This week the bombing at the Boston Marathon has dominated the news. In particular what drew my attention was the quote from a well known comedian, who stepped out into a more serious note and announced to the terrorists something to the effect of, “We are good, and we outnumber you”. At face value, it’s somewhat inspiring. But then I started to think about it a little deeper. We are good according to whom, and by what standard? Don’t get my intent wrong. When someone sets off bombs in the middle of a crowd of people, we can consider ourselves better than the people who did that, but only when such an obvious comparison is put before us.
The problem is that there are very few people in the world who will proudly proclaim, “I am evil.” People are notoriously adept at justifying whatever it is that they are doing, and declaring whatever someone else is doing evil. The going “wisdom” of the day now is to “be true to yourself and look inside and you’ll find the answer.” How many times has a person who’s life is falling apart called into a radio shrink and been given this advise? It’s some of the worst advise I can think of. It was from looking inside yourself and lying to yourself, telling yourself that you’re a great person and the problem is everybody else’s that got you in trouble in the first place. In short, we are amazingly good at lying to ourselves and pandering to our own egos.
So what does this have to do with American Idol? Furthermore, what does this have to do with photography? Many people take pleasure in watching the early rounds of American Idol, when novice singers make utter fools of themselves and are dumbfounded by the notion that they can’t actually sing.
These people are dumbfounded because they’ve lied to themselves their whole lives, and even worse, their friends have lied to them. Instead of being a true friend who would tell them that maybe they need some voice lessons, or an even truer friend that would tell them maybe the cello is for them, but certainly not voice, they just went along with the self-lie and told them, “Yeah, you’re great!!” A self-lie is so much easier to pull off if it’s supported by your so-called friends. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that excellence is so hard to come by. We have a culture that holds self-esteem above true excellence, even if the former is unwarranted. I hate to break the news, but this is not the way the world works.
It’s the same in photography. When I first decided to start doing photography for a living, I started working on stock photography, which is sending pictures into image libraries so advertisers and whoever needs a particular image can purchase the rights to use that image. When you send those images into the agencies, they review them for quality; focus, color balance, subject matter, composition, anything that if lacking would cause the image to not be worthy of sales. Well, to say that my ego took a beating in the early days would be an understatement, but not until after a bit of denial. You see, people had always told me my photography was great, not because they just didn’t want to hurt my feelings, but because their standard wasn’t the same as someone who reviews pictures for a living. Those early days of stock photography were some of the best training I could have ever had, and it allowed me to grow tremendously, even if I had to come to the realization that my work wasn’t nearly as good as I had told myself (yes, lied to myself) to believe.
I’m a better photography now because I didn’t just say, “My work is fantastic and those people have no idea what they’re talking about.” I took the advise of people who knew more than I did and in so doing I was able to grow.
So now we come full circle. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” This is the standard by which we can determine whether or not we are evil, not from looking to someone (ourselves) who is going to lie to us. Determining whether we have evil in our lives is a lifelong and constant process, because our natural inclination is to satisfy and build up our own ego, and this is the constant force we fight against.
Related articles
- Comedian Patton Oswald Offers THE BEST Commentary On The Boston Marathon Bombing (pinkisthenewblog.com)
- Father of Bombers Says ‘All Hell Will Break Loose’ if Remaining Son Killed (torah1964.wordpress.com)
- roncowiephoto.wordpress.com