I just want to be good at making pictures

What is successful?:

Immediacy, being able to understand and identify with something as soon as you see it. Whether this is through a really clever idea, or really striking visual style, or both? Simplicity usually seems to be a good way to achieve this? Also anything that makes you feel something is a success in my mind, whether you can look at it and feel a sense of the mood the person was trying to get across in that work is really important but hard to achieve, its something I'm really struggling with at the moment. 

What is great?

The thought process and consideration that go on behind work are what makes it great, anyone can make something that is technically good, but it takes experimentation with different methods, iterations, roughs and mistakes to actually learn whether what you're putting together is the best it can be. I guess a big part of what makes something look good is selecting the appropriate way to tell your story to best make the point you're trying to make

How is this project exceptional?

At the moment, I'm not feeling too much like its exceptional, which is really making me sad. But I know is largely down to my rubbish mood and feeling so overwhelmed, and it really is a shame because what makes this project so exceptional is that we get the opportunity to tell someone Else's life story through our work any way that we choose. And more than that the people we've been given are fascinating and theres a lot of really amazing information to be conveying in our images. Whilst I've been seeing this as a really scary thing as it means the pressures on to portray as much information as possible in a short amount of time, also doing it in the most effective way possible and do this person justice, I do need to start seeing it as exciting, because it is. And just like with visual narratives which started off so broad and overwhelming, I need to look at what I can do to narrow down my area of research so that I'm only trying to show one small aspect that makes up this mans life. In my head I'm worried that no ones going to understand the outcomes if they're not these all encompassing, complex masterpieces which is ridiculous because we can be as abstract as we like. As long as there is a sense of emotion and feeling that reflects this amazing man and his life in the work I produce then surely the work will have succeeded? I'm just not sure if thats the same thing as it being great.