Spend the Intention
Living work cannot be planned into existence — but it cannot be stumbled into either. The real skill is recognising what your constraints throw up.
The work you will be proudest of in five years is something you have not yet decided to make. You cannot decide it, because the decision depends on materials you do not hold and problems you have not met. This is not a flaw in your planning. It is the condition under which anything alive gets made.
The complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman has spent decades arguing a version of this about living systems, and his phrase for it is blunt: emergence is not engineering. A cell runs no programme that builds it. It constructs itself through the work its own structures perform — membranes channel flows, enzymes drive the reactions that rebuild the membranes — so the organisation is enacted, never executed. No blueprint sits apart from the thing, instructing it what to become.
Hold that against the two stories you have been told about making pictures. One says: settle your concept, write the statement, then collect the images that prove it. The other says: drop the concept, trust your instinct, let your eye lead. Both assume the destination already exists somewhere — inside your idea, or inside your gut.
Kauffman’s argument cuts beneath both. The direction of living work is not deducible in advance, not even by its maker. So the capacity you most need is neither vision nor instinct. It is recognition: the ability to build conditions that yield more than you intended, then to notice which of those surprises deserves to stay. This should unsettle you a little, because it demotes the thing you were taught to guard — your intention.
Tight rules, open outcomes
The seductive misreading here is the romantic one — emergence as surrender, shooting loose, waiting for a gift to arrive. Kauffman’s mechanism runs the other way. He calls it constraint closure. The structures of a cell limit how energy and matter can move, and those limited flows perform the work that rebuilds the structures. Constraint does not oppose emergence; it powers it.
The philosopher Gilbert Simondon described living things as metastable — held in a charged, unresolved state, never finished, continually individuating by working through their tensions rather than settling them. A practice behaves the same way. Strip out every constraint and nothing is forced to happen; fix your intentions too tightly and nothing new can occur. The fertile position sits between, where the rules are strict enough to generate consequences you cannot foresee.
There is real comfort in this if you let there be. The project that feels unresolved is not failing. It is metastable — charged, still individuating, holding more potential than a finished thing ever could. Premature resolution is the actual risk.
So before your next project, assemble a constraint set instead of a concept. Choose a hard perimeter — one lens, a half-mile radius from your front door, the hour after the streetlights come on, a rule never to photograph a face — and bind yourself to whatever those limits surface, not to the pictures you imagined. The constraint does the thinking your plan cannot.
Gregory Halpern, an associate of Magnum, worked close to this principle on ZZYZX, his book made over several years in and around Los Angeles. He did not begin with a thesis about the city and gather its proof. He accumulated nearly a thousand rolls of film, then spent a further year sorting them, letting an order declare itself through adjacency until the run settled into a westward movement from the deserts east of the city to the Pacific. The arc arrived in the edit; it was never specified in advance. That asks for patience most briefs will not grant you, which is exactly why the strongest work tends to come from the projects you refuse to resolve on schedule.
Take this as method. Lay out far more than you can use, and resist writing the statement first. Let pictures fall beside one another and watch which pairings produce a third meaning neither image held alone. Your structure is something you find, so postpone the explanation until the material has spoken.
Keep the failures where you can see them
Kauffman’s favourite example of the unforeseeable is the swim bladder. Water entered the air-filled lungs of certain early fish, and the ratio of air to water let the animal sense neutral buoyancy. An organ for breathing became an instrument for floating. He calls this a preadaptation, an exaptation — a part repurposed for a use no one could have deduced from its first one. From a lung you cannot derive a buoyancy sensor, just as from an engine block used as a paperweight you cannot derive its use for cracking open a coconut.
Your archive is full of swim bladders. The frame you shot to document a doorway turns out, two years on, to be about light, or solitude, or your own unease — a property the picture always carried but never announced while it served its first purpose. You could not have planned that second life. You can only catch it when it surfaces.
So keep a folder for the failures you cannot quite delete. Fill it with frames that missed their original brief yet hold some stubborn, unaccountable charge. Return to it not to rescue individual pictures but to ask what new function your project could be turned toward, given what you already have.
The French photographer Vasantha Yogananthan built A Myth of Two Souls out of precisely this kind of repurposing. Across seven years and thirteen trips to India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, he retold the Ramayana in seven chapters, retracing its route from north to south, reaching for old vernacular methods — large-format portraits hand-painted by Indian artists, Madhubani drawing laid over his prints, panels lifted from a 1970s comic-strip version of the epic. He did not derive the final chapter from the first. Each stage opened possibilities the previous one had not contained — what Kauffman calls the adjacent possible, the set of moves that become available only once you have made the move before.
When a project stalls, this gives you somewhere to go. Stop forcing the original plan harder and ask instead what your existing material now makes possible that was unavailable at the start. The question shifts from “does this match the brief” to “what can this become next.” A stall is rarely a dead end. More often it marks the moment the adjacent possible has shifted while you carried on working the old map.
You are inside the thing you are making
Kauffman draws a line from all this to a stance he names participation rather than control — co-creator, not controller. We can guide and constrain, he argues, yet we cannot command an outcome we are unable to specify. For him this humility is not a moral posture but accurate orientation: if the result is genuinely undeducible, then certainty about where your work is heading is simply a mistake about the kind of thing it is.
Susan Meiselas pushed that idea to its edge with akaKURDISTAN, the participatory online archive she launched in 1998 alongside her book on a century of Kurdish history. A scattered people’s visual record could not be authored by one photographer, so she built a structure and invited others to fill it, ceding authorship to those who held the photographs and the stories. The content was never hers to predict. Her authority lay in the architecture she made for other people’s contributions, and her strength was the willingness to let go of the rest. Relinquishing control read, in her hands, as confidence rather than weakness.
Alfred North Whitehead called reality a creative advance into novelty — genuine newness no prior state entails. For him the future is not a reshuffle of what already exists; it is the arrival of what did not. Your practice is one small instance of that advance, which is why the most rigorous plan cannot contain it, and why forcing it to do so quietly kills the work.
This changes how you judge. Replace the editing question “is this what I meant?” with “is this alive — does it hold the rest together?” A heart earns its place by pumping blood, not by matching a prior drawing of a heart; Kauffman defines the function of a part as whatever sustains the whole. Judge a picture the same way. Keep what makes the body of work cohere and breathe, even when it contradicts the intention you walked in with.
Spend it
Which returns us to the plan you began with, and to what it was actually for. A plan is not a blueprint to fulfil. Treat it as a constraint to be consumed — fuel rather than architecture. You spend it. The intention you set out with was never the destination; it was the friction that made an unforeseeable thing possible.
So the moment to release your plan is not the moment it fails. It is the moment it has done its work — when the constraints you set in motion have produced something you would never have thought to ask for, and your only remaining task is to recognise it, and keep it.
