Alright! Nice!
I'll add a lot of space so you guys don't take seizures while viewing this.
Right then, art ahows! The title of the blog entry! That means I will be talking about art shows! Or...openings. Or galleries. Whatever you want to call them. The point is, I will be talking about them.
Why? Well, that's a darn good question.
The other day, while sitting in my lovely photography class...a discussion broke out! Intense debate! Fearsome rhetoric! Only available on PPV!
Here's what went down, for those of you reading this in the future/not present for the event and have no memory of what happened.
Someone menitoned something like "What if we didn't go to the opening, nobody would know, right?" and someone else was like "Why wouldn't you want to go to the opening?" and the first person was all "Yo, I'm going to the opening!" and then other people were like "Yeah dawg, we're all going to the opening! Who wouldn't want to go to the opening?! Art openings rule! Woo!"
I may be exaggerating here, but that's basically how I heard it.
Well my friends...I have a confession. I do not want to go to the art opening.
Yes, it's true, it's true. But hear me out!
The average normal photographer would love the idea of having a bunch of people look at his or her work. I mean, you take a bunch of pictures, and what good are they if nobody views them? So you get a giant place to put them up, and then a bunch of people go and look at them! You promote yourself! You get feedback! Your hard work gets appreciated! Shouldn't this be what I want?
Well baby, there's a lot of things you don't know about me! (I've always wanted to use that line.)
See, there's this man I look up to. His name, is Darin Morgan. Darin was a writer on the X-Files back in its early seasons. So, he took this dark, serious show and made comedic episodes. People loved those episodes! I know I did! Hell, one of them even won Darin an Emmy! But....there was a problem. After his first episode aired, Darin got his fan mail...as well as hate mail. People claimed he ruined the series forever! Poor Darin was then plagued with self-doubt. Confidence issues. Darin Morgan wanted perfection, and thus, he would only write three more episodes for the show before quitting, citing he was burnt out.
Now, I'm not going to say I'm exactly Darin Morgan. My photography skill is certainly not as good as his writing skill, although that's a very Morgan-esque statement in and of itself. But the self-doubt, that resonates with me. I want perfection just as much as Darin did. I don't want to overlook a mistake and then learn from it. That should have been seen in the first place! The problem arises when I make a picture that I like, and then other people don't like it. When that happens, everyone contradicts each other. One person wants to change A, one person wants to change B, but there can not be A and B coexisting at the same time.
Then, imagine this on a bigger scale. Sure, everyone may not be as vocal....or maybe they will be. You can't predict a crowd. But the fact is, there's going to be tons of people there, looking at what they will perceive as imperfections. There will be different opinions of my work. And I don't like that. I loathe that! I basically go in, say "This is the best I have to offer!" and have people reply back "That's great, but let me begin to tell you why you suck."
Look, I may slightly be exaggerating a bit here, but the overall theme is true. So at this point, I find that people give two replies. The first think people will say is "How can you survive in this business if you can't take people rejecting your work?"
Easy. If I were hired for a job...I wouldn't exactly view that as "my" work. Sure, I'm the one who took the pictures. I made all the photographic decisions. But the goal is to not do what I think is best, but to do what I think the client would think is best. So at the end of the day, I may be told "These suck, you aren't getting paid." That's actually not that bad. It comes down to being a business decision, not a personal one. I can live with that. It didn't fit into this one particular client's vision. At that point, all you can do is man up and adapt. So while it may be disappointing, it is not a direct criticism of my idea of perfection.
Which brings us to point two: "Do what you want to do."
Well, I do. But I wouldn't do what I want to do for money. If I took a nice picture, or even, an artistic picture, I'd be worried if people actually wanted it. That's my picture! Mine!
Basically, it's like...people would be stealing a part of me. And I wouldn't want that. Besides, for somebody to want a picture of mine, they would need to see them, presumably in public. In public, multiple people would see them, which would have multiple criticisms, which would bring us all the way back up to my original point up above.
There you go. An explanation of how my mind works, and why I don't want to go to the art opening. Now, there is a difference between what I want, and what I will be doing. For example, I'm just going to take pictures I like and say "Screw their opinions" for the rest of the school year.
And, I will be going to to the art opening, as much as I don't want to....Even if it means the whole day, my internal reaction is this:
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