Last week, shared an essay by Peter Hoffman about the power of photography in the age of AI. Along with an explanation of the delightful photo-specific term “punctum,” Hoffman distilled an idea that I’ve been circling for a few years but have failed to succinctly define — that too many photographers have “the idea of craft battered into them so hard that it is impossible to see value in a photograph that doesn’t look like a technical achievement.”

Amen. That’s it for me in a nutshell, the central tenet in my current thinking about photography. I have never in my life been less interested in the technical quality of a photograph.1 After a lifetime of studying technique and working to refine, refine, refine, I’m tired of it. Unfulfilled. Stop the ride I want to get off.

This is made more clear to me with every advance in post-processing capability, with every amazing new face-tuning filter, with every sharp new lens and every image-generating AI. The closer an image is to technically perfect, the less interested I become.

I didn’t decide this, I should mention. This was not a choice. I just noticed I was feeling it. I want less refinement, less polish. I stopped using hair lights in the studio. I retouch less and less. I lean into imperfection. I cherish a crooked smile. I’m all about the wabi-sabi.

To be clear, technical quality can still wow me in a photograph, can add to the beauty and power of an image, of course. But for my money, it simply can’t be all there is. I can’t stomach only a technical achievement. It can’t be a veneer that was added in post. If the technique serves the subject, the idea, the meaning, I’m on board. But if technique is all that’s on offer, I am left wholly unsatisfied.

“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” – Ansel Adams

There’s technical quality, and then there’s quality in the way Robert Pirsig writes about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “Quality is not something you believe in, quality is something you experience.”

Now that I’ve figured that out, what do I do next?

A lady I don’t know posted a picture on Threads of a camera she’d been given. I didn’t recognize the brand — Protax — so it was not entirely surprising when she reported she’d been laughed out of her local camera club. The comments ranged from terribly rude to merely mocking.

* le sigh *

It ain’t the camera.

I know, it’s passé for people with nice cameras to talk about how unimportant cameras are. But in a situation like this, when the person’s goal is to simply get started, I cannot stress enough how much it is absolutely not about the camera. When you’re learning, it can be ideal to have the modern equivalent of an Instamatic: look through here, push this button, that’s it. This kind of basic exploration teaches us so much about seeing. Now there’s a subject I’m still interested in.

I am no longer convinced technical quality is a necessary component for quality photographs, ergo any camera is useful for making pictures.

If image quality mattered most, fuzzy photos from throughout history would no longer be relevant, usurped by technically superior photographs from newer, better cameras. If that were the case, all the best photos would be brand new.

Henri Cartier Bresson’s man jumping a puddle is blurry. As is the falling soldier photographed by Robert Capa. Ansel Adams’s work was technically expert, but he’s the exception that proves the rule. One of the greatest photographs of all time, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, is out of focus.

The lesson, it seems to me, is that entire generations of photographers have been convinced that improving their work starts with improving their equipment. If you just have that one more filter, one more lens, slightly better tripod, everything will finally come together. It simply isn’t true.

I’ve been studying photography — I’m horrified to quantify — for 40 years. And at this point it’s safe to say I have gone all the way around and come out the other side. I’m back where I started. I want to look through here and push this button, that’s it. I want to wrap myself up in imperfection, and in so doing find some essential quality that can’t be bought in a camera store. So that’s what I’m going to try.