This book began with a provocation: the images you find most comfortable are probably the ones teaching you the least. It returns to that same claim now, but with a different relationship to the discomfort. The provocation was intended, at the outset, to disturb a complacency — the ease with which the practiced eye mistakes recognition for seeing, the settled response for genuine encounter. The chapters since have been an attempt to describe what lies on the other side of that disturbance. It is less perpetual difficulty or unease cultivated for its own sake than a different and more demanding relationship with visual experience. In this relationship, the image that troubles is valued not despite its difficulty but because of what the difficulty is doing.
What it is doing, at its best, is keeping the encounter open. The image that troubles doesn’t deliver its meaning and release you; it holds you instead in a condition of sustained attention, of productive uncertainty, of the willingness to return. It asks for more than a single viewing. And what it gives in return for that sustained attention is not resolution but something better. It gives the sense of being in the presence of an intelligence that has seen something clearly and has found a form for it that does not simplify what it found.
That intelligence is the one that makes the images in this book what they are, and that this book has been trying to describe. It has an origin that isn’t especially mysterious: sustained practice, long looking, long making, long attention to the work of others and to the world that produces it. It is available, in principle, to anyone willing to do the work. But it develops slowly. The development requires tolerating a prolonged condition of not-yet. This is the condition of the photographer who can see, in the work of others, qualities they cannot yet produce in their own work. It is the condition of the photographer who knows, looking at their contact sheets, that something they were after has not yet been caught. It is the condition of the photographer who understands, returning to the same subjects season after season, that the image they are trying to make is still ahead of them.
Tarkovsky, in a passage from his diaries, writes about the way a finished film never quite matches the film that existed in the imagination before production began. The made thing is always a reduction of the envisioned thing, he argues. This isn’t because the execution fails. It’s because the envisioned thing exists in a state of pure possibility that the made thing, by becoming specific and concrete, necessarily forecloses. The gap between the vision and the made object isn’t a measure of the maker’s inadequacy so much as the simple condition of making: the price of the made thing being real rather than imagined.
What he draws from this is not resignation but something closer to fuel: the gap between the vision and the made thing is what keeps the practice alive. If you could make exactly the image you envisioned, the practice would be finished. The fact that you cannot is the condition that makes the next image necessary. The image you are after remains, in some quality or degree, ahead of what you can currently do. The practice continues not despite the gap but because of it.
The serious practitioner isn’t someone who has arrived, but someone who has learned to travel — and who has made peace with the fact that the destination keeps moving.
This is what learning to be troubled means, in the end. It doesn’t mean cultivating dissatisfaction with your own work. That only leads to paralysis. Nor does it mean chasing the restless consumption of more images, more theory, more technique. That only leads to distraction. It means maintaining a genuine relationship with difficulty: the willingness to stay in the presence of images that do not immediately yield, to look at your own work with the same rigor you bring to others’, to acknowledge the gap between the vision and the made thing without either despair or false consolation, and to find in that gap the energy for the next attempt.
The photographers and artists in this book — Koudelka, Friedlander, Strand, Leiter, Webb, Moore, Emerson, Gossage, Atget, Vermeer, Hopper, Bonnard, Derain, Rousseau, Van Gogh, Monet, and behind them all, Tarkovsky — did not arrive at their distinctive vision and stop. They continued. Koudelka is still working. Friedlander worked until he could not. The bodies of work this book has examined are records of ongoing practice, not monuments: evidence of sustained attention to the world, a willingness to be troubled by what the world offers and what the made image fails to hold, and a belief that the next image might be closer to what is being sought.
That belief is the condition that makes a serious practice possible. It is the belief that the next image might be closer, that the practice is pointing toward something even when it cannot reach it. This isn’t optimism about outcomes so much as faith in process: in the accumulation of looking and making and failing and returning. That accumulation, over time, changes the instrument itself and makes available to it things that were previously beyond its reach.
The eye develops. Slowly, imperceptibly, in ways that become visible only in retrospect, the eye develops. The image you were unable to see at thirty becomes available at forty. This isn’t because you have learned the right technique or studied the right photographer. It’s because forty years of sustained attention to the world has changed the way you inhabit it. The development is the practice. The practice is the development. There is no other path.
Put the book down. Go and look at something.
Not something dramatic or photogenic or obviously interesting. Something near you, in the light that is currently available, in the ordinary conditions of wherever you are. Look at it for longer than feels necessary. Notice what the eye does on the first pass, and what it does on the second. Notice when it wants to move on and what happens if you refuse to let it. Notice, in your own sustained attention, the beginning — faint, provisional, easily lost but real — of what this book has been trying to describe.
That is all it is. And it is inexhaustible.