Take the Work Seriously. Yourself, Not So Much.

What’s a personal mantra or philosophy you live by?

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I suppose this is the closest thing I have to a mantra:

Take the work seriously. Yourself, not so much.

I’m not particularly fond of mantras, to be honest. Most of them sound better printed on mugs than applied to an actual Tuesday morning.

But this one has survived.

Taking the work seriously is the easy half. Or at least the respectable half. You try to do things properly. You pay attention. You don’t pretend something is good because you spent three hours on it. You turn up. You look again. Occasionally you admit that the thing you were terribly pleased with yesterday is, in fact, rubbish.

Useful skill, that.

The harder part is not taking yourself too seriously while doing all this.

Humans are very good at becoming important in their own heads. Give us a job title, a little authority, a Leica, a website, perhaps an Instagram account, and suddenly there is an alarming amount at stake. Civilization appears to depend on whether we crop three millimetres from the left.

Photography is quite good at curing this.

You can leave home feeling extremely photographic. Everything is charged, apparently. The light has possibilities. You have the right lens. You are alert. Serious business.

Two hours later you have photographed a bin, the backs of six people and a dog that turned its head at precisely the wrong moment.

The street does not care.

I find this reassuring.

And then, occasionally, it gives you something like the photograph above.

There is this enormous inflatable woman sitting in the middle of an ordinary street, eyes closed, hands raised, looking either spiritually fulfilled or thoroughly fed up with everyone.

I prefer the second interpretation.

Behind her: cables, damp walls, a drainpipe, someone’s front door, a street lamp that has seen better decades. Nothing has been arranged. Nobody seems especially impressed. A giant quasi-divine figure has appeared among the houses and the neighbourhood has apparently decided to get on with lunch.

This seems to me a fairly accurate model of existence.

We spend a lot of time trying to look dignified while standing beneath very silly things.

We make plans. Somebody hangs an electric cable through them.

We construct elaborate explanations for ourselves and then a giant inflatable goddess turns up and quietly ruins the tone.

Good.

I’ve become suspicious of philosophies that require constant improvement. Be your best self. Which one? I have had several selves over the years and some of them should probably remain archived.

Same with photography. I don’t really want every photograph to prove that I am improving. That sounds exhausting. Sometimes I want to notice something stupid before it disappears. Sometimes I want to make a good picture. Sometimes I fail and keep walking.

There are worse systems.

The serious part still matters. Work matters. People matter. Keeping your word matters. Looking properly matters. Trying not to bullshit yourself matters quite a lot.

But solemnity? I can live without most of it.

Especially my own.

So yes, if I have a philosophy, that’s probably it: do the work properly, keep your eyes open, distrust grand explanations and, whenever possible, leave a little room for the possibility that you are being ridiculous.

The woman in the photograph seems to know this already.

Or maybe she just wants everyone to go away.

Both are reasonable.