Creativity and Falling Short
with David Field
image by Field
words by FieldHenri Cartier-Bresson is famously quoted as saying “your first ten thousand photographs are your worst”.
That was in a day when every image had to be painstakingly printed in a darkroom. With the ease and convenience of digital photography, I wonder how many photographs you have to take before you are through “your worst”…
I bought my first camera (a Hanimex 110 EF) out of my pocket money at the age of 8. I have no recollection what initially made me want a camera – potentially it just captured my eight-year-old imagination as a grown-up toy, like a new watch. Once I had it, even at 8 I soon fell into a burning compulsion to document all the interesting things I found in the world around me, inevitably followed by disappointment once the prints came back, looking nothing like what I had pictured in my mind’s eye.
High school saw me with a series of borrowed SLRs, working in black-and-white, spending hours in the darkroom, dodging and burning back when they weren’t just buttons in Adobe Lightroom, and, through all the frustrations, somehow still eking-out just enough accomplishment to think this photography thing might be worth pursuing.
I can point to many other milestones in my growth as a photographer – the rich subject-matter of living in Taiwan, the increased “fluency” for photographic technique developed through constantly having a camera in my hands, discovering the power of photographic projects and the use of photographic narrative. But the key thing that really stands out for me is the feeling of constant dissatisfaction with the results. Photography for me has always been about striving for something that feels just out of reach, always falling frustratingly short of the image in my head. I know that if eight-year-old me could see the photography I’m doing today he’d be amazed, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever looked at one of my photos without first taking an inventory of the mistakes and shortcomings. Maybe that’s what makes it interesting – that sense that I’m chasing something that I’m never quite going to catch. By the time I get to where I thought it was, I realise that it’s moved on.
When I talk to friends who have been professional photographers they are dismissive of the idea of a constant sense of the shortcomings of their work. They tell me that, when you do photography for a living, “you have to get over that pretty quickly”. Thinking about my own legal work, that sentiment resonates. I don’t have the time, and the businesses I support don’t have the resources, for me to produce perfect work. With a bit more time I could easily point to dozens of imperfections in any piece of legal work I produce – but the work is fit-for-purpose, it gets the job done.
Maybe photography has given me a valuable vehicle to indulge my perfectionism in a way that sets me free to be more clear-eyed and practical about being “good enough” in the rest of my life.
Along with Tom Kaldor, David is the creator of Laws of Creativity.
David is Chief Legal Counsel at Canon Australia, and on the board of the Minds Count Foundation. His previous photographic projects include the Lifetimes in Law portrait project and a number of documentary projects on telecommunications. His work has been exhibited at the Australian Bar Association National Conference, and he has twice been a finalist in the Law Society of New South Wales’ “JustArt” competition.