What the camera makes possible
The Art of Dog
The Art of Dog is an ongoing series that digs into the deeper side of dog photography – its history, its meaning, its purpose. It’s for paid subscribers. If you haven’t used your one free unlock yet, this might be the time.
She sent me three photographs of a hillside in bloom.
Balsamroot, mostly, the kind of yellow that makes you forget what you were worried about. Lupine and paintbrush coming in behind it.
One of my favorites too, I wrote back.
We were strangers, technically. She had a dog with cancer and I had a camera. One of her dear friends brought us together to commemorate the special relationship she had shared with her dog.
That was all we knew of each other.
But we had balsamroot in common, and that turned out to be enough to start with.
Meaning runs both ways
Sean Tucker’s The Meaning in the Making is, among other things, a book about finding your way back. Tucker had lost the thread between his work and his joy. He’d spent years doing product photography to pay the bills, making images that meant nothing to him, for clients who needed nothing more from him than technical competence. The book is his attempt to locate, through philosophy and practice, what makes creative work feel worth doing.
He draws on Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps by holding onto purpose when everything else had been stripped away. Those who have a why, Frankl wrote, can bear almost any how. Tucker also pulls in Joseph Campbell’s idea of deep gladness, the place where your singular mix of character, temperament and worldview meets the work only you could make.
Tucker’s argument, built on these foundations, is that meaning lives not in outcomes – not in finished images, recognition or validation – but in the act of making itself. The process is the point. The struggle, the doubt, the repetition: All of it carries value, if you’ve located the deep gladness driving it.
It’s a generous framework. And it pulled Tucker back from a place where the work had gone hollow, which is no small thing.
But it’s a framework built around a solitary maker and an abstract future audience. It assumes the meaning flows in one direction – from the maker outward, into work that might matter to someone, someday, in ways the maker may never witness. Tucker finds peace in that uncertainty. He writes about his grandfather’s photo albums: made without any thought of legacy, now precious beyond measure. The work outlasted its maker’s ability to witness its meaning. That’s Tucker’s consolation – and perhaps his thesis.
Trouble is, I’ve witnessed enough of this to know it doesn’t have to work that way.
