Fetishizing the Act vs Chasing the Artifact

I'm wrestling with my current obsession around photography, or should I say its most recent manifestation. I've created by drawing, writing, photographing, playing music, writing speeches, and many other ways my entire life. I'm built to produce. (Can't explain why.)

My journaling work today uncovered a great revelation. I wrote about the fact that I've been a bit focused on the gear of photography the last handful of weeks and less interested in the pursuit of great output. I wrote down the sentence that's now the title of this letter to you: "You're fetishizing the act instead of chasing the artifact."

The "Artifact" is the Output

When you work, the thing you produce is the artifact. If you write reports, the report is the artifact. Taking photos (in the case of the thought I wrote about), the photo itself is the artifact.

In any pursuit, it's important to stay attentive to the artifact, but time and again, I see us all worried to death about the methods/systems/tools that will produce the result.

"What Camera Did You Use?"

If you take a good photo, that's the first question you'll hear. It's what I was thinking when I got back into this a few months ago. I went straight from "I want to get back into photography" into "I must have a great camera."

Don't get me wrong: just like with photography, you do need some equipment, and sometimes, what you have makes the pursuit easier.

If you're compiling code or editing video on a 5 year old computer, it's probably going to groan and complain a bit. If you try to run in very old shoes, it's going to hurt. Cooking on really crappy pans is a misery. You get the idea.

Good. Serviceable. Useful.

Work processes don't have to be "ultimate." They have to be a good chef's knife. You don't need to chase every trend. You need to get work done, and sometimes that means just producing something that's serviceable in the instant. No one cares if you've got the latest camera. They want to look at the picture. That's the part that's useful.

So, there are three reasons I wanted to use a standalone camera instead of my phone, although my phone (like yours) has a quite powerful and useful camera right inside it.

1. I wanted to get outside, and I use the camera as an excuse to take a walk.
2. I wanted a camera instead of my phone so I could put the phone in my pocket a while and ignore it.
3. It's nice to have a camera that can actually catch the shots I most want to take (people, in my case).

If not for that second detail, my phone would've been fine, and for the third detail, a slightly better (faster) camera was necessary.

Beyond that though, it becomes a fetish. Let me explain.

The Cult of Work

At work, some people fall in love with process. Don't get me wrong: with zero process, nothing works well. Imagine showing up to the kitchen of a restaurant and the chef says, "What do we want to cook today?" It would be horrific.

In fact, I'll tell you that my recurring failures in business when they happen is when I stray too far afield from process. Without some structure, things are far more difficult, unnecessarily so.

But when one turns something into a fetish (in this case I mean "an abstraction of the actual thing that we put more energy into than the real ultimate thing itself"), that's where it goes afoul. The pursuit of process instead of the pursuit of output. That's the problem.

Eye on the Prize

The output is the goal.

I realized with my photography that I was falling into a very common trap for me where I was getting more interested in the gear and the tech and the mechanisms.

My "solution" for this, my cure, specific to photography, is this guy Daidō Moriyama and his method. Essentially, don't get full of yourself. Just take the shot.

He shot with crappy film cameras, and then a not-all-that-special digital camera when those came about. His style was called "Are Bure Boke" and that translates to "grainy, blurry, out of focus." Talk about the antithesis of "I need the best gear so I can shoot the perfect pic."

Moriyama's most famous photo is this dog.

Can't get much simpler than that.

Work on Chasing the Artifact

No one cares what camera Daidō used (and when they find out, they shrug and scoff). No one cares what process you used, as long as what you're doing makes things work well enough without a whole lot of fuss put on fetishizing the process itself.

Did this come into focus for you?

Chris...