There’s something deeply suspicious about always taking good photos.
Not in the technical sense, which matters too, but in that ease with which everything fits, everything works, everything receives a kind of silent approval that, if you stop to think about it, starts to feel a lot like indifference.
Maybe, in such a saturated visual environment, it’s no longer about making better photos, but about changing the way you jump beyond the norm.
But what does jumping have to do with photography?
The jump of Dick Fosbury didn’t fit. And yet, in theory, he had everything going for him: height, physique, and every reason to do “what everyone else was doing”.
But his jump wasn’t clean, or orthodox, or reassuring; there was something awkward about it, almost like a misunderstanding, as if that clumsy, crooked gesture didn’t quite respond to what was expected of him. It didn’t align with the logic or the aesthetics of his time: while others repeated recognizable and effective techniques (scissors, western roll or straddle), he seemed to be moving from somewhere else, something less obvious, less correct, even suspect. His jump felt strange, as if there were something slightly wrong with it. For a while, that’s exactly what it looked like: a sustained mistake.
He jumped backwards.
People thought he hadn’t quite understood the rules of something everyone else seemed to have figured out. But there was an intuition there, hard to explain, something that wasn’t about improving what already existed, but about listening to a form of his own, even if it wasn’t fully formed yet. It wasn’t technique. It was something else. A kind of fidelity, or intelligence, toward a way of moving that still had no name and no validation.
Until 1968, at the Mexico City Olympics, he won gold. And suddenly, it no longer looked like a mistake.
The problem is that we rarely insist on what doesn’t quite fit. And in photography, surrounded by already validated forms, even less so: everything is well done, everything works, everything fits within a shared language where images start to look too much alike. There is no error, but there is no friction either.
And without friction, nothing really belongs to anyone.
Talking about finding your voice sounds inspiring, but in practice it means something far less comfortable: stopping yourself from making the decisions you already know will work. It means moving from a place without guarantees, where what you do doesn’t always hold up on its own, and where a certain sense of loss appears.
Because what is truly your own, when it emerges without references, rarely arrives in a clear form.
It looks more like clumsiness than discovery, like something that doesn’t quite fit, that you can’t fully explain, and that you’re not even sure is worth holding onto.
The Fosbury Flop wasn’t an obvious stroke of genius from the start. It was an insistence, almost a declaration of intent. A way of doing things that didn’t respond to expectations, but carried something impossible to imitate: it didn’t come from repetition; it came from a need to exist.
In photography, that moment is fragile. When you start making images that don’t quite fit, neither with yourself nor with what you see around you, you lose clear references, and all that remains is an intuition that is still uneven, still hard to defend. And that’s where discomfort appears. The feeling of not fitting.
For a while, uncertainty will hover over you. Your images may be less celebrated, less certain in the eyes of others. Or you may feel that you’ve lost precision, when in reality you’re losing something else: the need to fit into a recognizable form.
But perhaps you’re beginning to come more into alignment with who you truly are.
What a great gift you are giving yourself.
Fosbury didn’t fully know what he was doing either, but he did know that this way, however strange it seemed, was the only one that felt honest to him. And in that fidelity to something still rough, something new began to take shape.
Maybe in photography the point isn’t to find something completely new, but to recognize that gesture of your own that still doesn’t quite fit, that way of seeing that resists expectation, and precisely because of that, carries something that cannot be replaced.
Holding onto that requires patience, belief, and a certain tolerance for doubt, because at first it’s hard to tell whether it’s a mistake or the beginning of something.
But maybe there’s no other way to find out. Find your Fosbury Flop, and let it express itself.
Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
