Daily Inspiration Quote by Imogen Cunningham

A bracing kind of mercy hides in Cunningham's blunt classroom verdict: make work to throw away. Coming from a photographer who spent decades refining an eye for line, texture, and intimacy, the wastebasket isn't contempt; it's a tool. She is trying to sever students from the addictive fantasy that each assignment should be a portfolio piece, a proof of talent, a miniature legacy. In photography especially, that fantasy is paralyzing. The camera records too faithfully; beginners start performing for the imagined judge instead of looking.

The line also smuggles in a modernist ethic: process over product, experiments over monuments. Cunningham worked through eras when photography fought for recognition as art, then watched it become ubiquitous. Her insistence that classwork is disposable pushes against the market's hunger for "keepers" and the cult of the single iconic image. It says: your job here is to risk bad pictures on purpose, to learn what failure looks like up close, to discover that taste is trained by rejecting your own drafts.

There's a teacher's hard pragmatism, too. A classroom is not an exhibition; it's a lab. The wastebasket is where imitation goes, where overthinking goes, where the dutiful, correct image goes. What survives isn't the sheet of paper or the print, but the student's sharpened attention - the only thing that actually compounds over time.