PERSONAL STORY
Don’t be afraid of mistakes, and improvise
FOR MORE POWERFUL RESULTS
Jordan is a photographer from New York. He makes portraits, especially portraits of dancers in natural light. I got to know him through his “10-minute photo challenge” on YouTube, and I was immediately impressed with his ability to improvise. After a career as an actor, he went into photography, which was a field he truly fell in love with and in which he is self-taught. He has now published several books of photography, including Dancers Among Us, a New York Times bestseller, and the 2018 book Born to Dance. He also exhibits his work around the world.
Why did you start a photo challenge on You-Tube?
It’s an incredible adventure! I wanted to show that in just ten minutes and with a talented dancer, you could easily obtain magical images. I started from practically zero in the summer of 2017, and in less than a year, I had more than a million subscribers. I believe that artists, in general, think too much and try too hard to predict the final result. My grandmother was a painter. She was so afraid of making mistakes that she sometimes spent months just thinking about what shade she should use. I decided to do the opposite, to trust in my instincts. This challenge is sort of an extreme way to believe in your intuition: you have to move, not try to predict. The time constraint allows you to see elements that you would never have noticed otherwise.
Has this challenge changed how you create?
Not really, I’ve always worked in a rush. I am always on the lookout for the fabulous picture that is just around the next corner. I know that the perfect conditions (light, surroundings, composition) will only come together for just a few seconds, so I dive right in. My photos are not staged. They are all taken spontaneously.
The challenge was intended to show my process, rather than to conceive of it. I have always plunged right in with my work, but I’m happy to see that some people are now following the challenge and have told me that it has changed how they work. What’s really great is that they realize that photography does not have to be hours and hours of preparation for one shot. It can be a lot of fun!
What is your best piece of advice for somebody getting started with their creative practice?
Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. The problem, I think, is that most people are conditioned by the fear of making a mistake. They come up with an idea, and then right away, they think about all the reasons why it’s bound to fail. And so then they go straight on to something else because they’ve decided that the first idea will never work. Lots of times, when I’m talking to other photographers or to dancers or to anyone else about a new concept that I have, I’ll be thinking out loud, and I see the doubt in their eyes. They don’t think the project is a good idea. Talking about it helps me to develop my ideas. And so, of course, to start out with, they are not all good. But you have to keep building on these first attempts and not just give up right away! Don’t ever throw out an idea too fast under the pretext that, at first glance, it doesn’t seem perfect to you!
Salvation Army, 2010.
When you think of an idea, that’s the first step in the process, not the end. A lot of people who call themselves creative stop their creative process before it has even started. My best advice is to stop getting in your own way and to allow your imagination and creativity to develop freely.
How can we reduce this fear of making mistakes that paralyzes our creative process by keeping us from trying new things?
It’s actually simple: you have to fail. Mess up. Over and over again. Every day, a failure. Do you know about “failure therapy”? You literally have to have the goal, every day, of confronting a failure. For instance, going to a restaurant and asking for a free meal. You know that they are going to say no. But keep going. Don’t stop at that first no. Even if the final answer is still no, you will have forced yourself to push through to the end, to try everything. If, for a month, you have a failure every day, believe me, at the end of the month, you will no longer be afraid of people saying no to you. You will have already heard it so often that it won’t have the same effect on you. Getting beyond this fear of making mistakes is really the most important thing, in my opinion, for developing your creative process.
Michaela DePrince, Waiting for a Ride, 2013.
YouTube : Jordan Matter
Site : www.jordanmatter.com