How do you get "better" as a creator of photographs?

Gear will always change. Styles change. Most of the photographs we're making right now will look quite trite in ten years. But some small fraction will still have resonance and appeal. That's what we're working for. That fractional quantity of good work that comes from working on our stuff every day. Planning? Research? I'm sure those things are good as long as they aren't being used as fancy procrastination tools. Remember when monitor calibration was the exciting technical side trip of digital image making? It was really mostly an effective way to put off heading out the door to make photographs. 

Perfectionism destroys creative vision. Waiting until all the stars are perfectly aligned destroys careers. Waiting too long to embrace the work makes photographers poor. 

There's always an excuse not to do the work. It could be as droll as staying home all day, waiting, so you don't miss the Federal Express delivery of your new lens. Or your aversion to the light misting rain scuttles your plans. Or you feel you must watch the  new YouTube video from Dave Herring trying to convince you that film Leica cameras are a bargain but digital Leica cameras will take centuries to pay off. And you have to wade through to the end to understand whether you need a film Leica or a digital Leica before you can really start in earnest. 

Or you are trying to get through a famous photographer's autobiography before you really ramp up your shooting, in hopes that he or she will uncover for you some secrets of the people who have "made it" so you can find a short cut to being really, really good. Without trying too hard. 

Or your knee hurts. Or the world seems to be falling apart at the seams and it's all so overwhelming that you are paralyzed. 

I have a solution that I think I read as a quote from writer/photographer, Bill Jay. He was asked what to do if you were at a loss for motivation. Didn't know what to point your camera at next. His response was to grab your camera and go shoot anything --- just to start building up your photographic momentum. 

I try to go out with a camera every day and find something interesting to photograph. Not because I need  something new and amazing in my endless catalogs of photographs but because the act of engaging in the practice itself keeps moving you forward and the momentum of a daily practice gets you over those moments of weakness when nothing seems like pursuing anymore. The practice takes over and the momentum of the process itself pulls you back on track. 

Or, maybe you are genuinely over being a photographer and just want to be a person who takes photographs occasionally. Or maybe you've lost the spark entirely. I guess that's okay. Now you'll have time to figure just what it is that you really do want to spend your time pursuing. And that's good too. 

I just read: Everything is Photograph. A Life of André Kertész by Patricia Albers.

It's an exhaustive and exhausting 428 pages of detailed diving into one photographic super star's life. I'm not sure yet if I can recommend the book to any other than big time Kertész fans since so much of the detail is about the photographer's ability to self-sabotage his own success over and over again. And his easy ability to complain about it to anyone who will listen.  But it does inform me about how incredibly different it was to be a "known" photographer in the 1930's - 1970's versus being a "known" photographer twenty-five years into the meat of the digital photography age. 

That Kertész was a very talented photographer is indisputable. And he was a relentless worker. His archives contained thousands and thousands of prints and hundreds of thousands of negatives. He worked relentlessly for a Condé Nast publication, House and Garden, and delivered more assignments and images to the magazine, year to year, than any other photographer delivered to any of the Condé Nast publications in the years he held a contract to work with them. 

But though he lived on the income from commercial work he was constantly battling his own frustrations that the work of work got in the way, all through his life, often preventing him from doing the kinds of photographs he wanted to do instead. He made his reputation in Europe in the 1930's and the early work was the material that kept moving his reputation moving forward, in the eyes of multiple audiences, throughout his comparatively long life.

Since the twentieth century targets for photographers were all print: magazines, newspapers, books and gallery shows, having early and privileged access (by dint of reputation and earned connections) to the critical media made him a star in his era. That he was a peer of Brassai, HCB, Szarkowski and many others meant he existed, to 20th century photo buffs, as one of a rarified group of super stars of the medium. 

By the last decade of the 20th century his reputation was cemented by a near endless series of international retrospectives of his work. All sealed for success by the signatory kiss of approval from John Szarkowski, the photo curator at the all powerful Museum of Modern Art. 

It's hard for a young photographer of current times to even imagine how powerfully concentrated the media were back in the days of printed magazine subscriptions, and a very limited number of publications aimed at a general audience of photo hobbyists. Millions of eyes were glued to the pages of Modern Photography Magazine and Popular Photography Magazine and U.S. Camera Magazine every single month. To have work showcased, again and again in all of those publications cemented in the minds of the readers that just a few more than a handful of photographers were responsible for everything great and creative and innovative in modern photography. Really, the reduction to a small pantheon of names made everyone who was lucky enough or talented enough into, basically, the Taylor Swift/Drake/Bruno Mars/Billie Eilish of that time; in that field. 

Today, with ready access to every photographer, and with the easy, ongoing generation of billions of photographs every day, hitting that level of star recognition in photography is now nearly impossible. And we may wrongly worship the previous generations only because they were much more selectively "knowable" than current generations by dint of a very small collection of outlets for the work. Outlets that were known and devoured by the fans of photography. It focused their attention down to a small, consistent group of photographers who had "made it."

Circling back around though, even though fame may have been less elusive in a way, the Kertész story does reinforce the power of getting started and then, relentlessly doing the work. Had Kertész dabbled his way into early recognition but walked away from leveraging early fame of decades and decades of doing the work, making the connections (over and over again) and continuing to make work that tastemakers love he would have dropped off our collective radar long ago....

At some point we don't pursue our photography because it might make us famous, or rich, or cool, but because we love the process and we love, sometimes, the end results. And mostly, that's reason enough.