The other day I read a great blog post called “Zen and the Art of Making” on the MAKE blog, which put into words some things I’d been thinking about with respect to why I seem to have a love/hate/confused relationship with photography these days.
“Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much fun it is when you’re a beginner at something as opposed to being an “expert.” [...] I really want to avoid being an expert in some things, only so I can continually look forward to learning more without the overhead of being an expert. Being an expert means your journey is somewhat over.”
This is something that is never discussed in school— what to do when the excitement of technical mastery has faded and the hard, barely-discernable slope of simply working kicks in. I know this is the time when people are supposed to put themselves in unfamiliar situations or use a different camera or format, but for me it doesn’t feel like enough doing this alone.
“Beginners need to practice a lot; experts need to talk more than practice usually.”
I’ve put myself in the position of talking much more than practicing, since for work I teach and tutor and assist. This doesn’t help the situation. I feel the pressure of being expected to know and none of the excitement or magic of not knowing.
“Beginners can celebrate failure while experts rarely admit it. For a beginner, all the obstacles, failures, and challenges are the path ahead. Beginners usually do not have any fear; they just make things — maybe it doesn’t work out, maybe it does — but they don’t have the same risk aversion experts tend to have.”
As anyone who has read this blog previously would know, I am a little obsessed with thinking about the idea of failure, even though I couldn’t for the life of me define what failure would really mean to me. What I do know is that I do feel fear and feel stuck, even bored, with some of the photography I’ve been working on and need to do something or I really will fail because I’ll stop making altogether.
“Sure, when you’ve mastered something it’s valuable, but then part of your journey is over — you’ve arrived, and the trick is to find something you’ll always have a sense of wonder about.”
This is where my head is at. I’m trying to spend my time doing the things that give me that sense of wonder, that make me excited. I love learning and so I’m taking classes in things I’ve always wondered about but have never pursued. Right now I’m taking a molding and casting class and loving every minute of it. I have no idea where these new skills will take me but it’s wonderful to just get excited about the idea of making without envisioning how it should fit into my career.
“Beginners can take more risks than experts — they start with zero, so there’s nothing to lose.”
And so that is what I am trying to do, to carve out space for myself where I can take risks and lose and be a beginner. The downside of success is that there is a pressure for continued success and the risks feel scarier because you aren’t starting at zero. For now I am trying to concentrate on following what excites me and trusting myself/not second-guessing myself too much. If I believe that I have the ability to make something other people will get excited about then I have to trust that it will happen as long as I keep following what makes me excited.
This is my pictorial representation of wonder:

***I’d like to clarify that I by no means think of myself as an expert and would never use that word to describe myself, but rather that the feelings the author explains feel relevant to me at this point in my life.