Good enough. Great. Perfect.
I've been making new work recently and it's sort of being amazing and disappointing all at the same time.
The amazing part is being out, energised, engaging with people, feeling like what I'm making is purposeful, fun and interesting.
However, the disappointing part is looking at it and realising it's not good enough yet. In some ways this makes total sense: it's new, it's not finished, of course it's not good enough. But I've realised that there's something a bit more pernicious going on in my thinking and perhaps it's a good thing, but also perhaps it's making me feel worse than I should.
For a long time, perhaps even still, some of my favourite photography is editorial photography. For those who are not familiar, editorial is when a newspaper/magazine/website will pay a photographer to go shoot something for an article/feature/etc. The photographer has to produce something that looks fantastic, perfect even, in a short amount of time. So the people who work this way are just masters of the surface of the image. This stuff is highly perfect, tightly controlled and very specifically executed. In my head, especially when it comes to colour work, these types of photographs are really what I'm playing towards.
Here are some examples (these are not my images in case you're wondering!) - I think you can see in each a sort of almost diorama-like perfection.
Why I've been thinking about this is because when I look at my own colour work it's not that strong - it seems a bit too garish or a bit too simple. The colour is never quite as muted, rich or controlled and I feel like I'm missing the mark. On the other hand I wonder if that's important to hit 100% of the time for me. Sure, if someone is paying you to get 2-3 photos, you need each one to be a winner, but if I'm making a long body of work there's space for things to develop and get better. Equally in a final product of 100-200 photographs, not each is going to be equally perfect in terms of the surface. To some extent there are lots of other things in an image that can be engaging, the surface of it is only one element.
I've been oscillating between thinking 'just let it be, what you make will be good enough' and 'push yourself, find out how to get images that are more specific and successful in their use of colour'. I wonder if that's even possible, I shoot outdoors, regardless of the weather, working quickly with people and moving fast. There's not often the time to set things up properly or respond to the lighting and all of what's going on to reach a level of consistency. I can't bring much more than a camera and a flash with me.
So I'm stuck between good enough, great and perfection. Being good enough is often my standard - I think that almost everything I do I'm happy with good enough. I don't need to be the world's best cook, just be good enough so that when people eat what I cook them they are happy and feel the love. I don't need to be the world's biggest publisher, just good enough to share great work and collaborate with lovely people. But sometimes I want to be great: move towards something that feels a level higher - a lot more skilled or technical or polished. But it's hard to tell the difference between wanting to be great and being caught in a perfectionist trap. You never get perfect, or at least you don't get it often, and aiming for perfect robs the good enough and great outcomes of their joy, steals away the feelings of success that should come from good hard work.
I can't always tell if my internal compass is pointing towards a good ambition or a self-made trap and I wonder how others sort that out.
Here's one last image for you (ah, Jody Rognac, what a star)