In a recent blog post titled “Breaking Out of Being Broke”, Randy Gage reminded me of an anecdote about one of my favorite authors.
In 1964, Ayn Rand published a book titled The Virtue of Selfishness. When asked why she chose a word that would offend so many people, her reply was “For the reason that makes you afraid of it.”
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” - William Hutchinson Murray (oft mis-attributed to J. W. v. Goethe)
Check out the boldness of this boy (and his parents!). A boy, wearing a pink sundress to school, risking ridicule and hazing from his peers, because he feels it’s important to announce to the world that he likes pink? That’s bold.
I think that far too often we as businesspeople (and particularly those of us in the arts) underestimate the value of being so bold. We’ve been practicing a “play it safe” mentality for so long, that it’s become a habit.
We’ve forgotten that great things are not accomplished by people who play it safe.
The United States wasn’t founded by people who were playing it safe. The light bulb, the microchip, the automobile, the refrigerator, franchising, cell phones, the Sistine Chapel, the great dome of the cathedral in Florence, the Eiffel Tower — none of these things were created by people who were playing it safe. They all risked, they all went where noone had gone before, they all ventured where there was no road and left a trail for the rest to follow. For all of these things to come into being, boldness was required.
I know firsthand how difficult and frightening it is to be so bold. We pour a lot of our heart and soul into our work, and when we show it to the world, it feels like we’re exposing our deepest thoughts and fears on an easel for all to see, shouting all of our secret anxieties from the rooftops. It makes us vulnerable. It’s painful when people make vitriolic comments. It’s depressing when we get a lukewarm response. Even constructively critical pointers from people who sincerely want to help us improve our craft can be painful.
As a schoolchild I experienced the torture of being the teased one: the recipient of jeers like “Dumbo” because my ears stuck out, the bookworm in a classroom full of jocks, the one who was easy to beat up on because I was smaller and less physically strong than many of my peers, the one who would rather visit the library than than go to the keger.
To this day, memories of the sting from those emotional and physical bruises remain with me. Sometimes it makes it difficult for me to talk about what my photography really means to me. Sometimes it causes me to not make a photograph that I really want to make, that I believe would be beautiful and uplifting and maybe even inspiring, because some aspect of it might be unpopular and I don’t want to experience the discomfort of ridicule and persecution that I may have to face if I were to show it publicly.
I’ve allowed my fear of ridicule to undermine my willingness to be fully self-expressed in my business, to inhibit my boldness. I know I’m not the only one.
The simple truth is that without boldness, we as small business people simply cannot succeed. Take a look at the boldness you’ve already shown: You’ve decided to start a business. You’ve “hung out your shingle”. You’ve started a website or a blog about your business. You’ve posted on Twitter or FaceBook about your business. You’ve approached your friends and neighbors about becoming clients. You’ve approached total strangers about becoming clients. You’ve joined a Chamber of Commerce, or BNI, or other business networking organization.
If you’re anything like me, most (if not all) of these things required you to be bold, to step outside of your comfort zone, to do something that you were, at first, afraid to do.
In order to make our businesses as successful as they can be, we have to be willing to take that boldness even further, and make what we offer to our clients truly unique and full expressions of our true selves, as Michael Port and Napoleon Hill encourage us to do, in their respective books, Book Yourself Solid and Think and Grow Rich.
Particularly inspiring to me in this regard was a passage from the article about the boy and the pink sundress, where the mother writes:
I warned Sam carefully that if he wore it, he would probably get teased. He was undeterred, adamant about wearing the dress; clearly, avoiding teasing was a lower priority for Sam than simply being himself. I could see that standing up for his choices in a relatively safe and supportive environment was a useful life lesson. And it occurred to me that having confidence—being proud of who he is, even if he’s different from other kids—is the best defense against the inevitable ridicule.
What a powerful lesson! What if we could all learn to make the avoidance of teasing a lower priority than simply being ourselves? What if being proud of who we, even if we’re different from other kids, really is the best defense against the inevitable ridicule? How powerful would that make us as businesspeople, as creatives, as human beings?
“If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.” - Seth Godin, The Dip
Well, I’m gonna steal a page out of that little boy’s book, and wear my pink frilly dress to school. This scares the living daylights out of me, because in the following statements I risk alienating a lot of potential clients. Many of you won’t like what I have to say, but I have to say it, because it’s a fundamental part of who I am and how I do what I do. So … here goes nuthin’:
I got my first camera when I was six years old. The little Kodak Pocket-Instamatic with “normal” and “telephoto” settings was a Christmas gift from my mother, and I’ve been addicted to photo gadgetry ever since. It became a hobby/distraction/side-line thing for me while I pursued other interests in aviation and computer science.
In 1991, I first encountered the photographs of a man named Jock Sturges. I was fascinated by his imagery, not just because he had the boldness to publish books (over half a dozen now) filled with stunningly beautiful photographs of naked people including children and teenagers, but far more importantly because I, as a complete stranger to these people, could look at their photographs and feel like I knew them personally. He, and the people in his photographs, had the boldness to be who they really are, and to show it to the whole world.
I’ve since had the honor of studying with Jock, and am coming to understand how and why he makes these images, and I am all the more inspired for it. His dedication to craftsmanship, and his deep and undying respect for the people with whom he works is nothing short of magnificent to me.
My photographs want to be like his when they grow up.
Yup. That’s right. I want to photograph you nude. And your family. Yes, even your kids.
Now don’t take that the wrong way. Just because I want to photograph you with no clothes on, doesn’t mean I will, if you don’t want to. I want my photographs to be like Jock’s, and that means having the utmost respect for the people that I photograph. If you don’t want to be photographed nude, that’s perfectly fine. Most of my clients choose not to be nude for their photographs, and that’s OK with me. More important to me is that I’m photographing the real you — the beautiful and interesting person that you are inside … which is precisely why, even if you choose not to be photographed nude, I’ll still want you to have it as an option to consider (and I mean really, seriously consider, not just dismiss out of hand because the idea rejects the commonly advertized “reality”).
“So,” I hear you asking, “If photographing the real me is most important, why does he want me to be naked? I don’t have to be naked to be myself!”
Very true. You don’t have to be naked to be yourself, but it helps. Here’s why I think so:
“What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?” - Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
I want to photograph people nude because to me the human body, displayed with dignity and respect, is among the most magnificent and beautiful things in the universe. I hate the idea we’ve been indoctrinated with that says “clothes make the man”. It’s not our clothes that makes us pretty, or hip, or smart, or worthwhile human beings. It’s precisely the other way around. That, and the ubiquitous corporate logos that are stamped all over clothing these days do nothing but distract from the beauty and interestingness of the person wearing them, making photographs of people look more like photographs of fashion, or fashion rejects. When you make the clothes generic, or remove them entirely, you can allow the person’s character to emerge into the photograph.
I want to photograph people nude because I want them to feel beautiful, just the way they are.
I was fortunate to grow up in an environment where I was exposed to nudity in many different forms: As a kid, I was allowed to run around the house and yard naked whenever I wanted. I was never chastised or scolded if I saw my mother naked. She would “drag” me to art galleries filled with paintings and sculptures of naked Greek gods and Christian saints and Venetian women. When visiting my grandparents over summer vacation people of all shapes and sizes and ages would be naked at the beach.
Exposure, at a young age, to the wide variety shapes that humans come in taught me respect for, and acceptance of, my own body and those of others. I never had to “play doctor” to find out what girls looked like “down there”. I never felt uncomfortable or embarrassed about being seen naked (e.g. while changing in the locker room after gym class), nor, to my knowledge, did any of my friends (of either gender) from my grandparents’ village.
I want to offer people the opportunity to feel what it’s like to break free of the stifling body image stereotypes that pervade our media; to give them the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be photographed nude with respect and dignity.
I want them to know that there’s at least one person in the world that thinks they’re interesting and beautiful and worthwhile enough to invest the time and effort in, that is required to produce a finely crafted photograph of them.
I want to photograph families like Bernard Landon does, whose clients uninhibitedly celebrate their beauty and togetherness.
I want to work with people who think like this woman, and these women (featured in Glamour magazine!), who have discovered that they don’t have to look just like Barbie, or fit into a size-zero dress to be beautiful — that their outer beauty is a reflection caused by their inner beauty, and that many of the things which our culture calls their “flaws” are the things that make them individually and uniquely beautiful. (Which raises an interesting question: Can you feel good enough about yourself to want to be photographed nude? If not, why not? Think about it!)
I want to photograph people nude because I feel that there are few things that reproduce as beautifully on film as human skin.
And I want to photograph people nude just because I want to.
How’s that for bold?
