It comes with the territory.
Churchill called it his Black Dog – the days where it seemed that all the effort and striving were for naught. No matter how you looked at things, all was lost.
Well, it comes naturally with Slavic blood. Like mine. Where else could Dostoyevsky be a best selling author other than in Eastern Europe? And his readers, like Winston, drink to excess, compounding their depression rather than helping it.
I have these Black Dog days frequently when looking at my pictures. The depression part, not the drinking, that is. While I now do my ‘snap a day’ thing on my photoblog that’s not where I expect to find many of my best pictures. It’s a place to think aloud, experiment and cull for later publication. Those that make the cut I place on my more static web site and it’s that which causes the depression.
I mean, after all these years, I sometimes think there is absolutely nothing to show for the effort.
For example, I have always loved this picture, which says a lot about the England I adore – some people enjoying the park on a rare, sunny day with the lady standing in the way only an eccentric nation could understand, to get a better view of a passing parade. I remember taking that as if it was today and I knew it was fabulous. Or is it?
Green Park. London, 1973
Then this one has only improved with age, now that we live in a time where you cannot get within hundreds of yards of Britain’s center of power without all sorts of clearances. I loved it when I snapped it and I like it even more now. Or do I?
Outside Number Ten. London, 1974
I was especially happy with the next image – the light just so, the colors simple. Or am I mistaken?
Thinking of Hopper. San Diego, 1997
The next snap has everything I could think would make a perfect color picture – a sense of abstraction, a monochromatic palette and I love the composition. Or do I?
Sky. Bermuda, 1999
For an abundant sense of mystery, I adore this. Or do I despise it for its sheer ordinariness?
Penseur. Cayucos, 2005
Finally, I keep telling myself that my best is yet to come. That I still have ‘it’. That my sense of color and composition gets stronger with the passing years. Or is this simply self delusion passing for a defence mechanism?
Minuet in Green. San Francisco, 2009
Do you see where I’m coming from? Sometimes it just all seems hopeless. Maybe this whole photography thing is just a mindless time sink?
Well, I’m 58 today and that alone is sufficient cause for Depression.
Reading through this, it neatly summed up my own feelings when considering work I’ve produced recently. ‘Recently’ here relates to my 2009 Lightroom catalogue, which is considerably smaller than previous years…
The other day, I started to write a response to a recent TOP article, (The Tenset), about why I maintain three different websites and whether I could present my ‘Top Ten’ images on a single front page of any of those sites. The article never got finished, because every time I looked at my photographs from recent years I was swamped by the same feelings of doubt that you describe.
However, just one successful picture per year is an acceptable hit rate in my view, and ‘Minuet in Green’ would seem to a very worthwhile candidate for 2009.
These feelings are certainly not confined to those of Slavic extraction; more likely related to the fact that I too got very close to the end of my sixth decade a couple of months ago.
Cheer up, Thomas, you are good.
You just published a new site with your dailies (I can’t get enough of them); this site is full of insight and good humor: what else do you need? You do this to please and express yourself. The Green Park, London image could be a frame from Blow Up (I love it), and you get depressed? Those folks in the image look depressed, but I think that comes with the Territory.
Yes, we all get depressed sometimes for various reasons, but your images don’t reflect that. I enjoy Hopper myself and I can tell which of your images resonates with him before reading the subtitle.
I’m a photographer myself, with a structural engineering background; in 2008 I won an award at a local art show (I live in SoCal), and had a solo exhibit in Eastern Europe this September, had shown 100 images. My website is close to go live but not there yet. I do mostly landscape, travel and people photography.
You have a lot to show for your efforts, keep up the good work:)
Best regards,
Paul