The Essential and Unavoidable Place of Failure
Before becoming one of the most distinctive photographic voices of the 20th century, Diane Arbus spent her days in the polished world of fashion photography, working alongside her husband. The images were composed, elegant—and yet something in them did not quite breathe. By her own telling, they left her quietly unsatisfied, as if she were circling the surface of a life she had not yet entered.
Then came Lisette Model. Model did not offer comfort in the usual sense. She did not say, “This is good.” She said, in effect: “Go closer. Risk more. Tell the truth.”
And in that invitation—part challenge, part blessing—Arbus began to trust what she had once held back: her strange, searching way of seeing. The work deepened. The images began to breathe.
Something similar unfolds in the early life of Carrie Mae Weems. She did not begin with the clarity we now recognize. Her early photographs were grounded in documentary practice—steady, attentive, but not yet carrying the layered voice that would later emerge. What changed was not simply her skill, but her permission.
In the presence of teachers, fellow artists, and a widening circle of conversation, she began to see that her own life—her family, her history, her identity—was not something to work around, but something to work from. That her experience was not incidental, but essential.
And so the work shifted. Not toward perfection, but toward truth. Again and again, this quiet pattern appears: The mentor listens for what is alive in the work, and quietly invites, “Stay with it.” And yet, how quickly we forget.
I often imagine that artists arrive fully formed—that greatness is bestowed rather than slowly, almost invisibly, grown. In that forgetting, my own early photographs begin to feel like evidence against me, rather than part of the path.
After all, I know my own work from the inside: the hesitation, the misjudgment, the images that fall flat. And yet I encounter the work of others only after it has been shaped and offered to the world. I do not see their early attempts—the uncertain frames, the failed exposures, the long stretches of not knowing. And so the scale tips—unfairly, quietly, persistently.
What I need—and what we all need, perhaps—is a more generous way of seeing: an honest remembering of how much awkwardness, repetition, and imperfect seeing lies behind anything we come to call beautiful.
I think back to my undergraduate years at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and to my art history professor, Dr. Constance Armitage. I took every course I could with her—not because she made things easier, but because she made them more real.
She helped us to see differently—to honor our own unique ways of perceiving the phenomenal world, rather than rushing to inherit someone else’s vision.
In her presence, looking became something more than analysis. It became a kind of listening. A quiet trust that what we were drawn to—however tentative, however unpolished—might already carry the seed of something real.
She didn’t take us to museums, but she encouraged us—again and again—to go, to return often, to linger and to look. And when we did, she quietly shaped our attention—not only toward the masterpieces that draw the crowds, but toward the early works of those same artists: the hesitant lines, the uneven compositions, the beginnings that did not yet know what they were becoming.
We explored the earliest works of a famous artist so that we could recognize the essential and unavoidable place of failure—to allow ourselves to do things quite imperfectly for a very long time, as the price we cannot avoid paying for the chance, one day—perhaps decades from now—to create something that feels whole: an image, a book, a non-profit, a garden, a meal…something others might one day call a masterpiece.
And perhaps this is not so far from what Shunryu Suzuki called beginner’s mind—that way of meeting the world without the burden of already knowing. A mind that is open, curious, unguarded, and willing to stay with uncertainty.
“In the beginner’s mind,” he reminds us, “there are many possibilities.” To begin again—awkwardly, imperfectly, honestly—is not to fall short of the path. It is the path.
