The post from the other day was fun. I had no idea we’d end up were we did. Just write, and I did, and I ended up with new insight into a project I’ve been struggling with for the last couple of months.
Today’s insight comes to a project that’s over ten years old that I’ve never been happy with, and even at the end of this post, I’m still not going to be happy with it. Such is—as I’m told—the creative curse. Firstly—nuts to you. Anyone telling me anything is just the way it is because that’s how it is, is, in my opinion, partially wrong. Statistically the best they will ever be is almost right most of the time. Secondly—I’m not sure the creative curse applies when you’re trying to copy something someone else has done. By then it’s a commentary on the actually somewhat hilarious juxtaposition of the pride in your own work against knowing you could have done a better job ripping off someone else’s.
About a million years ago I was in a photography course during my first year of college. As part of an assignment we were to select a photographer from a website and then select a photo of theirs to attempt to copy in as many ways as we could—composition, theme, subject, whatever. It had to be as close to the original as we could get it.
I was a bit of an ass back then, so I picked what looked like the easiest one from one of the first photographers listed: an untitled piece by Robert Adams. It’s a door. A door in Denver. And you can look at it on—I’m not joking—the exact same webpage I found it on a million years ago. Nothing has changed, not even the page where you can order a CD-ROM version of the site for… wait for it—$50USD. I’m not sure what’s funnier: the price itself or that for the price you get a CD-ROM sent to you in the mail of the site you’re already looking at.
Okay—so maybe I’m still a bit of an ass. Irregardlessly, a door is a door. How hard could it be to find a door at the end of a hallway, snap a picture, get it developed (remember this was a million years ago when that sort of stuff happened), scan it, slam it into Photoshop, crop, convert to black and white, punch up the grit for that low light, high ISO seventies interior chic, and be done with time to spare? I didn’t think it would be hard at all, so I put my time to spare at the beginning of the project and did other things ever-confident my low hanging door would be only a hallway away.
Turns out no such door existed in my halls. Ever-confidence was replaced with real-panic and I did a slap-dash copy cat job with no processing of what looked just like a door at the end a hallway yet somehow, impossibly, looked nothing like the original. Like a good racecar driver I’m going to start with blaming the equipment. At the time I would have been using a Canon AE-1 with a fixed 50mm lens which meant by the time I was far enough away from the door to get the floor and ceiling in the shot the door was way at the end of the hallway. Then I’ll blame the conditions, saying there wasn’t time for proper processing of the image. Then I’ll blame the track, saying I’d have been better off picking an Ansel Adams.
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I did get an 80% on the assignment. Not bad—but I know I could have got a 95% or more if I’d put real effort into it. I don’t like knowing I could have done better. I’d much rather know I did my best and have that be the end of it.
So now I’ve got this original door looking back at me. And the more I look back at it the more impossible it becomes. I must find this impossible door. But where does one find something so desolate? So devoid and yet so contrived at the same time. It looks perfect, but there’s not a single piece of symmetry in the entire composition. Everything’s just a little bit off. It’s gorgeous in its visual dissonance. Beautiful in its offensive ordinarity. I hate it. And I must find it!
It’s now last year, a million years later, late spring, and I am walking down a hallway toward the door to the office I’m pretending to work at. I don’t like pretending to work there because at the time I think I actually am working there. As I walk I’m wondering why the company feels so desolate, so devoid yet so contrived. It looks perfect, but everything’s just a little bit off. I hate it…
Then I see the door.
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I like to think I nailed the door. But this is the part I told you about at the beginning of the post where I say I’m still not happy with this project. I’m not. It still doesn’t look right. It’s just a door. How hard is it to find a door?
So I look again at the untitled door in Denver. And I see the door is only half of the picture. The rest of it is the hallway. The hallway is what makes this picture feel the way it does. It’s the hallway creating all the discomfort, all the dissonance. The door is perfect. It’s the only thing in the picture that is.
And then, for the first time in all the times I’ve looked at this door, I see a sliver of light coming from behind it. It’s actually open a little tiny bit. It’s been open all a long. All these years I’ve been looking for a closed door at the end of a hallway when it turns out I’ve been inside the room the entire time, a room I can leave and lock behind me. The hallway is beyond.
The door I’m looking for leads out—not in. And… it’s already open.