Update: I’ve started to expand on this in notes on taste.
I’ve split the Sydney photo gallery into two parts—one for the “good” photos, and one for the rest. Deciding which photos are the “good” ones is a purely subjective experience, with a pinch of context thrown in that can’t be captured within the photo itself. I have no doubt that some people might look at the photos I’ve included in the ‘B’ gallery and think “these are way better than the dumb ones in the so-called ‘A’ gallery.”
The first rule of smart writing is you must recognise what smart writing is. Sounds simple enough but most people fail at this. Lots of smart writers get their good quotes ignored and their tepid quotes celebrated. This lowers everybody’s standards.
Replace “smart writing” with “good pictures” and that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Generally, I’ve found that:
- the pictures I’ve taken that I’m happiest with are not the same as the ones other people like the most, and
- other people often like the same group of pictures.
Which is fine! I don’t take photos for other people, generally—I’m taking the photos that I like and that I want to see. Maybe it’s also something to do with having developed my taste in photography further (which doesn’t necessarily mean better). Similar to a musician getting into more and more avant-garde or abstract compositions over time as they need to express their taste beyond what’s conventional.
This relates to something Samuel Hughes wrote about not too long ago about art being “easy” and “challenging”.
I want to step back for a moment and introduce a different distinction, namely between what we might call easy styles and challenging, or difficult, ones. A style is ‘easy’, as I use the term, if works in it can be enjoyed or appreciated, at least on a basic level, without much work; a style is thus ‘challenging’ if works in it require a lot of work to enjoy.
It’s a really interesting piece, arguing that the general trend towards increasingly difficult art is at odds with architecture’s position as public and background art. In our case, photography is a private and foreground art, so the issue of whether or not more challenging is better comes down to taste. Further on Hughes talks about difficulty being orthogonal to, but correlated with, quality—i.e., good doesn’t always mean challenging, but the best works are often more difficult—and I do think my taste tends towards challenging, particularly in photography.
I think also that there’s the context of how, where and when the photo was taken, which might add to my experience of it but would be absent for anyone else unless there were there or unless I’d gone into detail about it elsewhere.
Like many pictures in my camera roll, it’s unremarkable. And yet, unlike other pictures taken that night, it conjures up for me a potent memory that’s not exactly depicted within the photo, but with a few taps I can always evoke it.
I remember reading similar examples of this from people making creative work, where the pieces they were most proud of or thought were the best were not the most popular. I’d list them here if I had a coherent and functional notetaking system, so for now I’ll have to leave the examples section empty, to be filled out as I collect them.
The lesson here is that we often don't know what the important work is while we’re making it. Sometimes, it’s a more significant contribution to respond to the conditions that you are in, instead of what you may have imagined as the proper context.
Anyway… I’ll probably flesh these out in the Notes section of the site.