Chasing The Perfect Picture — Perfectionism In Photography
“So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.”
These words from Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay collection On Photography have passed the criteria to make it on my list of the things forcing me to question the art I do and, ultimately, its essence.
From a young age I understood the world through the irrational rather than the rational. Now, I am speaking about art in the general sense, the part of human culture where the faculties of creativity and interpretation enjoin and transcend normal superficial mundanity. I used art as my candlelight to guide me through darkness.
Art has always been a precarious balance between the irrational and the rational — the calculative nature of mind merging with the fiery and unpredictable temperament of heart.
At the age of 16 I picked up my father’s Nikon D90. I had already watched enough films by various directors at this point to have a gist of composition and mood.
The most accessible location to ‘beautiful objects’ for shooting was my back garden. The flowers sprouting out of the soil were the go-to subjects for my first photographs. They offered all kinds of colours: sorbet orange, brash purple, and melancholy green.
What was my motivation that drove me towards flowers in the first place? Why was I attracted to take flower photos first? I see this done a lot where beginner photographers are drawn to flowers like they are the bees themselves. Was it because they are universally thought of as ‘beautiful’ so a photo of such an object would be easy for a fledgling snapper like myself and others?
When things are conventionally beautiful, the job of an artist to make it beautiful is almost made easier.
We tend to capture things that are thought as ‘beautiful’, something that is seen as aesthetically pleasing to one’s eye upon gazing.No sooner than pulling my eye from the viewfinder when I realised that they didn't have much to catch my attention. Everyday looking into the garden as a child, in the passing minutes of trivial life, the flowers looked unspectacular. But I still went outside to photograph them anyway. In the real world they didn’t seem that much to me.
It wasn’t until my reading of Sontag in my torturous times of messy adulthood, that I realised what she said resonated with me. It spoke of the essence of my own photography :
My pictures have been my very own standard of beautifying the world.
Daydreaming and fantasising — something I still do profusely to this day — about alternate life events controlled me more than I did it. Childhood as a yellow dot on a white canvas meant there was a barrier with connecting with people outside co-ethnic and cultural plains.
To stave away social marginalisation, I became adept at fantasising through movie-like reels of images in my head. I imagined a world where I hadn’t experienced racism, where I wasn’t different to the people around me. I imagined a time where I would escape to a place where I was valued for how I think rather than what I look like.
I conjured up these elaborate visual stories that would coat me in comfort like a euphoric drug hit.
Having watched movies that made me feel this way benefited this daydreaming/fantasising because I began to replicate the moods I appreciated through my photography. Photos, to me, became a way to have a modicum of control in my life. It became the essence of finding meaning, and, possibly, meaning in the supposed ‘beauty’ of it all.
But ‘beauty’ in art is terribly subjective and trying to pin down a concrete definition that is mildly accepted by artists could be a lifelong meandaring debate. To save time I will offer a very personal definition: ‘beauty’ is not what is mathematically proportionate in the photograph, it is not the brightness of colours, or, for a painting, how alike something is to the subject in question.
‘Beauty’ is the effective portrayal of Human’s vulnerability in relation to the finite nature of Life. It says to me that life is short (a Korean friend, after a brief moment of silent contemplation, said to me that “living a beautiful life is Art in itself”- something I will never forget).
The most beautiful pictures are the ones that speak to me in this way. I would look at the photos; they hold pause on the things I am doing, bringing the world to a stand still for a little while. Powerful photos never hit me with the rational first (“How did they do this?” or “what camera did they use?”) but with the irrational.
I recall a conversation with another good friend a few years ago. We were discussing the eternal self-judgement of one’s art, again, in the broadest sense. In this conversation it was about music performance. I just finished playing a piano recital and confided in him, like I’ve always confided personal turmoil countless times in him before, about my sordid dissatisfaction with my work.
He tells me in his comforting voice: “The reason you are never content is because you are an artist.”
I don’t think it is striving to become better that is the issue here; it is the strive to be ‘perfect’.
My perfectionism keeps me from being satisfied with anything I do in life. Perfectionism, as written in 2018 by Amanda Ruggeri, can have dangerous downsides on the clinical side of things (depression, anxiety, self-harm, insomnia, chronic fatigue, suicide etc.) She even goes on to say that “the rise of perfectionism…. means we’re getting sicker, sadder and even undermining our potential.”
Perfectionism, however, seems to be what drives me to continue on my journey, I have to say, regardless of the detriment it is reported to have on the mental condition. It is always the chase for my own perfect image. It could mean a lone photo or a series of complimentary images that satisfactorily capture the human condition — my personal condition, maybe. I want those pictures to elegantly show, underneath the fabric of the visible world and in the invisibleness of mood, that life is a constant harsh struggle.
In my head I always ask myself that within the next 5 years I will get the ‘perfect’ image which, contradictorily in thought, is wildy inappropriate for an artist to think this way. One should never create in this way. But, at the same time, knowing this doesn’t stop me from thinking it. If, then, I still haven’t got it within my hands, it will be the next five, and the next. It is this chase, this notion of adventure and enlightenment, that’s exciting.
With all the fantasising I do in my daydreaming career I still cannot give you a definite description of what my ‘perfect’ image will look like. This is a strange justification to give you but as a writer too, I can’t seem to describe it in words. If only there was an Emotion Machine and digitally transfer you it wirelessly to your nervous system, just so that you could feel exactly what I feel...
But fashion photographer Kenneth Lam comes from a different angle. His own artistic goal is not to chase the ‘perfect’ — an aspiration he deems to be a “stupid, forceful and impossible” endeavour — but to translate an event and moment in his life, or a feeling, into a photo.
He always sees his still life pictures of situations and things as a version of something he wishes they were. This romanticism permeates his art — the idea of turning life’s events and memories into something it is fundamentally not.
He doesn’t overthink his art, he tells me over our Zoom call. His face suddenly lightens up. “It’s funny because I overthink a lot of things in life.” Art, among all the Human activities, is a domain where heart and feeling takes precedence over logic. Often at times the people to which he shows his photos are able to describe the emotions better than he can, he says.
Chasing the ‘perfect’ image to him, as mentioned in Ruggeri’s article, would cause great misery. Every photo under the scrutinising eye of a perfectionist will be torn apart and its essence not fully appreciated.
Carl Battams, a music and portrait photographer, says during our call that if you think you’ve found the ‘perfect’ image you are not pushing yourself hard enough.
I think I agree with what these brilliant visual artists have said about personal photographic motives. Attempting at perfection is forceful and “our definition of perfect is always changing” as Lam says. Feeling like you have already in your portfolio a ‘perfect’ image is progressive, as Battams says. I happen to agree that it is a prognosis of a dull creative life.
From now I live with all these advices in mind. The journey towards capturing the ‘perfect’ but knowing that whatever I do is never good enough — I would never a wish a life of dissatisfaction on anyone else because it is painful and restless. But it is the life I want. I would never trade my life with anyone else (Mark Baum, in the movie The Big Short, was described by one of his employees at a FrontPoint Partners that “he is happy when he is unhappy” — an apt self-description).
All my life I seem to have lived within the images in my head, translating things into photographs to be the way I think they ought to be; I just don’t see things the way they really are.
Sontag is right. Am I trying too hard to see my ‘perfect’ world through digital postcards and not focusing on the ‘beauty’ in the real world?
