Back at the end of May, I did a post on rethinking learning in which I talked about the need to slow down and reflect on the direction of my learning journey. I shared a quote from Alan Briot that started me thinking about why I wasn’t creating better photographs. This path I’ve stumbled down is now taking me to places where the why has become far more interesting than the how.
I’ve just started to read “The Perfect Wrong Note: Learning to Trust Your Musical Self” but there is one idea too good not to share with you now. Once upon a time I took piano lessons. I really enjoyed them until I had to change music teachers because I went off to boarding school. The new teacher was a firm believer in scaring her students into playing each piece to perfection. You wouldn’t dare make a mistake because she was very unpredictable with her response. The day that she slammed the piano lid down and one of her students ran out of the room was the day I begged my parents to let me stop taking lessons. It was probably one of the formative events in my life where I learnt to fear making mistakes.
In The Perfect Wrong Note, William Westney writes “…the golden pathway to learning, not just music but in anything in life, is through one’s own individual, honest mistakes. We all learn uniquely, so there is a unique pattern to the mistakes that each of us needs to make. These mistakes form the quickest way, the healthiest way, to learning that is authentic and solid. Best of all, the process of working through honest mistakes has vital, positive energy because it grows out of healthy self-acceptance.” When I read this, a light bulb went on in my head. Not because this is the first time I’ve read that making mistakes is fine but the reasons why. Westney goes on to explain how our body reacts when we feel we’ve done something that we should not have done. The physical reaction resulting from that belief is an obstacle to learning. When you allow yourself to react as if mistakes are the most natural thing, your learning is like when you first learnt how to walk and your mistakes find their own path to ”correctness”.
That we need to make mistakes means unlearning something ingrained in me. Westney suggests “producing as many honest mistakes as possible–intentionally…(to) trust the process and don’t try to control it (and) enjoy all the sensations”. With this in mind, I want to share a new mini-project that I hope to start next week. I have given myself permission to make mistakes. Big, fat, juicy mistakes. In fact this project is geared to nothing but making mistakes. If I don’t make any, I will consider it a failure. And even then it will succeed. I am going to photograph with film using one of my father’s old Rollei’s. And I am going to photograph people. Mistakes will result. Guaranteed because I’ve just begun using film and exploring photographing people. There are more details to this project which I am going to keep under wraps for now but I can honestly say that I’ve never been more excited at the prospect of making mistakes!
Great message – you go girl!
Mark
Thanks Mark. I’m going to think about you saying this when I photograph my first person on Sunday
That is a fantastic explanation of the reasons that mistakes are valuable. Like you, I have long heard of the value of making mistakes but the explanations always seemed half-formed and hollow to me. No longer.
Thank you for this. I have already added this book to my reading queue.
Let me know what you think of the book once you get around to reading it, Tommy. Thanks for stopping by; it’s nice to see you again.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mark Olwick and Ray Ketcham, Jacob F. Lucas. Jacob F. Lucas said: RT @SabrinaHenry: Friday post is up on the blog "Big, Fat, Juicy Mistakes" http://tinyurl.com/2vcmeyg // great post, Sabrina! [...]
Good post and good timing too. Coincidentally I am going to shoot some film this evening and feeling quite uneducated about it – you have just reinforced my resolve to get through the mistakes in order to learn. I love the reasons for making mistakes – it is a great explanation – thank you Sabrina!
Although I will be scanning my negatives of the drag queens, the film thing is intriguing and (I hope) will produce some interesting portraits
I’ve been thinking a lot about scanning negs lately. Love to chat with you more in detail.
Maureen, meet Chris.
Chris, meet my good friend, Maureen.
Hope you had lots of fun shooting film. Let me know how it went!
Thanks Sabrina. I actually do know Chris – we did a workshop together a while back. Hi Chris – maybe we can have coffee sometime and talk about Sabrina and film too. And if we are REALLY lucky Sabrina will be here one of these days.
Unfortunately the film thing did not work out tonight. Very dark room (bar), black walls, a single light (two were in the plan) and 160 ISO film – so next time, faster film and more light to focus. Luckily I had my digital so it was a fun/productive shoot. Now I have to use up the 160 film in both backs
Boy this is a small world. I didn’t realize you knew each other–probably before we knew each other?
Maureen, thanks but I’m sure we’ve never met. I looked on your web site for your email address so we could chat about scanning but I couldn’t find it; I was hoping Sabrina could assist. I’ve been confused with Chris Klug the snowboarder, and (weirdly) Chris Orwig the photographer, so there must be something in the air (grin).
What a fun project! And what a great attitude to have going into it. I learn from everything you post, so I can’t wait to see what comes of this.
I promise you are going to see every gory detail, Dorothy! Maybe you’ll try something like this too?
This is a great explanation.
Good luck with your project. What a great idea. And what a nice personal touch to use one of your father’s cameras.
Thanks Beate. I’ll need all the luck I can get…working my way through the mistakes is going to be tough but I am going to embrace it.
You know, I had to laugh a little when I read this because if these images are your mistakes, your keepers have to be amazing. Great post.
Chris, you are good for my ego. You can stop by anytime
I pretty much post keepers on my blog but I will post my mistakes from this new project. I don’t have any amazing images…yet
You make me laugh, girl. Your enthusiasm is wonderful and I hope you enjoy this mini-project and the lessons learnt. I also snicker a bit as Chris mentions because you have some really nice keepers.
Glad I can make you laugh, Monte. I’m really not that funny in person. Maybe you will get a few more laughs when I post the big, fat, juicy mistakes!
what can I say
Ray! You can take a little credit because we both know that you’ve been a huge help in opening me up to these kinds of ideas.
If ya want to make mistakes… shoot with me sometime. Mistakes is all I do!
Besides, I will never forget what an old Australian plumber told us Apprentices, “Thars only one way to learn, mate… Thawts the HAWWwwwd WAY!”
Sabrina, an interesting post.
In a past life I worked almost 18 years in I.T. for a Japanese manufacturing company. Their quality process was based up continuous improvement, which boiled down to collecting, prioritizing, analyzing, and developing countermeasures (learning from) for mistakes. While they tried to eliminate mistakes they didn’t consider them as “bad,” unless they were repeated mistakes — a sign of failed learning. Their attitude was that a mistake was an opportunity to learn.
That may be the one thing which stuck with me from those 18 years.
Excellent way to deal with “errors”. In my line of work(day job), safety is a huge part of the job. The safety officers use the same sort of approach to “mistakes”.
I used to tell my crews “be creative today find a new way to screw things up”. The only failure is a repeated mistake.
Earl my brother-in-law is a consultant in the Japanese method of Lean thinking and I always got the impression that mistakes were a bad thing. He often goes around plant floors to do what’s called the “walk of shame” where he picks out things that should be improved. I’ll have to ask him about the idea that mistakes are more an opportunity to learn and see what the difference is.
Sabrina, my experience was in the Japanese automotive industry. “Repeat” mistakes/problems were bad as that was a sign either the original mistake/problem had not been understood or the countermeasure was not effective or not properly applied. Of course the final goal was no mistakes…so I guess in that regard a mistake was something bad. However, there was no “walk of shame” in my experience.
The process of continuous improvement was a natural part of the workflow and something to be proud of. They even had teams and friendly contest to share results. It was, umm…continuous.
I relate to this in so many ways, especially the scary teacher bit! Mandarin was my second language when I was in school and I used to have a drill sergeant tutor who would cane us if we got our practice exercises wrong. There were definite fight/flight physiological reactions going on there!
I’m embarking on a new leg of this image making journey right now and your post couldn’t have come at a better time. A reminder that all of the spectacular mistakes I’m about to make are the baby steps towards something bigger.
Isn’t it terrible what they do to children in the name of learning Charlene? I wish you nothing but good things for the next leg of your journey and if at anytime you feel yourself cringing at the turn of events just shake yourself free and allow yourself to just be.
Did anyone ever watch the painter, Bob Moss, on PBS? He would always say, “there are no mistakes, just happy accidents”.
I haven’t heard of Bob the painter, Chris but you might have just given me the title for one of the posts for the new mini-project!
Chris: it’s funny that you mention Bob Ross. He was in the Air Force for ten years and his calm, pleasant demeanor on his show was a response to the attitude he had to convey in the military[1].
So though he didn’t suffer the drill sergeant teachers (or maybe he did), he was still responding to that approach and advocating the value–or at least the innocuousness–of mistakes in art.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Ross#Personal_life
What a great discussion (you have a way of fostering that here…).
I’m no different, afraid to make mistakes. Of learning to slowly. Etc, etc. And I think that until I really find my style and my own path to learning, this will continue to be the case. In the meantime… more shooting. It’s the only path from here to there.
Love your accompanying image, Sabrina.