Plan B: ‘Find out what kids are good at. It will change their lives’

A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view.

It’s like I had to be first with an opinion – as if being first meant something. But what it really meant was that I wasn’t thinking hard enough about the problem. The faster you react, the less you think. Not always, but often.

Swagger is everything in fashion. Swagger, after all, is the art of looking both ridiculous and authoritative at the same time, which is pretty much fashion in a nutshell.

Think of the Emperor in his supposed New Clothes: the whole narrative depends on the fact that he believes he looks fabulous, and this enables him to walk through the streets with nothing on and have the crowds applaud him for his wardrobe.

This is not, I realise, the moral we are supposed to glean from the Emperor’s New Clothes. But it’s the best part of the story, isn’t it? The part where he parades around in nonexistent finery, before some pedant blows the whistle.

Without that, it’s just the story of some old guy getting done over by a conman, and where’s the fairytale in that?

As a photographer, you won’t get around bringing your desire to photography, just as a viewer you do the same thing. You have no choice.

As I have argued before, photography must fail if that desire is denied. But desire does not automatically create good photography.

An equally crucial factor is trust.

In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi and Am Hailed as a Conquering Hero.

The door opened and into the room walked the most dangerous person I’ve ever met. He reached towards his belt and slowly pulled out his .45 caliber handgun, raised it and paused to evaluate my expression.

“No disrespect, but it’s been pressing into my hip all day.”

He placed the gun on the coffee table, relaxed into the leather sofa and let his guard down for the first time in a very long while.

Photography has always attracted an interesting mix of artistic and technical types, and since the advent of digital we seem to be getting even more of the latter.

They tend to arrive at photography with a confidence that it must be subject to the same kind of rational analysis and processes that apply in their own fields.