Good work is not enough

Cormac McCarthy died yesterday at the age of 89. According to Wikipedia, McCarthy is "widely regarded as one of the greatest modern American writers".

What I didn't know about him is that after 26 years of writing, none of McCarthy's novels "had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies". He was labelled the "best unknown novelist in America".

He spent half of his long writing career as a mostly unknown writer. Success did eventually come to McCarthy, though, and only then his early work was appreciated the way it deserved.

The arts, and that includes photography, are not a meritocracy: good work, even outstanding work, is not a guarantee of success.

Another lesson we can take from his example and many similar others is that success is a lagging indicator. The same goes for failure, by the way.

We do not become what we are today overnight; it's only after weeks, months, years, decades, of hard work (or the lack of) that we achieve results (or not). It took McCarthy 26 years of dedication, of not giving up, to get significant recognition.

At the same time, in order to survive for that long, we should not make that kind of success our end goal. Would you be able to yearn for public recognition for a quarter of a century and still find the strength to keep going? I know I would not, I would've given up.

It's only when we find joy in what we do, and when we set our own definition of success, what that looks like for us, that we have a chance to succeed. And even if that never comes, at least we have poured our souls into our work and shared it with whoever was there to listen to us.

Not as good (or as bad) as you think

When we make a good image, we might think we are getting better at this: "I'm a great photographer", we tell ourselves.

When the best image we can come up with isn't any good, we think this is not for us: "I'm a terrible photographer", we convince ourselves.

We are neither that good nor that bad. The truth is always somewhere in between.

We outdoor photographers are at the mercy of the location, the conditions, and the light. Making a good image is easy if we are at the right place at the right moment. If we have nothing going for us, even the most talented photographer might have not been able to create a decent image.

Since most of the time we can't predict what the outside world is going to do, our best chance is to get out as often as we can and try to do our best. Let's use this as a measurement of success instead of "good" vs "bad" images.