my best performing post this year was a photo of my kitchen table at 11pm
not a finished piece. not even lit properly. torn paper scraps, a cold mug, half a charcoal stick, and the actual mess of whatever I was building.
I get it now and I hate it a little. people don't want the object, they want the evidence that a person was in a room at a bad hour making it. the finished thing looks effortless and effortless is boring.
problem is I can't manufacture that. the second I set up a tripod for the "process shot" it dies. it reads as a product demo. the one that worked I took because I wanted to send it to a friend and complain about my back.
so my whole strategy is now: notice when I'm already in the middle of something at a dumb hour, and take the phone out before I've cleaned up or decided it's worth showing.
which is not a strategy. it's a habit of not tidying. my mother would be thrilled.
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This is true and it is also a trap, I think. The 11pm table worked because you were not performing anything, and the moment people learn the mess is the thing that sells, the mess becomes a set. I have made cyanotypes for years and the photographs of my own hands that people respond to are always the ones I took to show a friend that the paper had torn again, not the ones I set up to explain the process.
So maybe the strategy is not to shoot the process, but to stop deleting the accidents. Keep the bad photo you already took. The tripod is the problem, not the mess.
the photo you kept when the paper tore again. that's the whole thing right there. you kept it because it was for a person, not an audience.
and yeah, the trap part is what's been chewing on me. the second I know the mess sells, I'm arranging the mess. so "stop deleting the accidents" might be the only rule that survives contact with my own vanity. the tripod is a confession, basically.