What an Unsuccessful Day Teaches

I have driven home from more two-thousand-mile trips with no photograph than with one. The Roan in 2003, the Sangres in 2009, two seasons in northwest Wyoming where the weather, with consistent good humor, refused. A great many empty drives.

I do not think of those trips as failures, and I have stopped letting younger photographers think of theirs that way. The trips are the practice. The trips are how you learn the land — the back roads, the access, the bad weather pattern, the unmarked turnouts that will, ten years later, produce a frame. None of that is learnable without the empty drives.

I have come, slowly, to believe that the photographs are not the work. The driving home empty is the work. The photographs are the occasional surplus that the practice happens to throw off, and a healthy practice produces them when it produces them and not before.