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by kens
3300 days ago
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I like to get to the bottom of things :-) I emailed author David Bayles last July to ask him about the story. He didn't give a lot of details but said it was a university level photography class taught by "a very experienced and sophisticated teacher", and apart from changing the medium to ceramics the story was the literal truth. I asked for more details, but didn't hear back and didn't want to keep bothering him. |
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A few observations, I think, flow from this:
1) Still not a study (as I note you have noted elsewhere, but I'm drawing that to the attention of anyone else who reads this), but rather an anecdote. Interesting one, though.
2) Art and Fear was published in '93, so that means chemical photography. That means that even the students who were being marked on quantity would have some lower bound for quality (in a digital photography regime, you'd just hold down the shutter for an hour and submit 3000 photos and be done for the semester). By-hand developing also has a lower bound on how much work you can do and still produce a photo. It just seems a lot less game-able than the pottery version, which makes the story seem more believable. So that makes it pretty weird to change for Bayles and Orland to change the story.
For myself, I think it's true that if you want to be good at anything worthwhile, you need to do a lot of work. But it's also true that if you want to be good, you need to struggle with perfecting your craft, rather than merely churning out whatever. I highly doubt that either is adequate alone. Of course, if you merely want to be tolerable, in many fields some people can get by on talent (however talent works).