The Flying Pig

[sonofdanang]

Roger, I think your question must be rhetorical. You may hardly be blamed as you've spent a long time in a state of love and I suspect it has softened and opened your heart. These are good attributes.


A generalization: men (and perhaps women too) who struggle in endeavors where success is not clearly defined will sometimes retreat into competencies more easily measured. I do not confuse technical mastery with this form of retreat. But this form of mental retreat allows concepts to be developed as rationale. The rationale allows for excuse-making avoidance of the task at hand: producing work. In our case, photographs. It is distraction by fantasy or delusion and it is perhaps one of the ego's best-used techniques to avoid the hard work of producing photographs (or anything else for that matter). Absorption in the process, whether Tai Chi or photography or cooking, subsumes the ego. It doesn't like that.

Maybe.

Perhaps we might, just as an exercise, divide the user group into two camps. One uses the gear they have, doing the best the can while wishing they had better. The other, produces nothing because they "don't have the right tools". Or produces less than they are able under the same speciousness. The reality is most people fall somewhere in the spectrum rather than at the extremes, if you will.

Maybe.

Men love metrics. Another generalization, but of all the female photographers I know (I restrict this definition to those who are producing completed works), and their number is somewhat greater than a dozen, only one of them engages in the "why don't they make..." litany. Of the males in the same line of work, a significantly greater proportion of them can tell you not only about the cameras that they have but the one that they "really wish they had", existent or not. I leave the implication where it lies. It is hardly scientific but it's all I have.

One notable exception amongst the male photographers I know is perhaps the most successful - all he knows about is the cameras that he uses and he knows them inside out, fingers moving across the controls, eye rarely leaving the viewfinder. He shoots digital but if you have a discussion with him about photography the camera is never mentioned other than his dictum that you must understand the camera so completely that you can operate it unconsciously. You must understand the camera you have - not the one that "they really should make...". He too has been softened and opened by long association with his lover.

Lest that provoke other readers to the folly of derision, this particular photographer came in second place in the U.S. heavyweight karate championships held at Madison Square Garden. In his hometown. Mid 1960s. While working full time as a commercial photographer. He is now an éminence grise, and not solely as a photographer though his body of work keeps growing and he keeps improving. Perhaps it is because he was trained as an painter and, as far as I can tell, always maintained a fine art practice, that his focus is on light rather than the black box we push it through.

Maybe.

Or it could simply be the technological musings of the technologically adept.

Maybe.

Generalizations. But we are talking about a group of people.

Best,

Shane