photography

Don't quit

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Talent is great, a good camera helps a lot, and having the resources to travel is amazing. But no matter where we start, the gear, or the locations we have access to, the biggest factor for our work is time. There’s no shortcut, no substitute for showing up, over and over, year after year, decade after decade. And doing it in a sustainable way.

Mastery through consistency

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“The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it” — Edward Weston

I’ve talked about consistency many times on this blog.

We need to give our tools and style some time to mature, we need to give ourselves enough room to grow with our current tools. Don’t try to photograph everything, focus on a few things.

Obsessed

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In 1977, on the sidewalk outside his loft on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, the fifty-eight-year-old W. Eugene Smith watched from a wheelchair as some two dozen volunteers—mostly young photography students paying homage—loaded his life’s work into two shipping trucks.

When the shipment arrived in Tucson, it filled a high school gymnasium and spilled into outlying rooms.

Included in the shipment were three thousand matted and unmatted master prints; hundreds of thousands of meticulous 5 x 7 work prints; hundreds of thousands of negatives and contact sheets. There were hundreds of pocket spiral notebooks and thousands of 3 x 5 note cards with scribbled notes; maps and diagrams from all over the world; and hundreds of boxes of clipped magazine and newspaper articles. Smith wrote hundreds of fifteen-page single-spaced letters to family, friends, and people he barely knew, and he mimeographed copies before mailing them. There were dozens of cameras, various pieces of darkroom equipment, trash cans and boxes full of loose lens caps, rubber bands, and paper clips. Smith also had 25,000 vinyl records and 3,750 books.

[Smith’s] death certificate read “stroke” but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of “everything.” He was flat worn out. He’d given up. He left eighteen dollars in the bank, and forty-four thousand pounds of materials.

Gene Smith's Sink: A wide-angle view

I’ve long argued that you need to be obsessed if you want to become great at something. But Eugene Smith took this to extreme.

We have to commit to our art with either intensity or longevity. They are almost mutually exclusive, as ferocious intensity can’t be maintained for too long. Even if your mind can hold, your body will eventually fail, as happened to Smith. He died at 58, leaving many years of potential growth and work on the table.

Consistency and a healthier balance over a long period of time are usually the wiser choice.

Originality is overrated

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I believe that trying to be original for the sake of it is counterproductive, and ultimately impossible. Instead of worrying about what others have or haven’t done, we should focus on being true to ourselves and photographing subjects that resonate with us. If that’s an iconic location, so be it. If it’s something no one else has photographed before, that’s great. Perhaps it's a combination of both.

Websites vs Social Media for photographers

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With TikTok facing a potential ban and Instagram ruining profile grids, many creators are questioning if building a presence on social media is worth the effort, given the uncertainty of the medium.

I’ve always advocated for personal websites and blogs: a platform you can truly own, free from the whims of tech billionaires. At the same time, though, I don’t shy away from sharing my work on social media.

These days, a website feels like opening a studio in a quiet, rundown part of town, while everyone is hanging out at the mall. It is flashy, lively, and all the cool kids are there. They even offer us a little corner for free, so we can speak our truths to the whole world.

That’s until the mall starts charging a fee and diverting visitors to the business placing the highest bids. Over time, you also realize that even though you got to interact with a lot of visitors, most of those interactions were fleeting. You’ve never seen those people ever again.

Yet, among the noise, meaningful connections still happen every now and then at the mall. While I’ve connected with fellow photographers through my or their websites, most of my relationships with people in this field have come through social media.

This has never been a case of the website or social media, but about embracing both the website and social media. The most beautiful, personal website is useless if no one ever visits; and your social media presence relies on whatever happens to please the owner that day of the week.

There’s no ideal solution to the problem of reaching an audience in this noisy, loud world. I believe that embracing both worlds is the best we can do.