A month or so ago I participated in a talk via Zoom with the great photographer Emmet Gowan. During his talk he told a story about how he saw an Ansel Adams print when he was sixteen years old. At that moment he realized it was essential that a picture contain a “transcendent element” instead of just being recording a collection of things.  To Gowan a photograph could be transcendent – so much more than a sum of the parts contained within it.  Once he became serious about photography, even with this important realization, it still took him “about four years to make his first picture”.

I have thought about all of this for a while. What Gowan said is so true.  It’s easy to take a picture … just go online and see all the wasted pixels floating around out there. It’s hard to make a transcendent picture.  It takes hard work, practice and a lot of heart. Once you’re mind’s eye finds something worthwhile it requires intense focus to isolate what hopefully will be a transcendent element and capture it in a meaningful way.

As a teenager in love with photography, it took me several years once I got serious to make a photograph of what I saw in a way I truly saw and felt it. Eventually, I got more and more keepers, but there were always the also-rans, the ones that just got away, or the ones that were so, so close but not good enough. The good thing was that I could now recognize and accept this.  Even for the truly greats it’s a pitifully low batting average for keepers. Adams said “twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop,” and he made thousands of images most of us would die for, yet very few made the cut.  We all want more than a dozen significant photographs a year but lets be honest with ourselves; do our pictures that don’t make the cut express what we saw and felt in our mind’s eye when we made them? Do they contain a transcendent element, or merely a collection of disparate parts?

Stay well, work hard and make transcendent photographs.

Michael