It's autumn. I know from the steam rising out of the summer-warm pond in the field across the road. As a photographer, I should run over and take a photo, but the espresso machine boiler relay is about to click off, letting me know it’s up to temp… that drug is a little more enticing at 6:50 am.

I decide to sit here while the house is quiet and over-think what I'm doing on this internet. Why people listen to me on youtube. Why 1000+ of you have now subscribed to my newsletter (woah!) I'm not a writer. What is happening?

The more people show up, the more I freeze and think

"I'm not good enough."

"There are better photographers/directors/filmmakers."

This feeling is even more acute as I work on a new Zine. There is a brief moment where the image I happen to be looking at isn't good enough. "I'm not good enough." Self-pity starts to simmer.

But then my brain pulls back. Let's go film-terminology here: It dollies back and booms-up (we don't have budget for a crane)... My brain pulls back to imagine The Thing. In this case, the zine as a whole. And the image suddenly works. It's serving a purpose. The images, mediocre on their own, will sum something. An idea. A thing that transcends one-off aesthetic demands.

Each image is a thread in a fabric. Or... a brick in a wall... Look at a thread/brick and it's nothing. Weave a bunch together and now you've got something. Perhaps a new pair of... metaphorical... mittens. Or that brick outhouse you've always wanted.

My friends who have published photo books or any personal work will go "yeah, duh!" But for me it's, like molasses on a fall morning, taking decades to realize how special of a time we live in where we can literally just make The Thing ourselves.

I've caught myself expecting a single, aesthetically-cute image, born from a rare fit of creativity, to tell my whole story. Social media demands the one-off, but doesn't explain why it feels empty or why it's not helping you grow. It demands us to think in an endlessly-updating now of one-offs.

I'd even argue a stream of one-offs is more work. If you're focused on epic location bangers, you have to travel to more exotic and more epic locations. Trying to out-Ansel the Adams at every turn. I think of a big landmark down the road from me: Niagara Falls. There's probably a small handful of good angles to capture the landmark (watermark?)... but turn around and photograph the weird faces that show up to see it? Now that's something. (Probably been done a dozen times tho.)

One-offs are like trying to hint ourselves to greatness – Younger me would imagine a stranger seeing the whole context of my being through a one-off work that lets me off the hook of actually saying something – Hoping your crush magically knows you like them.

That's a hell of a lot of pressure to put on our infantile creations while expecting a lot. It's also focusing on the aesthetic while expecting to outsource work we should actually be doing. Figuring out and articulating what we have to say.

Thinking of my weird YouTube journey, people don't really care about the quality. I mean, have the music too loud and you'll hear about it, but once you get those wrinkles ironed out, people really just want to hear what you have to say.

You know when you were younger and you looked at a great piece of art and thought "I could do that?" Of course we can reverse engineer someone else's single creation. We can partition it off as a one-off and ignore its context and temporarily feel pretty smug.

Add back in the context, the long-haul, lifetime of work by the artist, the trust in the motivations and meaning, and now you've got greatness.

Sure, a lot of art is not as special as we’re told, created by privileged kids who don't have to worry about how they're going to put their kids through school, but we can't fix that, that's not a good enough reason to give up.

And neither is one bad piece.

No one piece is good enough. Your thing sucks. My picture sucks. But thread by thread you'll start to build. With even a small contribution to the bigger picture, each piece is now more than good enough.

Thanks for being here.

You can always reply to this email and let me know what you’re working on.

Support through Patreon or by picking up my zine. Visit me on the YouTube channel, Instagram, and Threads.