{"id":7216,"date":"2026-10-02T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/?p=7216"},"modified":"2026-09-21T20:43:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T18:43:08","slug":"the-work-is-what-you-show-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/2026\/10\/02\/the-work-is-what-you-show-others\/","title":{"rendered":"The Work is What You Show Others"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Most of my photos are never seen by anyone. Not even my family and friends. I take a fair number of them, though nothing like what I shot twenty years ago, and only a tiny fraction ever makes it out of my computer. A photo per post on Substack, another as a postcard<\/a> every month, a few in a zine<\/a> every once in a while, that\u2019s pretty much it. I didn\u2019t grow up in a social media world, I don\u2019t feel that I need to constantly share to exist. The rest lives on hard drives. I edit them, sometimes print them, put them in books<\/a>, and nobody knows any of it happened. That\u2019s entirely on purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Walking in the countryside<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t call my photographs my work<\/em> (I\u2019ve said before that I hate the word, but I\u2019ve never found a better one). For me, work<\/em> means something very specific: it\u2019s what I\u2019ve shared. The photos that crossed from my private world into someone else\u2019s consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once a photo crosses into the world, it stops being mine to revise. I could reprocess the file because I have new ideas or I learned new techniques, but it doesn\u2019t matter: I can\u2019t update the copy in people\u2019s head, and the version that someone saw is the version they keep forever. Once a photo is shared, it\u2019s done: it can be collected, discussed, ignored, or stolen. It\u2019s no longer yours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything else is practice<\/em>. It\u2019s all the invisible photos, all the potential master pieces (hum!), all the processing left to do. It\u2019s the hidden part of the photography craft iceberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unshared photos are still in flux as far as the world is concerned. They\u2019re potential that hasn\u2019t realised into work<\/em>. As long as they haven\u2019t been seen by anyone, they haven\u2019t become fixed objects yet. Even a printed photo can be reprocessed and reprinted, and you can destroy the evidence of previous incarnations if you want. Nobody will know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m aware that work<\/em> in the artistic tradition tends to mean total output: everything ever made by the artist, including the notebooks, the sketches, the failures rotting in a drawer, the boxes of negatives and the unfinished canvases. That\u2019s not how I use the word. For me, work<\/em> implies an exchange, a contract of some kind between a producer and a consumer. Something is made, it enters someone else\u2019s experience, and that transaction is what freezes the object in its current state. From then on, the photo isn\u2019t entirely yours anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The crossing doesn\u2019t have to be done deliberately by the artist, and for example in Vivian Maier\u2019s case, it wasn\u2019t: her photos went unshared her entire life to eventually shared, and now they\u2019re firmly part of a body of work she will never know exists. Posthumous exchange is still exchange. By my own definition, her photographs were practice<\/em> her whole life, and the crossing that converted them into work<\/em> happened without her. My own photos may yet become work<\/em> after I\u2019m gone<\/a>, without my say-so. I have no control over that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So work<\/em> only exists when there is sharing. That\u2019s why most of my photographs are only practice<\/em> and will remain that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

#Photography #IMayBeWrong #Opinion<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of my photos are never seen by anyone. Not even my family and friends. I take a fair number of them, though nothing like what I shot twenty years ago, and only a tiny fraction ever makes it out of my computer. A photo per post on Substack, another as a postcard every month, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7216"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8184,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7216\/revisions\/8184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}