I recently shared a quote by Chuck Close on Twitter and Facebook on inspiration. I cut the quote a bit short (thanks to Mattias Leppäniemi and Alex JD Smith for pointing it out). Here it is:
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.
Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
― Chuck Close
As mentioned in the beginning of this article, Magnum photographer Alec Soth recently refered to Martin Parr as the “Jay-Z” of documentary photography. Parr is now 60 years old, but he hasn’t slowed down one bit. He is constantly hustling on commercial shoots and his own personal projects while traveling the world and exhibiting at the same time.
If you want to become a great street photographer, it isn’t enough to have talent. Sure it helps to have a good idea, but what I have learned from talking to many people is that it comes down to the hard work you put into it.
As Robert Doisneau once said, “Chance is the one thing you can’t buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.”
If you also look at all the great photographers out there, they are incredibly obsessed with photography and nothing else. It is great to diversify your loves and passions in life- but if you already have half a million hobbies – I suggest cutting down and focusing more on the best hobby out there (street photography).