I’ve always tried to understand things: how objects are built (I was the kind of kid that wanted to understand how his toys were made), how knowledge works (that led me to a PhD), and what makes me tick. When I started photography, that also became something I looked at to understand its mechanisms and how I relate to it.
That is why I started a newsletter on Substack. And it created a strange and unexpected feedback loop.
My goal was with this newsletter was simple: think about what photography means to me. I’d been doing that privately, in my head or on scraps of paper, but doing it publicly forced regularity and honesty. I had to articulate things I’d previously left vague.
I wasn’t sure I’d last more than a couple of months. Three newsletters and hundreds of posts later, something unexpected happened. The writing changed how I photograph.
Explaining your photos to yourself has two goals. First, understand what works for you and what gives you pleasure. Second, do more of it. It sounds obvious, but a lot of photographers miss this. They shoot, accumulate images, maybe post the best ones, then move on. No reflection, no analysis, no attempt to identify patterns in what they’re drawn to.
Writing forced me to look at my own craft critically. Not judgmentally, critically. What am I actually doing here? Why did I stop for this particular moment and not the hundred others I walked past? What’s consistent across the images I keep returning to?
The world that my writing reflected to me wasn’t what I expected at the start. I’d always seen photography as primarily technical. Get the exposure right, nail the focus, follow the rules of composition. That’s how I evaluated images. Mine and others. But when I started explaining what I actually responded to in my photos, technique barely featured. Or if it did, it was taken as a given. What mattered was something harder to articulate. A sense that the image was necessary rather than just possible.
That realisation changed my practice. I stopped caring about perfect edits. I used to spend hours making my photos exactly what I wanted them to be, at the pixel level. Most of my photos now get minimal processing, sometimes none. Not because I’m lazy or purist, but because heavy editing was solving problems I no longer cared about. The images that matter to me work straight out of camera or they don’t work at all. Trying to fix them in post just revealed they weren’t worth taking in the first place.
The themes that interested me also changed. I used to take primarily landscapes. But my writing made me realise that it wasn’t what really interested me anymore. I wanted more human. I wanted more story (or what approximated it to me). I wanted to be more a witness of existence.
That led me to reconsider the meaning of various genres. For example, I’d dismissed street photography for years as lazy work for people who couldn’t commit to proper projects and get up early in the morning to be on location a couple of hours before golden hour. Too easy, too reliant on chance, too performative. Then I started writing about why I felt that way, trying to articulate the dismissal. In explaining my resistance, I had to understand what street photographers were actually doing. That understanding made me curious. Curiosity led to trying it myself.
Turns out I was wrong about most of it. Street photography isn’t lazy, it’s alert. It requires constant attention, the ability to see potential in chaos, quick decisions under uncertainty, understanding the world to be ready when the important happens. And above all: it makes you see people. I’m not good at it yet, possibly never will be, but exploring it has opened up my practice in ways I didn’t expect. I see differently now when I walk through cities. I’m more attuned to human behaviour, to the small dramas playing out in public space.
None of that would have happened without the feedback loop writing created. Explain something to yourself and you’re forced to examine whether you actually believe it. Often you don’t, or you discover your reasons are weaker than you thought, or you realise you’re operating on assumptions you’ve never tested. You disagree with yourself.
The process works at every level. Look at an individual photo and ask: what’s working here? Not in abstract terms, specifically. Is it the light? The relationship between elements? The expression? The timing? Then ask: have I seen this before in my craft? Am I drawn to similar moments repeatedly? If yes, that’s information. That’s your visual language starting to reveal itself.
Do this enough and patterns emerge. You start noticing what you photograph instinctively versus what you force yourself to photograph because you think you should. The gap between those two is where honesty lives. Close that gap and your work becomes more coherent, more distinctly yours.
I didn’t start this newsletter thinking it would change how I photograph. I thought it would be commentary on photography, separate from practice or a consequence of practice. But explaining forces clarity, and in return clarity changes action. Writing about what I thought photography should be made me confront what it actually is for me. Those weren’t the same thing.
You don’t need a public newsletter for this. You just need to explain your photos to yourself regularly and honestly. Write it down, speak it aloud, whatever works. The medium doesn’t matter. What matters is the act of articulation. Vague feelings about images stay vague until you force them into words. Once articulated, they become actionable.
Understand what works for you. Then do more of it. Everything else is distraction. A lot of photographers never get there because they never stop to ask the question. They’re too busy shooting, editing, posting, collecting likes, moving on. The work accumulates but never deepens because there’s no reflection driving it forward.
I’ve taken thousands of photos I no longer care about. They exist, they’re fine, they mean nothing to me. The photos I can explain, the ones where I know exactly why I stopped and what I was responding to, those are the only ones that matter. There aren’t many of them yet. But there are more now than before I started writing, and the ratio keeps improving.
That’s the feedback loop. Explain yourself to yourself. Your practice will follow.
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