Ordinary defeat

"Ordinary defeat" makes me think of the small battles in life we lose every day: doom-scrolling for an hour, tripping on the stairs in front of your date, cleaning up the leftover soup after it exploded in the microwave, realising there’s a second page in this week’s problem sheet you didn’t know about – or, for Antoine, falling clumsily into the sea. The latter is cleverly shown in this very lively silhouette shot, where the starburst reflections on the surface of the sea add a beautiful layer of complexity to the essentially black-and-white composition. I commend Antoine for capturing an exciting moment, surely by looking through his camera and waiting for something to happen, which usually requires a great deal of patience and a steady hand. The fall no one noticed shows an instant that only two people will remember: the discombobulated diver practising his falling, and the photographer practising his art.

Practice makes perfect. Or at least, that’s what we’re told. There’s no case where practice doesn’t involve repeatedly making mistakes, some more and some less serious than others. How can an activity riddled with imperfections lead to achieving perfection? Philosophically, this is an interesting question with many possible answers, one of which I’ll present as follows: for A to cause B, then A must contain the attributes passed onto B. Then, for imperfection to lead to perfection, imperfection must have some sort of intrinsic perfection. “Yes, yes, but enough of this nonsense, what about photography?” you may think to yourself. I think there’s a useful takeaway from this argument that the process of becoming a better photographer starts with a photo, and a bad one at that, and little by little, shot after shot leads to a good picture, then a great one, and then...

In summary, every time you make a mistake you are defeated by life and by the world around you. Yet every day you keep losing those small battles until, at some point, you start winning. The diver starts to fall gracefully towards the sea, and the photographer begins to wield their camera masterfully. So then ordinary defeat is nothing much more than future success. A great motto, and quite possibly one of the next themes for this section.