When you least expect it

Ever since my Slut post, I’ve been thinking a lot about the parallels between relationships and photography. I was e-mailing with Shawn Gust about portraiture, and he said, “I would say not to search out subjects so much, but keep your eyes open. They’ll come to you, trust me.” And in a comment on the post, Ben Huff said, “Deep down, we all want to progress from being sluts into a long-lasting relationship with our own beautiful style. It will come.”

Any girl who’s ever been single has heard, “The right guy will come along when you’re not even looking” or “It’ll happen for you—trust me.” The implication: You should just wait and it’ll happen, through nothing you do or don’t do.

For someone who’s neither patient nor passive, this kind of advice is bunk.

It’s not that I think Shawn and Ben are wrong; their photographs alone are proof of that. It’s just that I can’t do anything with their advice. I agree that keeping your eyes open, as Shawn advises, is critical, but most of the time I don’t know if a picture will be good until I take it. (I often know in the few seconds between the time I first look through the lens and the moment I release the shutter. But that’s long after I pull over the car.) And Ben expresses beautifully what we want as photographers, but trust isn’t innate for me, and having faith that “it will come” isn’t easy.

My answer in the years that I spent between relationships was simply to be happy on my own. But I’ll never be happy with photographs I don’t love; hence, my conundrum.

My solution: Be a photographic slut and work hard at figuring out which photos I like and why, which photos I don’t like and why, and what I can do to increase the ratio of like to dislike. In time, after making many, many pictures and really thinking about what works and what doesn’t, I think I’ll be better able to trust that it’ll come.