Back when I was first starting out in this business, I shot nearly every day. Maybe for an hour or two, maybe only for a few minutes. When I wasn’t shooting, I was in the darkroom developing film, making contact sheets or printing.

Lots of printing.

There was a lot to learn, and the curve was sort of a hockey stick configuration. It was fairly easy to learn how to spool up a roll of film and develop it in chemistry as the directions explained. But once that hurdle was passed, creating more beautiful and tonality laden negs began to be something that resembled alchemy and magic – and a lot of damned hard work fraught with failure after failure.

And then that image gets printed – the one where I finally got it right. More tones, more depth, more feeling… magic.

After what seems like a lifetime – and tens of thousands of dollars later – the work was technically meeting some measurement of success.

I assembled a “portfolio” to share with the advertising exec a few doors down. He had hired me for my first ever gig, and I wanted to show him my brand new portfolio.

He took the book from me and sat down. He then flipped through it at a pretty fast clip, closed it and handed it back to me.

I sat there waiting for him to say something and finally he did. “Hey, you wannanother beer?”

I was kinda dumbstruck and asked him if he had anything to say about my book, my baby, the culmination of a few years of hardass work?

He stared at me with a kind of a wry smile and said, “nice shots… who cares?”

He must have seen my face fall about a mile down to the ground and he sat down, handed me a beer and let me in on something I will always keep close.

Good photography is all around us. It is everywhere. He said if he wanted a good photograph made, he could call a couple of dozen photographers in his rolodex (remember this is pre-digital) and get all kinds of good photographs made.

“Your photographs are good too,” he said, “but I am not short of good photographs.”

I was not getting it.

“What I am short of is great photographs. Photographs that captivate me and show me something I hadn’t seen before. Something more than regurgitated “Black Book” stuff.”

Well, I was kinda stunned for a moment or two, but it started to sink in.

I picked up my book and opened it up. Damn – he was right.

They were good… who cares? They were sharp… who cares? They were crisp and tonal rich and composed to the rules… who cares?

That stuff was a dime a dozen. It was everywhere – from the wedding shooters to the commercial industrial guys. Really good, sharp, well composed, colorful photographs of crap… good stuff, but of crap.

He challenged me to show him something he hadn’t seen before. He challenged me to show him a photograph that would make him WANT to look at it as an image, instead of an example of how I can make ‘good’ photographs.

And in that moment he changed my life. Seriously changed how I looked at my work, what I wanted to do, and how I would see my work in the context of the millions (today billions) of images that are ‘good’.

I would love to tell you that I took my marching orders and went out to make those shots that would totally make him want to see them. I would love to… but…

Damn! That was much harder than I thought it would be!

He was very good about letting me know that he would gladly look at my photos again when I felt I was ready, but I struggled so hard I didn’t see him for about seven or eight months. We bumped into each other and he asked if I was ready to show him some more work. I smiled and said that I was finding it a harder challenge than I thought it would be.

He then laid this little bombshell on me; “If you have to force it, it will never come. Let the images be an extension of your vision and stop trying so hard. Push yourself for opportunities, not for perfection.”

Two months later I knocked on his door with four prints that I loved. Deeply loved. Portraits taken of Navajo Medicine Men on the res for a local magazine, I had opted to bring my 8×10 and made a dozen exposures in the soft light of the open doors. They were not ‘commercial’ or ‘editorial’ or whatever, they were MY images and composed to show the room they were in as well as the majestic faces carved by the side light of day.

He took them from me and went through them kinda quick. “Damn,” I thought to myself. Then he started again to go through them much more slowly.

He grinned and looked at me.

“This is what I mean by great imagery,” he said. “You are letting me see something from a POV that I am not familiar with, and yet it makes me feel very comfortable – as if I have somehow known this work before.”

That made my day, for sure.

And it has helped shape my view of photography and context ever since. At Project 52 the students always hear me say “show me something I haven’t seen before” and “make the photograph, do not ‘take’ the photograph.”

It is not easy to do, and please do not think that every shot I have done since then is great, or meets the highest criteria of great… LOL. NOPE. It is damned hard to do, but I work at it on every shot. I want to make the shot surprise someone, push their level of understanding a bit, provide them with a bit of information or simply entertain them.

Good shots are all around us. And really, who cares? Good photography is now a given – even for smartphones and nubees with D800’s. Good is simply expected.

That moves the bar up a bit for great. And we cannot make ‘great’ photographs every time we shoot. Many times good is what matters to the client or agency.

If we put all we can into the image, pulling from our knowledge base, our heart and our vision, then we can be pretty darn sure we gave it every bit of effort possible.

No one can ask for more than that.

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PHOTO INFO
ca 1987
“Model in the Doorway”
Nikon F3, 180MM lens at f2.8, PlusX.
Printed on Seagull #2, toned with yellow toner, bleached and re-toned with sepia.
She was sitting just inside my office door on a moderately overcast day. I shot from the sidewalk.