Why Do I Take Pictures I Never Look At?

How Fernando Pessoa Is Helping Me Move Forward

Fernando Pessoa wrote something that’s been echoing in my head for 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.”

Those last two words—"It exists"—leave me brooding for long moments. They stuck, quietly but persistently. They've become something I return to, again and again…

Maybe you know this feeling. You're caught in some creative loop where the actual doing feels right—feels alive—but finishing anything feels impossible. I've been walking around with my camera for over a year now, talking to strangers, chasing light. In those moments, I feel like I'm exactly where I should be.

Then I get home. Upload them to Lightroom, but don't bother even scrolling through the shots. I may not even think about them for weeks, even months.

Why?

I'm not always sure what's happening in those moments, but I can say that some measure of fear begins to surface at that point. Not the dramatic kind, but a quiet apprehension that discourages me from glancing at what was captured. I admit there is this fear of failure, that the photos aren't worth looking at. That the results will expose me as someone who doesn't know what they're doing. That what I felt in the moment got lost somewhere between the lens and the screen.

I recently came across a phrase that seems to describe this kind of paralysis: Winogrand Syndrome. It’s named after Garry Winogrand, one of the most prolific street photographers of the 20th century. He shot obsessively—tens of thousands of rolls—but left thousands undeveloped or unedited when he died. Toward the end of his life, he avoided the finishing part entirely. Some say he couldn’t bear the weight of judging his work. That hit close to home. I realized I’d been doing something similar: shooting to feel alive, then leaving the work to sit in the dark—literally and emotionally.

A recent YouTube video even dives into this idea, asking: Do you have Winogrand Syndrome? The fact that this question exists at all tells me I’m not alone.

Pessoa's image of that neighbor's "miserable" plant keeps coming back to me. It's been working on me slowly, like water soaking into dry ground. That line reminded me that flawed work can still matter. Not because it's perfect, but because it exists. Because someone, somewhere, might look at it and resonate with it somehow. And if not shared, it can always be a welcome memory to revisit in the future, especially when it was long forgotten.

Sean Tucker said something like this 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. Today. Not a judgment on your worth. Just a marker.

I get that, intellectually. But knowing something and feeling it are different things.

But I know the truth underneath all that: I'd still take pictures even if no one ever saw them. Something in me responds to light, to the way people move through the world we share. And there's this voice—quiet, but persistent—that keeps saying: Keep going.

Here's what Pessoa's teaching me: Creating anything is an act of hope. We don't make things because we know they're good—we make them because something inside us says they need to exist.

The alternative—silence, nothing—feels worse.

So I'm writing this. And after I post it, I think I will be opening Lightroom more often. I have been.

The “miserable plant” exists. And somehow, that makes all the difference.

The photos won't be masterpieces. But they'll be mine. Honest and a little clumsy at times, but real. And maybe they'll mean something to someone else tending their own small, quiet flowerpot. Because even making one thing whispers: I exist. I tried. I'm still trying.