Before the Result
A friend on VERO recently shared a video featuring Rick Rubin talking about creativity. One idea in particular stayed with me: instead of asking how little we can get away with doing, ask how much more we can give to the thing we are making.
I liked the idea immediately. It also brought me back to something simpler: how much I enjoy making photographs.
After a good shoot, I often know that I enjoyed it before I know whether I made anything worth keeping. At the Musée Rodin recently, I had that feeling before I had properly looked at the files. For a couple of hours I had been absorbed in looking at light, faces, sculptures and people moving through the rooms. Whatever the photographs turned out to be, the afternoon had already given me something.
Then comes the less predictable part. You open the files and discover that the photograph you remembered clearly is not particularly interesting. Another one, almost incidental at the time, suddenly holds your attention. Some days there is very little to keep at all.
The experience and the result do not always agree.
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One photograph from Rodin made me think about this again. A face caught in a gradual fall of window light had been shot at 2000 ISO because the room was darker than I had realised at the time. When I opened the file later, I realised there was very little I wanted to change. The softness of the light was already there, and so was the grain. Nothing needed rescuing.
I find that discovery almost as enjoyable as making the photograph itself. Occasionally the work afterwards is not about improving an image, but simply recognising what was already there.
Of course, this does not mean the result no longer matters. I want photographs to work. I edit them, publish some of them and enjoy it when somebody stops long enough to respond to one. Pretending that the audience does not matter at all would be false.
But all of that happens later. The website, the post, the comment, the like, even the decision that a photograph is worth keeping all arrive after the part that first made me want to pick up the camera.
And there is a paradox in that. A session can be deeply satisfying and produce almost nothing. Another can feel unremarkable while you are there and reveal one photograph later that changes your memory of the whole afternoon.
Perhaps that is why I hesitate when creativity is discussed only in terms of outcomes, recognition or even the finished work. That is easier to say when no client is waiting for a result on a deadline. Professional work changes the equation. But in personal work, at least, the finished image is not the only reason I keep going out with a camera.
Originally published at https://journal.philippetriconnet.com on October 11, 2026.
