Difficult and Worthwhile

But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.

—Albert Camus

Note: This article contains passages borrowed from various sections of the manuscript-in-progress for my next book, Be Extraordinary: Philosophical Advice for Photographic (and Other) Artists. For those who are interested, in the coming weeks I will announce an upcoming online presentation touching on these and other themes from the book, followed by a live Q&A session. I look forward to answering (to the best of my abilities) your philosophical questions.

Art-making may produce many kinds of rewards: some external and practical (e.g., income, social interaction, recognition, prestige), and some inner. Many artists pursue explicitly one or more of these rewards, but some artists have been known to practice their work in certain manners and styles despite knowing it may cause them the opposites of some of these rewards: financial hardship, social isolation, anxiety, misery, even danger. Why? One answer is, flow—the state of mind described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as “optimal experience.” Flow arises from intense, prolonged investment of attention in some activity, to such a degree that no attention is left over for other preoccupations, such as troubling thoughts, anxiety, or discomfort.

In his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience [ad], Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “Contrary to what we usually believe . . . the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile” (my emphasis). This qualification—difficult and worthwhile—may be a barrier for many, preventing them from experiencing flow in their work and settle instead, often without realizing it, for lesser rewards.

The reason why difficulty and worthiness are conducive to flow has to do with attention. Tasks that are undemanding or uninteresting are not likely to command our full attention. When what we are doing is easy, we’ll be tempted to multi-task. When we don’t care deeply about what we do, we are likely to do it in a half-hearted way and look for distractions. On the other hand, when what we are doing is difficult and/or interesting to us we’ll likely focus all our attention on it. In doing so, we also claim attention away from other preoccupations, resulting in the state of flow: being so focused that we lose track of time and cease to worry about things beyond what we are doing and experiencing at the present moment.

If the last sentence sounds familiar to you, perhaps it is because you recognize its similarity to mindfulness, which produces the same effects (putting worries and distractions out of our minds) using the same cognitive mechanism (conscious focusing of attention).

Difficulty is correlated with skill level. What may seem difficult to a beginner, may not be to a seasoned practitioner; what may have been difficult to us in the past, becomes easier with repeated practice. This means that if we wish to experience flow in our creative work, we must maintain a degree of challenge appropriate to our skill level; we can’t get too comfortable: we must constantly push our boundaries: try new things, invent new things, learn new things, experiment.

Unlike other pursuits, in creative work (assuming we hope to find flow in it), we can’t just find a comfort zone where we keep repeating our former successes, sticking to proven formulas. These formulas may produce “good” work but their inner rewards will inevitably diminish in time as, once we master them, they become less demanding of attention. Similarly, things that may have seemed worthwhile to us in the past tend to lose their worthiness once we have accomplished and excelled in them: there is no point in reinventing the wheel. The conclusion: if we strive to experience flow in our work, we must be willing to “mess with success”—to take risks and to keep trying new things in order to maintain the sense of our work being “difficult and worthwhile.”

In art, and especially in photography, the most difficult and worthwhile goals are not technical excellence or aesthetic appeal. These we can master fairly quickly (relative to other media), without much practice, and/or delegate them to algorithms and automated processes. Whatever difficulty we may experience early on when learning how to produce a technically-competent image, will inevitably diminish with practice and repetition. Instead, the aspects of art that do remain difficult and worthwhile—where anyone, at any level, may find new challenges—are creativity and self-expression.

In a recent email exchange, a fellow photographer suggested that some people may disagree with my thoughts on creativity because they define creativity differently from the way I define it. To be clear, I don’t define creativity in my own way. The definition of creativity I use in my writings is one coined by creativity researchers and used most commonly in scientific studies.

“If creativity is to be a viable neuroscientific construct it should conform to several scientific conditions,” wrote Dean Keith Simonton—a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, and a prominent creativity researcher. “First,” Simonton wrote, “it should have a definition that lends itself to scientific inquiry.”

The definition of creativity most commonly used in scientific research, is this: “the production of something novel and useful.” Simonton proposed making this definition even stricter by adding a third criterion—non-obviousness: the quality of being surprising and/or unexpected. He explained:

Creativity can be optimized just a single way: Simultaneously maximize originality, utility, and surprise. If the idea is commonplace, useless, or obvious, or any combination of possible zero values, then an uncreative idea results. Each exerts veto power over the rest.

He added also:

A creative idea cannot originate via the straightforward application of well-established disciplinary procedures . . . such ideas must be considered routine, reproductive, or habitual rather than truly creative.

Novelty—the first criterion for creativity—is synonymous with originality, meaning that any creation that only reproduces something already done (by you or by someone else), no matter how skillfully or beautifully crafted, is not considered creative. If you are a beginner, technical challenges may still feel difficult to you, demanding your attention and perhaps even leading to flow. But once you learn the necessary skills, technical challenges lose this power to command attention, but creative challenges are , practically speaking, limitless: bound only by your capacity to imagine and your openness to trying new things.

The next criterion for creativity—usefulness—may be easy to assess in such domains as science or industry, but some researchers recognize that art is not usually conducive to being evaluated in terms of usefulness or utility. Therefore, some researchers of artistic creativity prefer using terms like “appropriate,” “effective,” “meaningful,” or “expressive” instead of “useful.” I think that’s an unnecessary complication. Art is something people do by choice because it enriches their lives (and in almost every case also the lives of others), which makes art intrinsically useful. Also, usefulness in art doesn’t have to relate to the products of artistic work; it can also refer to the benefits one gets from engaging in the process of art-making (such as flow). This is to say that if a person values time spent creating art, then art may be considered useful regardless of outcome. Put another way: when it comes to artistic creativity (unlike creativity in other domains), usefulness is built in.

The conclusion: if the usefulness of engaging in art is given, that leaves the criteria of originality and non-obviousness as the more important (and difficult and worthwhile) measures of artistic creativity, and therefore also the qualities that may yield you the greatest inner rewards possible in artistic work.

Coming up with creative (i.e., novel/original and non-obvious) ways to channel your own thoughts and feelings into you art, is obviously difficult, especially as we become more skilled and experienced—as more types of work transition from the “how do I do that?” list to the “been there, done that” list. Striving to come up with novel ideas, and investing work in them to see where they may lead, without guarantee of success, is also potentially unproductive and fraught with risk of failure. This is exactly why flow in art is most likely to occur when our process involves investing prolonged time and conscious effort toward the difficult tasks of 1) having worthwhile thoughts, feelings, and experiences worth expressing, and 2) seeking novel ways to express them artistically. The complementary conclusion is also important: rewards like flow, which may outweigh in depth and magnitude other kinds of (extrinsic/practical) rewards you may find in art, are to be found in the process of art-making, not in its products.

The implication of this cannot be overstated. So many products and techniques are promoted to us artists as time-savers, helping us automate tasks, increase productivity, work faster, spare us from having to learn and practice manual skills, and from having to invest attention in any task for too long. Using such products and techniques come at a great and often unacknowledged cost: they may rob you of the greatest rewards possible in art—rewards that are intrinsically tied to the very things such products aim to eliminate: difficulty and prolonged engagement in your work.

In his article, “A Personal Credo,” Ansel Adams expressed this sentiment well. He wrote:

I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term—meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching—there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

If you engage in art aiming primarily to enrich your life (rather than for practical or other extrinsic reasons), do yourself this great favor: make life (at least the artistic aspects of it) difficult for yourself—strive to constantly challenge yourself creatively, and adopt a process that involves prolonged periods of focused attention without distraction.

Be warned, however, that some kinds of self-imposed difficulties, especially ones of a technical nature, like using film instead of digital capture, or favoring manual/bulky cameras to more convenient formats, may ultimately amount to, as the Johnny Lee song goes, looking for love in all the wrong places, and not be as effective in terms of elevating the inner rewards of your art-making experience as pursuing creative challenges (instead or in addition to technical challenges). The reason: technical skills inevitably become easier with practice, and practically any photographic technique can be mastered and applied with (technically) excellent results in a relatively short period of time compared with other artistic media. Technical ease, after all, has always been among the raisons d’être for the photographic medium’s very existence, and a primary reason photography has often been derided as less artistic than other media.

It has always been distressing to me to see how much time and energy photographers invest in the minutiae and technicalities of equipment and processes, to a point of becoming so obsessed with achieving technical perfection as to give no thought at all to creativity and expression. This unfortunate reality has now been magnified to staggering proportions by online influencers and the proliferation of video tutorials. Long before the invention of photography, Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to warn against the undesirable effects of artists becoming too preoccupied with technique to the detriment of artistic expression. He wrote, “When every art goes into decline a point is reached at which its morbidly luxuriant forms and techniques gain a tyrannical domination over the souls of youthful artists and make them their slaves.”

Of course, using film or any other technology may be very enjoyable in ways that other methods may not be, which is sufficient justification for their use. They may even lead to flow if you consciously invest your entire attention into your work for prolonged periods. But they are not by themselves shortcuts to artistry or to any of the desirable personal benefits of evolving and nurturing habitual creativity. In fact, if technical choices become the defining characteristic of an artist’s work, they may even diminish the artist’s experience by taking up more attention than they deserve—attention that may instead be invested in qualities of experience.

On the other hand, investing attention in pursuing creative (original) work and striving for states of mind worthy of artistic expression—regardless of the technology used and no matter your technical skill level—can always be pushed to a point of being “difficult and worthwhile.”

As Edward Weston put it (with apology for what may be overly strong language):

As to photography’s mechanicalness, — art is a way of seeing, not a matter of technique. A moron can be a superb technician. And besides the spontaneity of the machine, — camera, time, and energy can be saved for creative thought, inner development.

Compared with artists in media that demand intensive regular practice to produce successful work, photographic artists have it easier when it comes to producing impressive (and prolific) results without great investment of (technical or cognitive) effort, which is to say: without meeting the preconditions for flow and other inner rewards arising from difficulty and focused attention. It thus becomes a greater challenge for photographers to find the self-discipline and courage to impose desirable difficulties on ourselves—to knowingly give up ease, productivity, and predictable successes in trade for the beneficial effects of flow, mindfulness, and meaningfulness: for the chance to have our times of artistic work be our private sanctuaries and periods of reprieve, in contrast to so many other busy activities governed by striving to please, impress, or work according to the expectations of others.

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