Competence Doesn't Interrupt You Long Enough to Photograph It

A comment on my social media got me this weekend.

I had posted a picture of a 30-plus-year-old bearing that gave out on our hay mower, and somebody joked about my equipment choices and my apparent luck with things breaking.

I laughed. Then I wondered if he had a point.

So I started scrolling back through my own pictures, and sure enough, there were quite a few of things that had gone wrong.

Then I tried something different. I went looking for pictures of things going right, and those were surprisingly hard to find.

I've spoken in front of rooms full of people more times than I can count. Scientific meetings, customer meetings, technical presentations, industry events. I found exactly one picture of it, and it's not from any of the bigger presentations I've given over the years. It's me talking about show feeds to a room full of customers in north-central Ohio. Why that one survived and none of the others did, I have no idea. Apparently somebody happened to have a camera out.

We run into the same problem looking for pictures for my websites or ad campaigns. We have thousands of pictures between us, but finding good ones of people simply doing what they do every day is harder than it should be.

It's not just us. Companies run into this all the time, which is why they hire someone to come do it. When I was at Kent Feeds, we'd bring in a photographer or videographer to collect B-roll, conduct interviews, or get the right shot for a campaign. Think about that. Sometimes an entire company has to hire someone to document things going right. Nobody has to hire a photographer when something goes wrong. The cameras just come out on their own. A fire, an accident, a riot, something breaking, something stopping, something happening that wasn't supposed to happen.

That got me thinking about our old family photo albums. Most of the pictures in them are staged, not in the way we think of staged photos now, but in the sense that somebody decided a picture was worth taking. Stand over there. Get everybody together. Look at the camera. Film cost money, developing cost money, there were only so many exposures on a roll, and you didn't know if you'd gotten a good one until the prints came back. Taking a picture required a little intention.

That was still mostly true when I was growing up. Cameras were more common and film was cheaper, but somebody still had to bring the camera, there were still only so many shots on the roll, and somebody still had to pay to get them developed.

Now almost all of us carry a camera everywhere we go. We can take ten pictures when one would do. Delete the bad ones, keep the good ones, and taking another costs nothing. You'd think that would leave us with a better record of our lives. I'm not sure it does.

Somewhere along the way, I think the currency of documentation changed. When every click of the shutter cost something, the question was probably, "Is this worth a picture?" Now that a picture costs nothing, the question has become closer to, "Did this get my attention?"

And drama gets our attention. A fire gets our attention. An accident gets our attention. Traffic at a dead stop gets our attention. When something goes wrong, it interrupts us. We stop, we look, and somewhere in there somebody pulls out a phone.

Competence usually doesn't do that.

Nobody takes a picture because interstate traffic kept flowing. Nobody documents the thousands of flights that landed safely today. Nobody commemorates the presentation where the computer connected, the slides advanced, the microphone worked, and the speaker knew what he was talking about. That's what was supposed to happen. Nothing happened, and there isn't much drama in that.

Competence doesn't interrupt you long enough to photograph it.

Maybe that's why the photographic record we're all building isn't really a record of what happens most often. It's a record of what got our attention. We have more cameras, more pictures, and more ability to document our lives than any generation before us, and we may still be missing most of what actually makes those lives work: the things that quietly go right, the people who quietly know what they're doing, the thousands of ordinary moments when everything works exactly as it should.

Maybe competence isn't supposed to be noticed.

Its reward is that nothing happened.