Quantity vs Quality

What was the WIP? The work in progress of my week in photos

Dec 16, 2024

At the beginning of 2024, I created a new section on my Substack called The WIP. The idea was to liberate my photojournal from Instagram to a platform where I could sequence landscape and portrait images, add captions, and include hyperlinks—none of which are possible on Instagram.

Every Saturday, whether I liked it or not, I’d post the ten 'best' photos I took that week. It was an odd combination of a public journal and an experiment in photography: the week in photos was also a work in progress.

To get better at anything you have to do a lot of practice. There is a story endlessly retold in self-help books about a ceramics class that was divided into two groups: one was told to make one perfect pot, and the other was told just to make as many pots as possible. The quantity group, so the tale goes, made much better pots than the quality group.

James Clear did some digging and learned that the authors had changed the original story from photography to pottery—a very different assignment! As Austin Kleon says: "you can still hang a blurry photo in a gallery, but you can’t drink out of a cracked mug."

What’s more, the photography professor who set the task was none other than Jerry Uelsmann. If you know Uelsmann's meticulous images, you'll know that his approach (involving hours in the darkroom) doesn't really scale. He takes the surreal vision in his mind and tries to recreate it. You can't achieve this through sheer quantity. No wonder he was shocked that the quantity side produced better results.

I looked at Art & Fear (the original source of the story) to see if Uelsmann was credited. While the authors don't acknowledge him in the ceramics anecdote, they do mention that he:

Once gave a slide lecture in which he showed every single image he had created in the span of one year: some hundred-odd pieces—all but about ten of which he judged insufficient and destroyed without ever exhibiting.

This is the crucial detail that we seem to be missing in our era of digital abundance: the delete key.

The world is a noisy place. There are so many opinions, podcasts, photos, videos, news, and adverts—it's a daily deluge of content … so much of it feels unnecessary. As the internet grew, Silicon Valley sought to find a way of scaling to accommodate billions of people. The solutions were niche communities and algorithmic sorting. Sadly, the result of this has been an increase in political polarization as the communities became tribal.

The beauty of newsletters is that there is no algorithm. It arrives at the top of your inbox on the day it was sent, joining all the receipts, work emails, love letters, and whatever else is in your inbox.

The tragedy of newsletters is that there is no algorithm. This means that it doesn't scale. If you have 700 friends on Facebook, you can guarantee that it will show you when one of them gets married, has a baby, or starts chemotherapy. The algorithm is primed to feature what stops people in their tracks. How do you do that with 700 newsletters?

Since I last posted a newsletter, another 100-odd people have subscribed to The Crop. Welcome! Many appear to have arrived because of a recommendation from Eduardo Ortiz, someone I didn't know before but whose beautiful, humanist (street) photography is well worth checking out.

It's humbling when anyone chooses to spend their finite life on earth reading this. Indeed, one of the reasons I've been publishing less recently is that I don't want to waste your time.

When I started the WIP I was conscious that no one needed more than one email a week from me. Indeed, even one felt like a lot, so I published it without ever sending it out to inboxes. We’ve now reached fifty weeks of the WIP and it feels like an erratic photojournal that lacks a clear audience.

Nevertheless, it's been an enjoyable experiment. Most of all, I've learned that the hard work comes not from creating but from editing your creations down to the essentials. This is what I intend to focus on in 2025. Until then, enjoy this selection from the past year.