The Weight of an Unopened Frame

Letting go of perfectionism and learning to let my photographs simply exist.

Fernando Pessoa is a writer whose words have a way of echoing in my mind, lingering there for days, weeks, sometimes even months.

“We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse.”

But there are two words in that passage that I keep coming back to: it exists.

Maybe you know the feeling. You get caught in some strange creative loop where the actual doing feels right. It feels alive. But finishing something —or even sharing it— becomes a hook you somehow find yourself caught on, twisting and turning around it without ever quite getting free.

I’ve been walking around with my camera for more than a year now, talking to strangers, wandering through the city, chasing light, captivated by moments. And when I’m out there, camera in hand, I often feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Then I come home.

I upload the photographs to Lightroom and sometimes don’t even look through them. They can sit there for weeks. Sometimes months, if not more. Lord, there are still images on my drive from last year I have mostly forgotten!

Why?

I’m not always sure.

I do admit I’ve had a long-standing approach of letting photographs sit for a while before I look at them. There’s something valuable in that distance. The excitement of the moment fades, the emotions settle, and eventually the photograph has to stand on its own. Does it still say something when I’m no longer carrying the feeling that made me take it?

That’s the kind of waiting I want.

But I also have to be honest with myself. Sometimes the distance isn’t that deliberate. Sometimes I don’t look because I’m afraid to.

I begin to wonder if the photographs are any good.

Perhaps what I thought I saw wasn’t really there.

Worse, maybe I’ll look at them and discover that I’ve been fooling myself all along and should sell my gear and spend my free time playing online chess.

That’s the trap. It’s easy to convince myself I’m giving the frames room to breathe when I’m really just avoiding looking at them.

So I put it off.

And putting it off gets easier.

Because eventually the photograph has to be looked at. It has to stand on its own, separate from the person I was when I made it.

And yet, when I think about Pessoa’s little “miserable” plant, I keep coming back to the same thing.

It doesn’t have to be extraordinary.

It just has to exist.

I love that image.

The plant isn’t remarkable. It’s sitting there in a lonely flowerpot, and yet it brings happiness to the person who tends it. Sometimes it brings happiness to Pessoa too.

The plant doesn’t need to justify itself.

It exists.

Maybe that’s enough sometimes.

Flawed work can still matter. Not because it’s secretly brilliant or because someone is going to recognize our genius, but simply because it has been made. Someone might see it and recognize something of themselves in it. Perhaps nobody will. Or maybe years from now, I’ll be the one who needed to see it.

That may matter even more.

Sean Tucker said something along these lines on a podcast once. He talked about seeing your art not as some final destination, but as a record of where you are right now.

A marker, really—not a grading of skill or worth, but simply a small note saying: this is where I was.

Now this is I can understand intellectually, yet feeling it is another matter.

Still, underneath all of it, I know something about myself.

I’d take photographs even if nobody ever saw them.

I know that because I did it before I ever started sharing them.

I’m drawn to the light, the small unscripted gestures between strangers, and the quiet spaces in between that vanish if you don’t catch them in a 1/250th of a second. We move through the streets alongside each other every day, rarely ever actually seeing one another.

To the way we move through this world together, without ever really knowing one another.

I don’t think I can stop noticing these things. Fact is, I don’t want to. I can’t.

There is simply too much to see. To learn, about others, and myself.

This, I think, is what keeps me reaching for the camera.

Not because the camera gives me a reason to pay attention. Living does that. The camera just happens to be there when something stops me.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been missing.

I’ve been thinking so much about the photograph—whether it’s good, whether it’s worth keeping, whether anyone else will see it—that I’ve sometimes lost sight of what matters most.

I was there.

I saw something.

For a brief moment, I was awake to it.

The photograph is simply what remains of that moment.

Maybe that’s all it should be.