Disappointment in the Photography Life
Silos, Cars, and Cloud
I came across the image in this post while preparing to submit some of my work to a publication for their consideration. The submission was of my photography of railroad cars, and I thought this image – which I had largely forgotten about – fit the theme nicely, so I added it to the collection. As an aside, I find the concept of my photographing railroad cars interesting. I’m pretty sure it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but my eye is drawn to them and I find them genuinely worthwhile and engaging subjects to work with.
When I finished putting together the collection of images I was going to submit, I found that I considered some of the compositions to be – dare I say it – repetitious. I choke on that word a little bit, because just a few blog posts ago I wrote about how my threshold for repetition in my work is pretty low. But here, viewing the assembled collection of images, even I had to concede there was an element of repetition that reduced interest in the collected images as a whole.
It’s disappointing, on several levels. It’s disappointing because I was excited to finish the task of submitting the work and being considered for publication. That’s not going to happen, at least for the collection in its present form. It’s also disappointing because it exposed a flaw in my work that I either missed or glossed over. I try to curate my work pretty tightly, so that’s disappointing too.
What to do? There’s a few options here. First, I could abandon the submission, and maybe even the project as a whole. That’s not very satisfying, because I do like the work and believe it has merit.
Second, I could put the submission on hold until my photography produces more images of railroad cars to add. It might even be beneficial, because now I have motivation to do more railroad car photography, and I have the perspective of trying to seek out new compositions that are not simply repetitious of what I have already done.
Third, I could proceed with my submission simply by culling the repetitious compositions so that it’s no longer an issue. The pool of images I selected was 49 in total, and I suspect the repetitious compositions numbered in the 5-10 range. If I cull the submission down to even 40 images or so, that’s still a respectable number to submit.
This issue of disappointment has me thinking a bit philosophically. I’m old enough now that I can look back on my years in life so far with a bit of a candid and objective eye. While I’ve had some successes, I’m forced to admit they are likely outnumbered by the large number of things that were failures or, even worse, could have been successes if I had approached them differently or given them more effort. Even my successes seem rather modest when compared against the full scope of the fields of endeavor that they were in and the successes achieved by others. And unlike a photography project, when things don’t work out in life, often there are few or no good options to fix them. It’s a cliché, but maybe photography really is a microcosm for life in that sense – trying to achieve something, being dealt setbacks or even outright failures, and learning to manage through the sting of disappointment and carry on.