Make It Like Your First Time, But Also, Like It Is Your Last.
I am revisiting Dan Winter’s biography ”Road To Seeing” and a line from it hit home. He said “I make it a habit to approach every picture as though it were my last”.
This, tipped on it’s head is like a feeling I have, that each image should be a new start, a fresh take, a reinvention, apply “beginner mind” maybe.
Both may be able to live in the same space, or are these one-liners even relevant unless you are in need of telling a story.
The attitude that you should cast aside your past, “kill your babies” as the art world so perilously puts it, is on one hand an empowering of the present-future over the past, assuming only forward growth matters.
Sometimes a moment is fleeting, something that cannot be repeated, or re-done.
So you are, as it were, only as good as your next image, but does this make your past redundant or at least demote it to parts of a journey that needs to be pushed aside for us to go forward. No dwelling in the past. The past is gone.
We are only ever the sum of our past though. It is us up to now and everything we have done.
The past launches us into the future.
The second dictate, that maybe each (serious) image you make needs to be treated as if it is the last you will make, so that you need to give it your all, your magnum opus as it were, is also a powerful termination point for creative excellence.
Powerful stuff.
If you pull it off, how do you know?
Have you reached a point of technical or artistic prowess beyond anything you have done before?
Can you even measure that?
Do you even want to?
Should any image be “the one” or is the effort to make it so powerful a motivator, that repeated defying the reality of failure is needed. In other words, can we get better, without needing to always try to.
Like the oft used trope “the gear does not matter”*, these are both handy catch cries, but possibly as misleading. Users of these terms, people who have come to realise that they are “there” in their journey, feel these thoughts are relevant, but for the rest of us, should we apply these borrowed labels/restrictions/tenets on ourselves, or should we wait until we see retrospectively that we are also “there” and a one-liner may sum up our process and philosophy, but it also may not.
I once knew a man who rolled out a “saying of the day”, likely taken from one of those daily planners that mechanically apply these pearls of wisdom in printing. The effects was not what he desired, the power of each often at odds with the mood and any relevance to time or place.
Often the power of other’s efforts empower our own, but it is easy to take this too far, to forget where we are in the picture.
Using a good catch phrase can be helpful in context, but it is also a good way of creating a false ceiling.
Maybe we should always be open to new ideas that do not need to be “coined” for others ears, just done, understood and allowed to strengthen us as needed, fall away when not.
Life is sometimes not as simple as a beginning a middle and an end, but a constant.
Labels are irrelevant, titles also.
*The gear itself does matter, but in balance with all other factors. “Only the gear mattering is not a thing” is maybe closer, or “the gear, experience, talent, luck, subject and effort all matter”.