One of the hardest thing in photography isn’t to learn how to use the camera or define your vision. It’s learning to trust your judgment when nobody is around to help you.
I started photography in the early-ish internet. The place was very different from what it is now. Forums were the main form of mass communication (IRC doesn’t really count, it was too specialised), people gave constructive feedback, and nobody was performing for an algorithm. There was no pressure to post all the time, no instant opinion on you and what you do, and growing a following wasn’t a thing or a goal in itself. You could post a photo and wait a week to get a single comment. That was normal.
That slow pace had one huge advantage: you had to build self-reliance. You couldn’t expect instant feedback to know what pleases viewers. Feedback was of course important, and I was looking for it because I started from absolute zero knowledge of photography. But that feedback was only a calibration tool, not the purpose of what I was doing. That gavbe me time to ingest and understand feedback, think about the next step, and adjust. No performance metrics nonsense for pressure.
It’s a lot oarder to do that now. In part because external stimulation constantly interrupts you: you have a phone with notifications, thousands of people checking (or being shown) what you’ve posted, no respite between photos. Access to a large number of eye is often seen as an advantage: more information, more feedback. But a beginner today is at the mercy of a system that rewards frequency, an algorithm that is designed to generate outrage, and a crowd of people who don’t care about you. Honestly, if I had started today, I would have quite and moved on to some other hobby.
For me, self-reliance covers two things: craft judgement, i.e. the ability to assess whether what you have done matches your vision, is technically good, and fulfills your goal. The second could be called emotional validation, i.e. the need to have someone validate your actions and your decisions. Both problems are taken care of by the same mechanism: when you have spent enough time taking (bad) photos, enough time looking at them to understand why they were bad, judgment and confidence emerge together. External confirmation stop being necessary because you have built your own evaluation system.
Capa knew which photographs were his best work. Shore knows which images belong in a sequence and which don’t. Neither of them built their thought system through collecting likes and reassurance. They built it through relentless work, until they had reached a point where internal standards were sufficient to guide them. You can see it in their archives.
A simple (and naive) for of this argument is “I photograph for myself”. It can mean the same thing as self-reliance if it is done honestly. If it is a means to ignore the reality of negative feedback, then that’s another animal.
This doesn’t mean that external feedback isn’t important. Early on, before your internal standards are built, it’s crutial. It provides the calibration data you need to learn. But once you spend enough time with it, you use it to build your own standards that don’t need to follow everyone else’s. For example, Picasso built his own standards and produced some of the most significant works of the 20th century. But he didn’t start there. He started early in his life learning to draw and paint properly (and he was very good at it at an early age). He learned first from feedback to be good at what other people expected, then built his own standards away from it.
But that external feedback can only exist in an environment that doesn’t punish being slow and considerate. It needs years of practice. The content machine is specifically designed to avoid that.
I show very few of my photos, and that’s deliberate. Most of what I photograph is personal, made for reasons that have nothing to do with whether anyone else finds them interesting. It doesn’t mean that I hide bad photos or that I’m happy creating meh images. I apply the same rules to all the photos I create (which sometimes leads me to go against the needs to the genre). The photos I share are selected for different reasons from why I make them: they might amuse, document a trip, or contain something worth showing to someone who’s not me. They have an external motivation to be shared and are made with that in mind from the start.
Learning the difference between those two categories, and being ok with the fact that most of your output belongs in the first one, is what self-reliance is in practice. It’s also what it looks like to take photography seriously.
#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong #Self-Reliance