I need to adjust some of my filters, do you?
I met someone last week who made a very interesting comment that has been swimming around my head ever since. We were at Derek's photography club's Xmas function, and Nick, one of the professional photographers who has given talks and provided critiques on their photo, was talking about some of the members starting to put up amateur photos in online stores. His comment was that they run the risk of people always thinking of them as amateurs, which can be difficult to overcome.
Nick went onto explain that a lot of the people he had shown his early amateur photographs to (mainly friends) have only just started to think of him as a professional photographer. This seems like madness because he is an exceptionally good landscape photographer, but I've only seen his stuff over the last year or so. Nick went on to say that his best friend has only just realised how good he has become when he took to the time to go to Nick's recent exhibition, and now wants a photograph for his wall at home.
This made me think about a few things: the dynamics of friendships; how we can be limited in our views of ourselves because of those around us; and, whether I do this to the people in my life. I guess what it made me think about is the filters that I use when I'm interacting with the people in my life, whether my memories and old images taint my current idea of who people actually are today?
My experience with this issue
I don't have a lot of people in my life who have been around for a long time. In some ways I find that incredibly sad, but I know that I am to blame for letting people slip away and not trying to maintain friendships as much as I should have. There are a couple who are still around in the periphery that probably do suffer a little bit from this problem. When I think of them I tend to think of who they were, and not necessarily of who they have become. It isn't true for everything, but I think that the general picture I hold of them centres around when we were younger, and I'm pretty certain they do the same thing.
This is something that parents and other family members do a lot as well. My parents, and those of my partners over the years, certainly have this mindset where they have defaulted to thinking of us as (rather incompetent) teenagers, or troublesome young adults. My parents have improved in this over the last decade, but I know that they can still be very surprised to know about the things I do in my career, and that their daughter has so much responsibility. And this one is a universal truth, I'm sure that all of your parents' images of you are tainted with marginal comments from parent/teacher interviews, screwing your nose up at broccoli and your first poor attempt at driving.I know that I am also guilty of this with my siblings. I can vividly remember just how surprised and impressed I was when my brother was doing his first art exhibition. We were in Melbourne for the exhibition and went with Matt and his wife, Pia, to Triple R where he was being interviewed about the event. When the interview started I heard this mature, confident voice that didn't gel with the image I held of my little brother. I realised that my idea of my brother was selling him short, and I rapidly set about adjusting that idea accordingly.
One of the things that struck me about the comment made by Nick was that he had not let his own opinion of who he was and how good a photographer he'd become be impacted by his friends obvious dismissive opinions of his art. But I wonder how many people do limit themselves according to the preconceptions and old images that their friends and family hold of them?
Memory is a funny thing
Maybe some of this comes down to things I learned in 30 days of remembering. If we don't base our decisions on events, rather we base them on the memory of those events, then it makes sense that we create images of people based on our memories of them in our lives. And for some reason, when we are talking about people it is usually the older memories that are more easily recalled, and can be the strongest influence on that image.This is where making new friends is fun, because they don't have any of these memories to incorporate into their image of you. They don't remember the awkward teenager with half her head shaved, your really bad choice in boyfriends, or the amateurish attempts at... well pretty much everything. They only know you as the accomplished adult you have become. But that can also be problematic, as they watch you struggle to learn something new they may think that you are completely hopeless, whereas people who have known you forever realise that you are always a bit of a slow learner, but you eventually get there.
I know that this post is a little rambling, I think that is very representative of my brain at the moment. I don't know what all of this really means, but I do know that it is a very interesting thing to think about. It lends itself to all of the preconception work from earlier in the year, and the I am not just a... concept. It is just another reminder that our judgements of others can be extremely flawed - whether we know them well or not.
So, when I visit with family over Xmas I will take the time to try to see each of them as a new person, someone I don't have a history of, and see if that person is the same as the idea I have of them now. It will be an interesting little experiment.
Do you view the people around you through an arbitrary set of filters that need to be adjusted? Is there someone close to you that you need to revisit your internal image of? Is there someone in your life you are selling short because of your memories of them as an amateur?