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It’s The Fling Itself

Getting out and making pictures can be every bit as rewarding as the images themselves

This Article Features Photo Zoom

This panorama of Lake Tahoe is a composite made with several frames taken with a compact point and-shoot-style camera.

In the past I wrote about “not being the best in the world, but being the best for the world.” I love little sayings like this. They keep me on course. They help me separate the signal from the noise. Recently, I came upon two more. The first I discovered when rewatching an old episode of the TV show Northern Exposure. In it, the character Chris decides to build a giant catapult and fling a cow across the Arctic tundra. As an artist, he’s crushed when he finds out that Monty Python already did this in one of their films. He wails, “If I can’t be first, what’s the point?” Eventually, however (in a plot far too complicated to go into), he finally decides to fling an upright piano that has been burned in a house fire. As he explains to the assembled crowd before the great event, “I finally realized, it’s not what you fling, it’s the fling itself!”

I think of all the photos I’ve taken in my life. All the thousands of images, each representing a moment that I’ve stopped to look at what’s in front of me. Little “aha’s” as my visual consciousness lights up. Each of these photos made an impression on my retina (and therefore on my brain) before they were captured on celluloid or as digital data. And that impression changed...me.

It wasn’t what I shot that was important, it was the act of seeing. It was “the fling itself.”

I consider myself lucky to be a photographer. To have trained myself for years in the art of seeing so that now, no matter where I look, the world is a visual delight. A million images over the years, who cares about the subject, a million little flings. The result? Eyes that make me an audience for visual miracles; eyes that, to paraphrase the words of Walt Whitman, allow “a morning glory at my window to satisfy me more than the metaphysics of books.”

All photographers have that gift, and the more we practice it—the more we fling—the better it gets.


Yes, I’ll no doubt forget all this when I’m disgusted with images of a particular day’s shooting. But I know it’s true. It’s the fling, man, it’s the fling!

The second “wise saying” I found written on a tube of organic toothpaste. (Hey, I care about the message, not the messenger.) It read, “It’s not what we make. It’s what we make possible.”

This thought hit me just as hard as the previous one. What do our images make possible?

In the beginning of my life, my images made possible a career that I could hardly dare imagine. Out there wandering the world for the National Geographic just because I could “see” with a camera was beyond my wildest dreams. Then to have the stories I told with my photographs actually change things (helping to stop a strip mine at the base of Bryce Canyon and a coal-fired power plant upwind of Zion National Park; influencing the Canadian government to make much of the Queen Charlotte Islands into a national park)—whoa, that was over the top!

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