Faith & Doubt

Faith, Doubt, and Building Something From Nothing

As I sit at my usual table, hidden away in the corner, strategically positioned so I can easily observe the interactions happening around me, I find myself overwhelmed by a familiar feeling.

Doubt.

This is nothing new for me. In fact, doubt has become such an ordinary companion that I sometimes wonder whether I would know how to create without it. Maybe it comes from a traumatic childhood. Maybe it comes from being an artist. Or maybe I became an artist because of my traumatic childhood. I have no idea, really. What I do know is that I have never met an accomplished artist who doesn't seem to carry some version of this contradiction within them: an almost crippling sense of doubt living side by side with an occasionally unreasonable amount of confidence.  One moment you are convinced that what you are creating matters.  The next, you are equally convinced that you have absolutely no business creating it.  And somehow, you keep going. Not because you want to, but because you don’t know how not to.

Maybe You Have to Be a Little Crazy

There are days when I feel a bit crazy for pursuing The Analog Arts Center.  Mad as a hatter might be more accurate.  Because when I remove the emotion and look at this project strictly on paper, I can understand why someone might question it.

We want to create a nonprofit arts organization. We want to build a community darkroom. We want to provide access to equipment, classes, workshops, and traditional photographic processes. We want to create opportunities for young people to discover film photography and other analog arts. We want to create a place where artists can work beside beginners, where knowledge can be passed from one generation to another, and where someone who has never considered themselves creative might discover otherwise.  Those are ambitious goals.  Especially when you are starting with very little.

Recently, I had a conversation with someone who asked me a perfectly reasonable question:  What financial resources do you currently have to get this project off the ground? My answer was simple.

Zero.

I didn't have a wealthy benefactor waiting in the wings.  I didn't have a giant startup fund.  I didn't have a building already paid for or a pile of grant money sitting in a bank account.  What I had was faith.  And I had the belief that our community would benefit from The Analog Arts Center and from having access to a community darkroom. They laughed.  And I understand why. From a certain perspective, it probably does sound ridiculous.  But their laughter has stayed with me.  Not because I am angry about it.  Because it forced me to ask myself a difficult question:

What if they're right?

What If, What If, What If?

That is the question anyone trying to build something eventually has to confront.  What if nobody cares?  What if we cannot raise the money?  What if we cannot find enough volunteers?  What if we struggle to find a permanent home?  What if the grants don't come through?  What if people say they support the idea but never actually walk through the door?  What if, after all the planning, conversations, paperwork, writing, fundraising, and dreaming, The Analog Arts Center simply doesn't work?  Those possibilities are real and I don't think there is any value in pretending otherwise. 

Faith does not mean believing failure is impossible.  Faith means understanding that failure is possible and deciding the idea is still worth pursuing. There is a tremendous difference between the two.

Artists Understand This Better Than Most

Perhaps this is why artists are sometimes willing to pursue things that look unreasonable to everyone else.  Every piece of art begins with something that does not exist. A blank canvas.  An unexposed piece of film.  A lump of clay.  An empty page.  A block of wood.  Before the work exists physically, someone has to be capable of seeing it in their imagination.  Then comes the difficult part.  They have to believe in that vision long enough to make it real.  There is no guarantee the painting will work.  There is no guarantee the photograph will be good.  There is no guarantee anyone will care about the finished piece.  You make it anyway, you make it despite the doubt.

Maybe building an arts organization isn't so different.  Right now, The Analog Arts Center exists somewhere between imagination and reality.  There is a vision.  There is a mission.  There is work being done.  But there is also an enormous amount that still needs to happen.  In some ways, we are standing in front of the blank canvas waiting for that first brush stroke to splash the canvas with color.

What I See

When I talk about The Analog Arts Center, I am not really thinking about enlargers or developing tanks.  I see people.  I see a teenager standing beneath the dim red glow of a safelight, watching an image slowly appear on a piece of photographic paper for the first time.  I see someone buying an old film camera at a thrift store and coming through our doors because they have no idea how to use it.  I see experienced photographers teaching younger photographers techniques that might otherwise disappear.  I see classes.  I see conversations.  I see prints hanging to dry.  I see people arguing good-naturedly about cameras and developers and film stocks.  I see young people coming through the doors after school because they now have somewhere safe to go.

And maybe, somewhere among them, there is a kid who doesn't have the easiest home life.  Maybe that kid needs somewhere to disappear for a couple of hours. A sanctuary.  Somewhere nobody is asking them to explain everything happening in their life.  Maybe they just need a camera placed in their hands and someone to say: Let me show you something.  I don't know who that kid is yet.  Maybe they don't exist.  But I believe they do.  And I believe they are worth building this place for.

Starting With Zero

There is something frightening about admitting publicly that you are trying to build something without having the money necessary to build it.  But perhaps there is also something freeing about it.  We aren't pretending that The Analog Arts Center is already something it isn't.  We are at the beginning.  And beginnings are messy.  We need funding. We need equipment.  We need volunteers.  We need members.  We need partnerships.  We need people willing to teach.  We need people willing to learn.  We need businesses and organizations willing to believe that something like this can make our community a little richer.  And yes, we need money.

But nearly everything humans have ever built began with something other than money.  It began with an idea.  Then someone else believed in it.  Then another person did.  Eventually, enough people believed that the idea stopped belonging to one person.  It became a community's idea. That is what I hope happens here.

The Doubt Is Still There

I wish I could end this by saying that writing these words has somehow eliminated my doubt.  It hasn't. I still feel it heavy in my chest, deep inside that place only I know, and that is ok.  Tomorrow morning I will probably wake up and question the entire thing again.  There will be moments when The Analog Arts Center feels inevitable.  There will be other moments when it feels completely impossible.  I have come to learn that tension is simply part of creating something.  The strange mixture of: I don't know if I can do this. And I have to try.

I've lived somewhere between those two sentences for much of my life as an artist. 

Perhaps The Analog Arts Center will be no different.  So yes, today we are starting with almost nothing. We don't have all the money.  We don't have all the answers.  We don't know exactly where this journey will take us.  But we have an idea.  We have faith in that idea.  And we have a belief that access to art, creativity, education, and community can make people's lives better.

Maybe believing that without having the resources to guarantee its success is foolish.  Maybe it is a little crazy.  Maybe the person who laughed at me was right to laugh.  But I've spent enough of my life around artists to know something else.  Sometimes the line between a ridiculous idea and a meaningful one is simply whether someone was stubborn enough to keep going.  So, for now, I think I'll keep going and risk being labeled stubborn.