A helpful and hopeful article, ‘Nobody does it better’, by the ever interesting Geoff Dyer in the Observer on the 5th. He argues: ‘There is no perfection in art, music or literature. You can edit down your body of work in the name of ruthlessly high standards of quality but perfection proves elusive.’ He pleads the work of Bob Dylan and Robert Frank in evidence.
‘His [Dylan’s] constant tampering with the lyrics is evidence not of perfectionism but of a restless hunger that is in some ways its opposite. In this respect he’s similar to the photographer Robert Frank, who said that a book of photographs by Hermann Eidenbenz (in whose studio he worked) “put me off perfection for life”.
Instead, the photographs in Frank’s landmark 1959 volume, The Americans – introduced appropriately, by Jack Kerouac, who was committed to the imperfect and potentially ruinous creed of “first thought, best thought” – were so blurrily off the cuff that they reconfigured notions of what might constitute an important photograph. Thereafter, many of the things hitherto considered flaws became folded into the idea of photographic excellence.’