use just a little more sharpness/saturation/max black/vibrance/whatever? You're worried that people might think your picture isn't quite enough of something, and your anxiety and insecurity allows you gradually to creep over the edge of right reason into excess. Or, you find yourself fretting about whether your lens is sharp enough in all ways and in every situation. Maybe you replace a perfectly nice older Canon 50mm Macro with a Sigma 50mm ART and then replace the 50mm ART with a Zeiss Otus 55mm and then find yourself worrying that maybe, just maybe, the Leica SL 50mm is just a tiny bit better than your Otus.
Whatever it is, here are two ways to deal with persistent persnickety thoughts:
• Go the other way. Do the opposite. If you fret and fuss over whether your pictures are saturated enough, force yourself to shoot heavily unsaturated pictures for three weeks. If you worry over whether you have a big enough sensor in your camera, buy a 1" sensor camera and see what you can do with it. Put the Otus away and shoot with a Lensbaby for a while. Whatever it is that you find yourself anxious about, take the bull by the horns, confront the demon, and banish the angst!
Remember those Islamic mosiac-makers in the Middle Ages who would deliberately place one tile out of place because perfection was reserved for Allah.
And if you're persnickety about level horizons, be glad you're not my student. You know what your next exercise would be. :-)
• Find a different outlet for the impulse. I learned this when I forced myself to photograph with a view camera (a beautiful Wista) for a Summer, for the experience. What I found was that my 35mm shooting suddenly got much more free and loose. I realized that I had been composing very carefully and deliberately with the 35mm camera—which I had not even been aware of before. When the view camera came into my life—a camera much more suited to careful and deliberate compositions—it relieved my 35mm shooting of satisfying those impulses.
If you recognize some photographic impulse that you know you're being persnickety about, find a way to embrace and indulge it outside of your main picturetaking or -making activities. It could very well help.
(Of course it's possible that your photography is already the outlet for some less-than-healthy impulse, as a way of diverting it from some other area of your life. In which case, carry on.)
The not always silent sufferers
I lived underneath a woman who had OCD once when Xander was a baby. I never met this unfortunate sufferer, but I gradually learned some of her habits. The first was that she had to sweep and mop all the floors in her apartment every evening, including moving all the furniture away from the walls. (The rumbling and scraping of furniture being moved every night at the same time mystified me for a good long while.) Another was that every morning she left for work with her briefcase in one hand and a large shopping bag full of clothes in the other. A neighbor who did know her told me that she dropped off the clothes at the laundromat every morning and picked them up on her way home. And this is what tortured me—although the clothes came back from the laundromat folded, every morning she re-folded each item of clothing on an ironing board in her kitchen and marched it individually into her bedroom to put it away in the drawer. Her bedroom that was directly above mine, that would be. Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp. Every morning. Back and forth and back and forth. Starting at 4:45. And me with a baby to take care of, short on sleep anyway.
Funny, with apartments hard to get in the near suburbs of Chicago at that time, the one I got happened to be sitting vacant. Coincidence? Unfortunately not.
Well, I do go on. That's enough about this—this should have been a short post. Butters is getting very antsy to go out and chase down his tennis ball...
...Which—oh, all right—he is obsessed with. :-)
Mike
P.S. That old Canon Macro is one heck of a sharp lens.
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This post needs an illustration, but I'll try not to
obsess about it.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Larry Gebhardt: "Was the spelling in the title intentional?"
Mike replies: I experimented with different misspellings. I originally put the mistake in the word “perfectionism,” but then I thought that people might be searching for that word so I’d better not screw that up. No one would search for the post with the word “how.”
Had to get it just right. ;-) .
Roy Feldman: "See last sentence: 'Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive-the more authoritative the photograph was likely to be.' —Susan Sontag."
Mike replies: I've always thought that the best photograph is one that looks like it just fell out of the camera, no matter how hard you worked to get it. The best art looks artless, in my view.
SteveW: "This column has struck a chord with me. I avoid editing photos like the plague. I shoot JPEGs in-camera, and that is that. Once in a blue moon I will crop, but only to send out for a print. This column provided a kind of revelation for me, in that my avoidance of the sliders is to avoid anxiety brought on by indecision and uncertainty. I don't like to go there. Perhaps the best medicine would be to rock and roll with the sliders and just let it rip. Thanks Mike. P.S. I also obsess a bit regarding lens quality, but I thought that was normal, haha."
Mike replies: It's certainly common, but I don't know how normal we are. :-)
Hans Muus: "Beautiful piece. And so recognizable. The (very) late hours in the darkroom spoiled with endlessly reprinting the same image with very small changes—changes so incremental I couldn't tell the prints apart in daylight the next morning. And then there is 'backwards perfectionism,' the urge to re-do all your earlier work in the style/technique you practice now, thus not only exerting your present energy in the wrong direction, but also denying your former self."
mike plews: "Twenty two years ago I witnessed a murder. After the initial shock wore off I was left with a pretty solid case of depression. I was sad, anxious and felt like my body was encased in cement. Just getting out of bed was a colossal challenge. And there were nightmares right out of Hieronymous Bosch. I recognized my condition for what it was and decided that if it did not pass in a reasonable period I was going to seek help. In a month I was OK but it left me with a deep respect for people dealing with chronic depression. Since that time I have never said depressed when I really meant sad or frustrated. Same for OCD. This stuff can hurt just like a broken bone."
Mike replies: Yes. Depression is an extremely serious disease; it kills a lot of people. There's a very good 52-and-a-half minute summary lecture about depression by Stanford's Robert Sapolsky on YouTube. I like the way he balances the physiological and psychological components. It takes a certain genius for reductionism to create such a comprehensive overview, and he does an excellent job. (I was originally tipped to the video by a TOP reader.)
Andy Johnson: "Re 'I lived underneath a woman'—that must have been very uncomfortable...I prefer to be on T.O.P."
Nick Hunt: "Mike—firstly, I have to correct you. It's 'pernickety'—no 's.' (Well darn me—autocorrect has just told be it has got an 's.' Wretched thing must be set to US English.) Secondly, my slider anxiety is different. I am fearful of moving the slider too far. What if I go over the top? What if my photos are thought of as (oh, horror!) gauche? Your 'aversion therapy' approach—apologies for another misappropriated and abused medical term—won't work. If I use less colour or less contrast or whatever for a week, then at the end of it I'll be...perfectly happy. Less is more. I love working in monochrome. Maybe I need to go super-saturated? But then there's the gauche thing, remember? Oooooph...."
Mike replies: Your aversion therapy would indeed be to make over-the-top, boldly gauche, crass photos for a week. But remember you only need aversion therapy if you are trying to cure yourself of a behavior that troubles or impedes you. If it doesn't bother you, then it's just the way you are. No cure needed.
Mus: "____________LEVEL HORIZON____________"
Bruce Gerencser: "I am a perfectionist. The why I am would take too long to explain. The short answer is that I spent most my life in Fundamentalist Christianity, both as a member and a pastor, and certain beliefs I held drove me towards perfectionism. This perfectionist tendency, of course, has filtered down into my photography work. There is no such thing as a perfect picture, and that poses a real problem for perfectionists. 😀 When I am editing photos, I have my definitely-not-a-perfectionist wife help with deciding which photographs I keep and which I delete. I've found she tempers my perfectionist tendencies.
"Forty plus years of walking the perfectionist trail has resulted in what my counselor calls Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD). OCPD has OCD simularities, but is not OCD. Here's a link you might find interesting."
Alberto: "Reading your articles is always a great inspiration for me and I'm so amazed from your ability to find so many interesting arguments, not only strictly related to photography. I find your 'Hwo to' article very funny to read and inspiring. I will follwo your example and I will let my photography to be more forgiving to small deffects."
alex-virt: "Another great article I can relate to! I am obsessed with sharpness and compulsively view my each picture at 100% and check sharpness in every corner. To cure this, I bought Nokia Lumia 1020, a 40MP phone whose lens is woefully unsharp in the corners. Have been shooting with it for about a month almost exclusively. I am thinking of doing a 'One Camera, One Lens, One Year' exercise with this phone. :-) "
Richard Skoonberg: "I like this point you made: 'Remember those Islamic mosiac-makers in the Middle Ages who would deliberately place one tile out of place because perfection was reserved for Allah.' It reminds me of beautiful Afghani carpets. When you compare these beautiful, handmade carpets to similar versions manufactured by machine in Europe, the difference is found in the imperfections created by handwork and manual looms: the borders aren't square, patterns don't repeat properly and there are flaws caused by the loom. The European versions are perfect and square. But it is the imperfections that delight the eye and reflect our humanity back to us."
Mike replies: I like your last sentence very much...well said.
Bob Rosinsky: "I have OCD. As did my mother and maternal grandfather. Unfortunately, my grandfather, a pharmacist, self-medicated. My mother spent half of her waking hours ritualizing, and I suffered from age seven up to age 35. I did not ritualize so much as suffer from intrusive thoughts (obsessions). Imagine a radio blaring horrendous words, awful sentences, and toxic content nonstop. Tourette Syndrome often accompanies OCD. I've had long bouts of Tourette; not fun.
"For me, the onset of OCD started around age seven. My first severe bout started in the fourth grade and persisted, nonstop, for a year. Eventually it receded. OCD is an anxiety disorder, so for many, it ebbs and flows.
"My intrusive thoughts were terrifying. Not until age 35, when I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, did I seek psychiatric care.
"My first visit with the psychiatrist changed my life. Within five minutes he diagnosed my condition as OCD. Furthermore, he told me about a class of drugs (SSRIs) that are effective in the treatment of OCD as well as certain other anxiety disorders.
"I was relieved to learn that there were other people who suffered from OCD and that I was not a freak, not alone. On the other hand, I was ambivalent about taking a psychotropic drug.
"After a lot of soul searching, revealing my 'secret' in gory detail to my wife, and two or three more sessions with the psychiatrist, I consented to begin drug therapy. It took a year or two, along with weekly sessions with a licensed mental health counselor, to find the correct drug and dosage and acquire coping skills.
"My quality of life skyrocketed. By my 37th birthday, my mind had quieted down and the Tourette Syndrome receded.
"I am 58 years old. I continue to visit a psychiatrist every other month. I have a weekly session with a CBT therapist.
"In graduate school, I became interested in neuroscience and sensation and perception. I am especially excited about the rapid pace of progress in brain science.
"I have always been a fastidious photographer. Many photographers, designers, engineers, chefs, craftspeople, tradesmen, and others are fastidious, and they are often held back over smallish details at the expense of losing sight of the big picture. I believe perfectionism is stifling. However, I think there are distinctions between perfectionism and paying attention to details. Perhaps perfectionism and an eye for detail fall along a spectrum. I can only speculate.
"I've read that OCD will be excluded from the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is being reclassified as a neurological disorder rather than a psychiatric illness. Hmm."
, and the monograph 
. Retired now, he writes occasionally for TOP (see his other articles by finding his name in the "Categories" list in the right-hand sidebar). He and his wife live in Maine.
