Δ Light Readings : 014 - Struggles with the messy middle
and sequestering despair
Hello from the muggy, late summer, non-swamps of Washington, DC. It has been nearly a year since I last wrote, but I’m glad to be here with you. My name’s Stephen Voss and I’m a photographer based in Washington, DC. You can see my work on my website, and IG.
When I began photographing bonsai trees, I didn’t say a word to anyone about it. I was afraid it didn’t really fit the kind of photographer I was trying to be. It felt like half of an idea at best with a whole spectrum of ways it could fall apart. I described the seeming futility of the work to a friend as being like going to a museum to take photographs of paintings. Here I was, driving across the city to puzzle over these old trees, when I could be marketing/shooting stock/organizing my archive or anything else that seemed to a better way to spend some time.
The early trips became a mind game of talking myself into going out there while pushing aside the doubts I had that this would ever amount to anything. To get out the door, I’d make bargains that if things were going south and I lost interest in the work, it could be finished forever.
Dozens and dozens of trips, thousands of images were made before I showed anyone a single picture. The work sat on a hard drive and I would periodically glance through it, but mostly kept it at arm’s length. I think a part of me worried that I’d look it over, decide it was no good and that would be it. When asked about this struggle with long-term projects, writer Maggie Nelson said something in an interview that feels profound to me:
[…] one of my good friends and mentors gave me the best advice I’ve ever gotten about this. He said, “Remember, your feelings about the work don’t determine the value of the work.” You can feel frustrated, disgusted, agitated, hopeless, every day, on and off, but you can’t necessarily believe all your moods. You just have to keep on working.
Yeah, not believing in your moods. That’s a quote from Emerson, I might add. “Our moods do not believe in each other.” Which is one of my favorite quotes because when you feel despair, despair doesn’t believe in joy. And that can be very hard as a writer. If you feel like you open up your files and everything looks like shit and you’re upset, that mood is going to make you want to invalidate your whole project.
Despair doesn’t believe in joy. I love this idea, and of adopting a mindset where we are a bit skeptical of our negative feelings. We give them a little side-eye, understanding them as the workings of our brain, not our mind. Jerry Seinfeld laid this out once in an interview (site has pop-ups) that I thought hit right on it:
The mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid, little dog that is easily trained. Do not confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master. You just have to confine it. You confine it. And it’s done through repetition and systematization.
I’m going to take strong issue with the “so easy” part, but he’s not wrong, and our ability to sequester our fears and doubts really does feel integral to creating work.
As I neared the completion of the bonsai project, I realized I had built up this muscle that hadn’t been there before. I’d found a place where I could work at something (mostly) free of judgment. I was making the pictures absent of critique and giving the work space to become something, to evolve and go in weird directions. Most importantly, I was able to shield my sense of self-worth from the work itself. The success or failure of these photos was not a reflection of my success or failure as a creative person. Any day I spent making new work was, by this new definition, a success. But, this idea never became innate, it required a lot of upkeep. Did I give myself a literal pat on the back when I finished each day? I sure did.
I mention this because of a new project I’ve been working on since this past October. I’m long past the exciting beginning phase and right in that messy middle, very willing to talk myself out of taking more pictures and feeling the momentum of the idea waning. This time, I leaned on a photo editor whose judgement I trust and left our Zoom call last week with some new ideas and this thought - “When your idea is narrow, you can expand it by pushing it to every edge to see where it might go.”
Thanks for reading.
Currently
Listening to An Alien in Minneapolis by Ondara and LOLing at this video for Training Montage by The Mountain Goats, featuring, of course, the band embarking on an exercise regimen that is both earnest and silly.
Totally taken by the composition of Andrew Wyeth’s Northern Point.
Cristina de Middel and Olivia Arthur are both making such interesting work and I was struck by this quote from an interview I watched with them:
After ten years in photojournalism, I felt limited by the simplicity of the language and how little room there was for opinion.
The Sunrise Bumble Bee Tomato may be the prettiest and most delicious cherry tomato I’ve ever grown. Sweet, but not overly so, with a skin that crunches when you first bite into it. It also continued producing through crushing summer heat and weekly thunderstorms. 10/10.
I wrote up a quick remembrance of a brief photo session with Mikhail Gorbachev back in 2009 with a video of the encounter, here.
(a h/t to Joerg Colberg’s wonderful CPHMag newsletter where I first read the Maggie Nelson interview which helped me finish up this piece. A highly recommended sign-up if you haven’t done so already)
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