Image © Julian Lass 2011
Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value
Albert Einstein.
It’s easy to focus on success, especially when you’re struggling and broke. So, exactly what is it I want from my photography?
Colin Pantall asked a number of photographers ‘what is success?’ recently on his blog.
David Campbell, Professor of Cultural and Political Geography at Durham University, and part of the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies, provides an interesting answer. David externally reviewed my MA video Mnemonika and we had an interesting talk about his views when I cornered him in a corridor at our group show.
Overall I think this is a very difficult question to think about in the abstract. I doubt there are criteria that would effectively judge success across the board for all projects. Indeed, I think reflecting on ‘success’ should be part of the thinking surrounding each project. It brings to the fore the question of ‘what is it that photographs do, and how do we know?’. So the first step for outlining success re a specific project is for the photographer to ask - ‘what am I trying to do with these images, who is my audience, and how can I reach them’. Although this might strike you as a bit vague, I believe strongly that posing the question and reflecting on the issues is an essential first step.
The next thing to say is that metrics have their place but they have to be used very carefully. Numbers can be become ‘facts’ far too quickly. One of the problems with numbers about attendance, circulation, readership, page views, unique users etc is that they often tend to assume that more is necessarily better. That is not always the case. It depends on how you answer my original question about who is the audience and how you reach them. If the audience is specific and limited, then having huge numbers may be irrelevant if that mass reach doesn’t get to the right people. An example - consider Marcus Bleasdale, working in conjunction with Human Rights Watch, and putting on an exhibit of his Congo images in Geneva so that the staff of global mining companies could view them (see here). In that case it might have only taken a few hundred, maybe less, people to be affected for the work of those photographs to be counted as ‘successful’.
At the same time, while Marcus’s photos might have helped change the policy of one company, they did not end the war in eastern Congo. And that points to the fact that the all too common, and frankly rather mindless universal claims, about photographers wanting to change the world - as though a single thing or person or picture could alone alter the course of history - need to be dispensed with in favour of much more reasoned judgements about what particular photographs can do. Who wouldn’t want to change the world - but we all need to carefully assess our place in the world and what our work can do.
I strongly believe that forcing this issue into the open and asking how we pose the questions and proceed with the discussions is the best way to address the concern. We won’t find a set of metrics that will provide a neat, quantitative answer, and if anyone proposed one I would be both nervous and sceptical. Making overt the aims and audience for a project is the essential starting point.
Benjamin Chesterton, who runs the audiovisual website duckrabbit provides a short answer in comparison: ‘Success is the moment you let go.’ But elsewhere Chesterton qualifies it. ‘I’ve had my fair share of success’, he says, ‘but the high is always short-lived, afterwards the emptiness comes rushing back in. For a long time I wanted to change the world, but the truth is it’s actually me that needs to change.
Part two of Pantall’s interviews is here.
Posted 1 year ago with NotesTags: influences
