Messages and Messengers

Minimal, Pamlico Sound, Ocracoke Island, North Carolina
Minimal | Pamlico Sound, Ocracoke Island, North Carolina | Oct 2008

I spent this past Sunday afternoon editing photos and generally relaxing online at a coffee shop in Ocracoke. While selecting and developing images I ended up talking to a really energetic 17-year old budding photographer on vacation from Orange, Virginia.

He saw that I loved photography and was really eager to share his pictures with me. I loved seeing them, yet I hesitated when he started asking for my opinion.

What kind of feedback is he really looking for?

Who am I to judge his work?

I mean, who am I?

I’m just an amateur myself.

How can I balance “being critical” and “being negative”? How can I be constructive without being destructive?

Instead of giving him my answers, opinions and ideas, I asked him questions to understand his own: What do you like about this picture? What does it say to you? What do you see?

I tried to examine his ideas, understand his intentions and get a peek into the stories he was trying to tell.

Instead of critiquing his eye, it seemed far more meaningful to help him develop his voice.

Perhaps asking questions was a better way to provide feedback than by giving answers. Hopefully I helped him think about his work with a different eye and mind. Maybe, with time and experience, he’ll come to understand that in photography the voice is more important than the eye.

We all give and look for feedback in photography, in business, in life: sometimes we get it, sometimes we don’t listen, sometimes we confuse the message and the messenger.

Yet we almost always fail to identify and interpret the inherent, inescapable biases embedded in us all.

How can we detach the message from the messenger?

Don’t worry, Lesson 2 of the series is on the way…

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Anil 3 months ago 1 point
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I don't believe the messenger can ever be detached from the message. Perhaps the lesson learned, or the end result can, but not the delivery. This can be a good thing, especially when you are asked your opinion about someone else's photography.

It's more about the messenger than the message in that case.

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Taylor Davidson 3 months ago 1 point
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Perhaps the most important thing about the messenger IS the bias? Perhaps it's the viewpoint and knowledge, the sum of the experiences and wisdom that forms the bias, that contains the most valuable part of the message.

(btw I tend to struggle with authority, even when it's my own "authority"...)

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Anil 3 months ago 1 point
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Well said, the message is in the bias, not the other way around.

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