The Online Photographer

Jeez, nobody liked my Valentine's Day story. Crickets.

I have one more point to add to the "Bones" series of posts. (Why did I give it that title? I don't know. Oh, yeah, Yorick!) It's that you should do what you can to not spin your wheels. Here are the first four articles:

Bones Part I
Bones Part II
Bones Part III
Bones Part IV

If you can manage, "by hook or by crook" as my grandmother used to say, to get a little more focused on your photography—knowing who you are and what you're really up to, what subject lights your fire and what kind of results do it to you / sock you in the gut / get you where you live, etc.—you avoid what I consider possibly the worst fate for anyone in an art-related or creative pursuit: spinning your wheels.

Life isn't too short to spin your wheels—in fact I think we need to do a fair amount of it, to explore options and gather experience to make decisions. What you want is to not keep doing it. Certainly not keep doing it forever. I remember one friend, a generation older than I am, who had four sons. His youngest son started out with a talent on the guitar and for singing, and devoted himself to the idea of a career as a famous musician. The trouble was, when I heard about him, he had been trying for twenty-plus years, he was into his forties, his hair was turning gray, he was still having a struggle getting booked at tiny local coffee houses, and he couldn't support himself. His parents worried, and all but considered him a lost cause. Talk about spinning your wheels—that poor guy was up to his hubcaps in mud.

I sometimes like to translate colloquial expressions into English, so "spinning your wheels" would be "to waste time doing things that achieve nothing" (Cambridge); "to continue trying to do something without having any success" (Longmans); "To waste one's time or energy idly or frivolously" (Free Dictionary). Curiously, we have an expression of the opposite quality that's just as figurative: being on a roll. Some artistic people spend their whole lives spinning their wheels. Compare the guy I described above to a childhood friend of mine who had been accepted at Stanford School of Business, but really wanted to be a singer-songwriter. He gave himself two years in Los Angeles, and worked as hard as could during that time to advance his music and his musical career. Having made no progress at all at the end of the two years, or not enough, off he went to Stanford. That's an example of not spinning your wheels.

Self-knowledge, direction, and having a purpose that suits your talent, n.b., says nothing about what you have to decide! I know a perfectly happy photographer who has decided that he just likes to snap pictures. He doesn't even care about looking at them. But he's clear about what he enjoys and why he does what he does. And by the way: one gadfly professional-photographer reader of ours (I won't say his name, but his initials are Kirk Tuck) pooh-pooh'd the whole idea of having to have ideas, saying, "ideas are the currency of philosophers, not photographers." I disagree, because he himself had the clearest of ideas: for many years he took pictures people were willing to pay him money for, making sure they got what they wanted for a price they were willing to pay, and had a good enough experience doing it that they'd hire him again and tell others to do so as well. That was his idea. And it's also the opposite of spinning one's wheels. It doesn't have to be the currency of philosophers to be an idea.

The second coming of David
At the risk of returning to a party I've already been kicked out of, one more story about Johnson's Flower Center. There was a guy, David, who worked in the houseplant section. He was skinny and unkempt, had a thick, frizzy black beard, unbarbered black curly hair, and a stereotypically New York attitude, or 'tude, as we might have said in those days, along with his New York accent. (New Yorkers kind of stuck out in D.C. in 1980.) Never smiled; looked down his nose at you and everybody; smarter than anyone else in any room, at least according to himself; cynical and sardonic, critical of ev-er-y-thing, definitely not afraid to crack a wicked, cutting joke about people he worked with—or even you, to your face. There might have been a hundred employees at Johnson's, and David was probably the laziest. If he was asked to do something, he would do it, but as grudgingly as if each arm and leg were as heavy as a potted ficus. Every task was beneath him. As he was quick to tell anyone who would listen, he had a Master's degree, which he was sure none of his co-workers had. (He was probably right about that.) His major activities were standing around sucking on cigarettes, gazing at the ceiling not looking humans in the eye, avoiding helping customers, scowling, and being miserable about the fact that his life in no way rose to his standards. He and I had conversations on academic topics, when the boss wasn't looking. He loved to vent his bitterness about the paucity of decent employment opportunities in his "field," but his plight, I might have suggested, was not entirely something imposed on him by an uncaring world, because his Master's degree was in "managing a student center at a large public university." Not something there was a lot of call for. There were literally more jobs available locally for master medieval-style stone-cutters and stonecarvers—the National Cathedral had not yet been completed at that time, and employed stonecarvers. I had a few cynical, sardonic cracks of my own about the wisdom of David choosing such a specific course of study in the first place. It sounded to me like a program designed by the University to get people to help at the student center without having to pay them! But I kept my own counsel. Regardless, for David, selling houseplants was slumming, a holding pattern, a matter merely of necessity, below his station, a waste of his education.

Eventually he disappeared. He had quit. Naturally, I assumed none of us would ever see him again.

Eight months later, though, who should reappear in the houseplants section but a new guy who reminded me in a curious way of David. And it was David! The very same guy. He had gained a few pounds, had a neat haircut, no beard—and, amazingly, a completely transformed attitude. His mien, his outlook, and his method of dealing with others had been transformed. He looked, sounded, and acted like a different guy: friendly, happy, eager. What in the world had happened? I had to know.

It turned out he had had an epiphany. After a period of unemployment and job searching, not to mention misery and many cigarettes, he discovered that he missed his old job at Johnson's, and that, actually, he loved working with plants. So he threw himself into learning about plants, and was in the process of enrolling in a graduate program in horticulture. He had come back to Johnson's to work until school started. He had decided to devote the rest of his life to working with plants. And he was over-the-moon happy about all this. So there he was, in the exact place he had been eight months earlier, doing exactly the same work for the exact same pay, but with an attitude that was 180° the opposite from what he'd been before. It was as vivid a spiritual transformation as Mr. Scrooge's on Christmas morning. All it took was a different perspective. Embracing rather than rejecting. Replacing surliness, hostility, and pessimism with enthusiasm and willingness. Laziness replaced by vigor. And no more smoking, even—he had quit.

Really made an impression on me. I didn't know the guy very well, but I've never forgotten this story.

So it's not what you do that counts; what's important—vitally so, I'd say, and I say it advisedly—is to be conscious, be positive, make decisions, commit—and avoid spinning your wheels for any longer than you have to.

Mike

P.S. I probably could have said all this in four well-worded sentences. But where's the fun in that?

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Featured Comments from:

Dave: "Bragging that you have a Master's degree while you're working at a job a high schooler could do isn't exactly going to impress anyone!

"Robert Roaldi reminded me of my days at a nationally-known ice cream franchise inside a mall. During Christmas, we would have a full counter with half of the people claiming they were next. So you would go over to them and ask which of the 31 flavors they wanted and they'd say, 'I haven't decided yet.' It was these people who received the regulation size scoop on their cone. (I called that a 'tension reliever.') We generally added a bit to each scoop, since they were pretty small for the price you were paying.

"Added to the crowd of people at Christmastime was the incessant roar of the water fountain. Generally once each holiday season, one of us would take off his uniform and change into street clothes, pour a small amount of dish-washing liquid into a courtesy water cup and discreetly pour it into the fountain water. This forced the maintenance people to shut off the fountain, lest the foam run all over the floor. We received dirty looks from the maintenance guys, but no one ever caught us doing it.

"One guy was pretty quick with clever comments. We had started charging for ice and water, mostly to pay for the cups. One 'customer' wanted a large cup of ice water and was complaining about us charging for it. The clever worker said, 'The water's free and the ice is free—but what are you going to put it in?'  :>)

"If you think these doings were too extreme, well, none of us murdered anyone in a fit of rage, so it all worked out to relieve the tension every so often."