Sometimes Words are the Nudge You Need
Be brave and create it, even if it gets no attention, because you might be coming up with something truly unique.
One of the mental challenges of pursuing a creative hobby in this “like” driven social media landscape is remembering the reason and motivation for pursuing the hobby in the first place. It’s easy to get caught up in chasing clicks or likes or social media attention. Those things give you a great short term dopamine hit, but they won’t lead to long term feelings of accomplishment or satisfaction with the work you’ve produced. That becomes even more profoundly apparent when you really step back and realize how little those likes actually mean and how many factors besides good quality work go into getting those likes, not the least of which is an algorithm someone at Instagram wrote to promote more engagement to sell ads instead of encouraging good work.
Great photography has the ability to capture a moment and communicate the feeling of the moment well beyond the image on the paper. A single frame from Diane Arbus could take an image of a subject and create a window into the challenges and fatigue of their life. Elliot Erwitt’s photograph of his first wife and child is everything. Erwitt is able to capture and communicate the connection between a mother and her new baby in such an unbelievably powerful way. Having a photograph simultaneously be image and emotion is what we should all strive for.
The interesting balance to strike is creating work that you are proud of that doesn’t chase likes, while sharing that work with the world in a healthy way. Creating images that you never share with the world will limit your ability to grow and develop your skills. One needs to continually add different herbs and spices of perspective into their own creative recipe to create increasingly interesting work.
The first step in that journey is putting the work out there, and putting it out there even when you’re likely to get no response at all. The above quote is from Sean Tucker’s most recent collection of photographs. I consider him to be a little bit of a photography zen guide, and reading the quote gave me the last little nudge I needed to put this site together and find another arena to share my work. I sort of expect this to get very little attention, and very little feedback, but I’ve learned from the few entries into local juried exhibitions I’ve entered that if you take a chance, you very well could get an unexpected success out of it.
For now, I will consider this part of the process of trying to find something truly unique that I can say with the work I produce. Another step in moving from derivative to unique in terms of what I can say with a photograph.
