Once they’ve understood themselves better and discovered what they love to do they can then work to become adept at those activities through ample practice and self-cultivation. Self-cultivation is related to another classical Chinese concept: that effort is what counts the most, more than talent or aptitude. We aren’t limited to our innate talents; we all have enormous potential to expand our abilities if we cultivate them. You don’t have to be stuck doing what you happen to be good at; merely pay attention to what you love and proceed from there. Chinese philosophers taught that paying attention to small clues “can literally change everything that we can become as human beings,” says Puett.

I think early on I fell into something that fits my personality. I like meeting strangers and striking up conversations, getting invited to see otherwise hidden places. The idea of candid moments can be quite flexible and there seems to be a wide spectrum of possibilities in this way of working. When you are in front of someone a curtain of happenstance often opens, it is unpredictable, it is that unexpected thing that can happen when being with somebody.

It took two volumes just to faithfully reproduce the mock-up with 450 photographs, accompanied by a third volume of text and information on each image. With it, Mr. Smith finally gets the control he always fought for. Still, it is a strange experience. The original book dummy consisted of such poor-quality reproductions that the images had an ethereal feel. Family photos and surrealistic scenes are mixed with his famous frames that are used out of context. The combination feels extremely modern and puts to rest any notion of Mr. Smith’s work being dated. It provides a glimpse into his sometimes disturbing — and occasionally drug-addled — mind.

Contrary to popular belief, creative thinking does not equal “thinking with the right side of your brain”. It involves recruitment from both halves of your brain, not just the right. Creative cognition involves divergent thinking (a wide range of topics/subjects), making remote associations between ideas, switching back and forth between conventional and unconventional thinking (cognitive flexibility), and generating original, novel ideas that are also appropriate to the activity you are doing. In order to do this well, you need both right and left hemispheres working in conjunction with each other.

What is boring photography? I do think that there is such a thing. But it’s not tied to the visual drama in the pictures. In other words, I vehemently reject the correlation between a lack of visual drama and something being boring. Phrased alternatively, photographs with a lot of visual drama can still be incredibly boring, while the most minimalist pictures can contain large amounts of wonder (however you want to define that “wonder”).

Then there are all the fussy collages of cut-up porn, furniture catalogues, ads, Internet screen-grabs, modernist architecture, urban wastelands, endangered species, sixties protests, or (of course) art-historical jpegs. We also see small-scale, colored, neatly framed, or cut-up photographs about photography. All of this Neo-Mannerism is an art of infinite regress. Defensive. Predictable. Safe. Well-defended. Loved by brainy magazines, websites, and curators but so far up its own ass that it can’t breathe.

Many believe that this move from fixed to fluid is not exactly new, and instead a return to the oral cultures of much earlier eras. Danish academic Thomas Pettitt’s theory is that the whole period after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press - of moveable type, the text, the 500 years of print-dominated information, between the 15th and the 20th centuries - was just a pause; it was just an interruption in the usual flow of human communication. He calls this the Gutenberg Parenthesis. The web, says Pettitt, is returning us to a pre-Gutenberg state in which we are defined by oral traditions: flowing and ephemeral.