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I have been talking a lot about failure lately. Since I was a young reader at the Ellwood City Public Library, I was curious about why people create. I read about Edison, Westinghouse and Ford – the American inventors of the industrial age. The one lesson that resonates with me today was that they all practiced failure. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Thomas A. Edison
Those same library shelves revealed to me the photography books of Smith, Evans, Bourke – White and Strand. Even these masters of the camera encountered failure as part of their process. Photographer and ASMP member, W. Eugene Smith writes of one of his most celebrated bodies of work, the Pittsburgh Project, “Pittsburgh, to me, is a failure…the main problem, I think, is that there is no end to such a subject as Pittsburgh and no way to finish it.”
Having been on this journey with my camera for most of my life, there have been the expected proverbial forks in the road. As much as I understood failure as a part of the creative process and, believe me, I embraced failure and overcoming failure as my great teacher. In the grand scheme of my life and career, I feared failure.
A few weeks ago, during an interview for a newspaper story about the work I do as an educator at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, I spoke of preparing my students for the craft of professional photography: “And don’t be afraid to take risks. ‘I can teach much more in a failed moment then in a successful one,’ [Kelly] says. ‘I often will encourage students to keep pushing their work until it hurts. Most of the growth as an artist occurs when you take risks beyond your comfort zone.’”
Follow Richard Kelly
Loosely based on a philosophy that my mentor, Art Kane, photographer and ASMP Member, had passed on to me during editing sessions in a darkened room with a carousel and a clicker advance. Watching him set aside technically good pictures for pictures that were a combination of serendipity meets brilliance. Searching for a moment, not just a composition, he would say “if it doesn’t make your gut hurt a bit it probably isn’t right” or “it’s expected but not special.”
I had made a promise to myself that this year I was going to fail more often by pushing my students and myself past our comfort zones. I felt that I needed to go to the place that would make my gut tighten up. So it was refreshing to read yesterday a wonderful interview with Stephen Mayes (someone to whom I look to for the bigger picture as it relates to photography and everything that means.) who observed, “I would go further to say that failure must become an essential part of all our work; if you’re not failing it means you’re working in a comfort zone and as the visual world changes at breakneck speed, to live in a comfort zone is itself a failure!” read the rest of the interview here.
Here is to failing often and producing something great.
Top image from Imgembed.
This is a cross-post from Imgembed.
Richard Kelly is a photographer and educator looking for serendipity and brilliance in Pittsburgh. This article originally appeared in ASMP’s Strictly Business blog.