Ben Baker Photo

It was sad to see the passing of filmmaker Morgan Spurlock last week. 

I photographed him for Mens Health Magazine and enjoyed the time and conversation with him. 

It was memorable because of how he spoke about the challenges of creative work, his breakthrough, the constant need to feed the ideas machine and ideas alone are worthless.

This was the conversation.

Me - “Morgan, congratulations on the amazing success of your brilliant idea to make Supersize Me.

Morgan - “ Ben, do you think this is my only idea? Do you know how many other ideas I had that I was convinced would work and failed miserably? I had no idea this would be the breakthrough. Do you know how many of my friends have quit this business? I am just the last one standing.

That was a lightbulb moment for me, as I understood that no one truly knows if an idea will succeed or fail, and those who say they know are not honest. There are no formulas or guarantees; we must try and be willing to fail. No one wants to be the last one standing after constantly failing to read the room and move on to a safer or smarter job. 

One constant in the years of photographing those who have broken through and succeeded is that all of them have suffered lots of failure on the journey yet somehow and somehow had the inner belief or madness to find the way through.

All of them.

Some days are not yours, and today was not one for Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
His party voted him out for trying to keep the lights on for the US government—a first in US history.
This was shot for with the brilliant in better days for Kevin.
Let's see who and what comes next. I have had many conversations with incoming conservative reps, and many simply want to shut down DC and give the power back to the states and smaller towns.
When said like that, it seems reasonable, but we don't go forward by burning down the house without a plan for the future.
Let's see what's next; there's not much at stake except a functioning government and democracy.