the Artist and the Accident

It’s a little known fact that it was actually the man’s interns that made the discovery. Though he was the project foreman, and would later take all of the credit for their mistake, he never actually went to the chicken farm where it happened. Medical researchers that they were, the two young men arrived at the farm to study the disease that had been spreading among the chickens. After observing, and logging the events for quite some time, they began to notice a pattern…that the few chickens who were not killed by the virus, never got sick again. Beyond this unusual observation they thought nothing, and cultivated their own strain of the germ in a small on-site lab, to preserve samples for future study after the sickness had run it’s course and dissipated.

Now, what caused them to leave their laboratory and return to the city for two weeks is unknown to this day, but when they returned they found their cultivated germ samples to be all but worthless, barely clinging to life. Desperate to try to regenerate the virus, they attempted to inject the barely-living germs into healthy chickens, in the hopes that it would strengthen and multiply…but at the time they had no idea that a weak version of the germ, when injected into the blood, would cause the antibodies therein to not only crush the germ mercilessly, but also render the creature immune to it ever after. Their boss, Louis Pasteur, despite being furious with their mistake of letting their samples nearly die off initially, would go on to successfully use what they had discovered, completely by accident, on a small boy with rabies.

As a photographer, I am perpetually baffled at the incredible degree that chance plays in the creation of a successful photograph. I confess, in fact, that no picture I have ever taken, and thoroughly enjoyed, has been anything other than a surprising accident, nestled in a sea of garbage that I had suspected would turn out much better than it did. There exists some sort of stream, just beyond what the mind is capable of understanding; call it fate, call it muse, call it God, whatever; that serves as the fountainhead for truth and beauty. The best we can do is reach for it, and organize things to be receptive of it should we stumble upon it. Most of the great painters, even, begin a fresh canvas with a general goal, but an otherwise fresh mind, to better allow this force to guide them as best it can.