When I first started, I was deeply involved in conversations about style. What will get me hired? How do I get it? Lately, I’ve come to realize that photography isn’t the magic many beginner photographers think it is.
Why you shouldn’t follow a style
Like most of my articles, my views on the subject are informed more by my artistic practice than by someone who may be interested in other genres of photography. The rest of this article is purely my opinion and how I navigate my photography practice. Your experience may vary.
My point still stands. Having a style is great; it makes a photographer’s work instantly recognizable, which I assume can be commercially hired. But style isn’t really something you can go for, I don’t think so. You can of course focus on technical skills instead. But assuming you’re already at a place in your studies where you have a technical skill set, you should focus on having or developing a point of view: what you want your work to say.
However, how are these different? Style is different from having a point of view or something to say?
For me, my practice is about discovering our relationship with ourselves, with each other, and the world around us. Basically, I’m interested in larger philosophical questions, such as “what is truth?” or “how do we behave in capitalism?” What are some things you are interested in or would like to explore? These are things you can actively write down or read and do in your photography practice. This, in the context of an artist’s statement, is a living document. You can do it in hours or weeks, or even over a longer period of time. But it can (and probably should) change as you do.
Style, on the other hand, is more about how your work looks. In general, a concept or an idea cannot revolve around what things look like. As for me, I tend to stick to minimalistic layouts and selectively use color and form. Not only can you not reasonably develop a style, or navigate it in a way that you direct or direct what your style is, but I think doing so is detrimental.
You figure out what your interests are and what you want to talk about and you do it in a year or two. You work on a series of images and then possibly a series of other images. And then you look back and you find out what popular choices you’re making. This can happen after a year or two or more, but is logically even longer than that.
Equivalent of Photography
Alfred Stieglitz coined the term “equivalence”. This is a simple concept, but an important one to think about when working in the ways described above.
Photography is bound up with the physical world. If I want to make a picture of something, it has to exist near me in the real world. If I want to take a photo of a pizza, I need a pizza in front of me. If I want to take a picture of a horse; similarly, I need a horse in front of me. If I don’t actually have access to an object, I can’t photograph it.
This is all well and good, but when your work involves abstract concepts it gets more complicated. As from previous examples of my work, how do you photograph something that is not an object, such as “truth” or “capitalism”. The long answer is that you have to think of other things that will make people think of these things.
Close the door
Art photography is the creation of images to contribute to a broader artistic discourse. I consider myself a photographer and then an artist, but in this particular corner of the photography world, art must come first. So there’s a certain way, almost, to do things.
What ideas would you like to explore in your photography? And how does that represent your style? Or if you haven’t done it this way and the idea comes before anything else, do you think you’d give it a try right now?
