Photographers often pride themselves on knowing who they are and what they do. In fact, a lot of us believe that it is a requirement to do good stuff. But this leads to a kind of self-deception that is hard to catch because it doesn’t feel like lying: we all have a story about the story we carry around, what attracts us, and what our work is about. That story is misleading us.
Most photographers mistake it for self-awareness. In reality, it is a filter that stands between them and reality. That reality of what we’re making coming through the filter is distorted in both directions: images that don’t really work are inflated and praised, and others that do work, sometimes on an unconscious level, are dismissed
for example, a photographer that decided he was a poet of everyday life will find poetry in images that a stranger would dismiss as pointless. The formalist would discover pleasant formality in images that are nothing more than competent snapshots. The self-described street photographer will find meaning and intent in photographs that aren’t anything more than pure luck.
None of these photographers is really lying. They didn’t set to create a bubble around them to isolate themselves from the reality of what they do. If anything, they would hate living within that bubble. Their belief in what they do is real. But they simply read their work through the filter of their prejudice and the preconception of who they are.
The solution, in principle, is simple: stop asking yourself about your work and ask the world. What you felt at the instant when you pressed the shutter needs to be decoupled from what the resulting photographs actually are. Your intent was tainted by your understanding of yourself. Patterns in the photos don’t lie the way intentions do. By letting the photographs talk for themselves, you’ll discover things that consciously or unconsciously were included in them. And you can only notice them after the fact.
The best way to do this is what I think of as the stranger test: show your photos to someone who doesn’t know you, without explanation or context, without any indication of what you’re aiming for. Let them look at them and tell you what they think. Their responses will be clean and free of your self-filter because they have no investment in who your ego thinks it is, what you’re trying to show the world, and what you hope to have done.
Most photographers never run that test in those conditions. And admittedly, it’s hard. It’s not something you can just do on social media because your viewers won’t spend enough time looking at your photos to try to understand them. If they don’t create an instant dopamine hit, they’ll move on. If you show them to your friends or family, they’ll want to spare your feelings and encourage you, rather than be completely honest.
To be honest, I’m totally guilty of that. I show very few of my photographs because I feel like I’m taking them for myself. Even my projects aren’t really for public consumption. And as I grew up in the pre-internet world, I don’t feel I need strangers’ validation. So, nothing pushes me to show what I do to strangers. The closer I’ve been to doing it consistently was when I was a member of camera clubs: members of the clubs would be supportive and therefore not entirely honest, but judges during competitions who don’t know you, won’t ever talk to you, and often you’ve never heard of, will be that 100% honest soundboard.
As a result, I certainly don’t feel what I do is strong yet. I know it has lots of bias, I know it’s in part what I want reflected back to me. My thinking has evolved considerably over the last couple of years, in part because of my Substack newsletters that force a minimum of honesty. But the photography hasn’t kept up.
Self-image doesn’t just limit your ability to evaluate your photos honestly, it actively controls what you make. When you photograph to confirm who you think you are as a photographer, you stop noticing things that don’t fit the narrative. As a result, you miss opportunities, you stop noticing certain things, the images that would challenge your self-image don’t get made at all. The work calcifies around a version of you that may have nothing to do with who you actually are behind the camera.
Dropping the self-image doesn’t mean having no direction. It means letting direction come from the work rather than from the story you’ve been telling about the work. Those two things can look identical from the outside for a long time. Eventually, they don’t.
#Photography #Opinion #IMatBeWrong #theory