The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them.
—Edward Weston
It is the habit of most photographers who write about photography to extoll the medium’s virtues and positive affects—all of which may be true, but none of which are guaranteed to occur. It’s not often acknowledged that the pursuit of photography may also have downsides, some of which may be severe. Often, what tips the odds in favor of photography being a positive, rewarding avocation is not anything having to do with the mechanics of the medium, subject matter, travel budget, or social dynamics, but the photographer’s attitude.
No doubt, photography may be an immensely rewarding pursuit: a source of—or at least a catalyst for—enjoyable, elevated, and meaningful experiences. But, if one is not mindful of the possible pitfalls, photography may also unwittingly become a source of pervasive anxiety and stress. Photography may sharpen a person’s capacity for observation and mindfulness, train a person’s mind to notice and to become fascinated with nuanced beauty that may be missed by those with untrained eyes. But often photography may also have the opposite effect: blinding a person to unobvious details and suppressing complex, reverent aspects of experience, giving rise to jadedness and cynicism.
The danger I speak of, despite its painful effects, often passes unnoticed and unacknowledged. This may account for the fact that it infects the great majority of photographers for at least some periods. Not realizing they are infected, many never think to take countermeasures against this danger, and may suffer its penalties for many years—in some cases, entire careers.
The danger, in the poignant words of Susan Sontag, is this: “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”
Put another way, the danger is in allowing the incessant pursuit of photographs overshadow all other aspects of experience, all other forms of reward, and all other measures of success for a given endeavor.
Once a person defines themselves as a photographer, often without even realizing it, photographs may become the sole goal and measure of all discretionary experiences. Travel is considered “wasted” if a trip does not yield good photographs, and all other pastimes seem less desirable if they don’t involve photography.
Like the chick of a cuckoo bird, the obsessive pursuit of photography may crowd out a person’s capacities to find value and meaning in other experiences. Such a person may lose sight entirely of the fact that travel (and life in general) offers a myriad of opportunities for elevating, meaningful, life-affirming experiences, many of which have nothing to do with photography, and some of which may surpass greatly in their importance and rewards anything involving photography. By insisting on making all experiences about the pursuit of photography, a person may unwittingly deny themselves these experiences, squander or fail to even consider opportunities to partake in them, and as a result live a stunted, partial life. In the insightful words of Italo Calvino:
The minute you start saying something, “Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!” you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.
When a photograph becomes the primary or sole measure for the quality or success of a given experience, a person may lose or forfeit some of life’s most powerful and profound sources of pleasure and meaning, such as the capacity to appreciate beauty for its own sake, the capacity to appreciate insights, feelings, epiphanies, and wisdom that may not ensue from or lend themselves to the capacities of the photographic medium. When time, money, and effort are considered “wasted” if they don’t culminate in photographic trophies, all other possible affects and outcomes that may arise from an experience become blocked as sources of meaning, ideas, emotions, lessons, memories.
Added to this already unfortunate effect, if one’s incessant pursuit of photography proves unsatisfying or unsuccessful, and if no other aspects of an experience are valued highly enough to sufficient to offset or negate one’s photographic disappointment, an infected photographer may come to feel anxious, depressed, angry, unsatisfied, even unworthy.
Like other pursuits, one’s interest in photography may begin with a pleasurable pastime but—often without noticing—become an addiction, with its known undesirable effects: one to become numb, ceases to derive pleasure and fulfillment from their once-enjoyable activity. Satisfying the addiction becomes an end—a need to be met—rather than a means—one of many that a person is free to choose—to richer experiences. The irony of this phenomenon is this: some who may gain recognition as masters of photography may become mastered by photography.
When one is mastered by photography, photography ceases to be a discretionary pursuit—a useful tool in one’s kit to reach for when its use is desirable and appropriate—and instead becomes a pressing compulsion, growing increasingly more unpleasant the longer it goes unsatisfied. “Art,” warned Henry Miller, “is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.”
Slaves to photography come to feel compelled to allay their discomfort—to make photographs, to talk about photography, to obsess about photographic equipment—even in situations where more rewarding alternatives to photography are ostensibly open to them. Rather than risk the pain of enduring the urge while waiting for creative epiphanies, strokes of imagination, inspiration, revelations, powerful emotions—things that may make photography truly and deeply meaningful, but that are also by nature unpredictable and unreliable—one becomes tempted to pursue easy wins and plan their photographic excursions for guaranteed results rather than for meaningful experiences. Such excursions are easily recognizable: they involve arriving at a prescribed location, at a prescribed time, capturing preconceived photographs, then moving on to other things, oblivious to any other reward the place or the experience may have to offer.
I have warned in other writings about the hidden danger of over-planning. Simply put, sometimes the greatest danger of planning is that things go exactly according to the plan—that one experiences no surprises, learns nothing new, encounters no serendipitous opportunities (or fails to recognize or pursue them when they present themselves) that may in some cases yield tremendous rewards.
Some of life’s most powerful experiences involve elements of surprise and serendipity: things that cannot be planned for, but that may be thwarted if one insists on following a strictly prescribed plan. Alas, too many photographers are beholden to plans and insist on carrying out their plans even when they have opportunities to roam and explore freely, open to surprises, epiphanies, strokes of inspiration, in places rife with opportunities for serendipitous encounters.
The wise photographer, no matter how passionate, must account for the fact that a full and meaningful life involves recognizing and pursuing those opportunities that may yield the greatest rewards, and that such opportunities are never restricted to just one thing: whether photography or any other. The most fruitful attitude, therefore, must involve recognizing those times when the passionate pursuit of photography is truly the most rewarding use of one’s time and resources, and also those times and circumstances when photography is best set aside in favor of other pursuits—without qualms or regrets. Put simply: the wise photographer must strive to become a master of photography, not a person mastered by photography.
