I often find myself wishing that we could live our lives with built-in blinders. How would we live them differently if we weren’t affected by the words and actions of others living their lives around us?
There have been countless situations in which I’ve based my choices around what others will think, what others have done, what works and doesn’t work for other people. What is the first thing we do when we have a big decision to make? We consult others. We ask our friends and our peers for their recommendations. We research the experiences that other people have had when faced with similar choices. We base everything around what others have succeeded or failed with.
This rings especially true when it comes to photographers. In this age, it is nearly impossible to stand out as a photographer. There are so many of us; the market is so saturated. The teacher of a photography course I took said that in order to be successful in your photography business, you need to be in the top ten percentile in your region. In a region like the Lower Mainland and Vancouver, that is a daunting task.
It is difficult to escape the tendency to view the work of the successful photographers who are in that top ten percentile and not model your work after them, even subconsciously. It’s only natural to look at their photographs and their way of interacting with their clients and thinking, hey, this is clearly what works – this is what I should be doing, too.
I’m not referring to plagiarizing or outright stealing of ideas, but the subtleties that photographers tend to pick up about other photographers. There are subtle details in shooting style, post-processing techniques, and interactions with clients that the clients themselves might not even notice. Stealing is one thing, but being affected by the style of another photographer – basing our own decisions on equipment, shooting, post-processing and marketing techniques on the success or failure of other photographers – is very difficult to escape.
It isn’t always a bad thing to be affected this way by our role models and our peers. It is entirely possible to gain a new perspective from another photographer that we admire and take it in a whole new direction, with our own twist. The trouble comes when you’re so overexposed to what others are doing with their work that you lose sight of what your work is, what your style is. How can you stand out in this saturated market when you yourself don’t even know what makes you unique?
The bad news is that you can’t search for what makes you unique. You can’t go on an epic journey of self exploration and hope to come back with some key thing or another that suddenly makes you unlike every other photographer around you. There is no such thing as a truly original thought or idea. I believe that. Billions of souls have lived and thought and created and there is nothing we can do that no one has ever considered before. There is only one truly unique thing in this world, and that is the collection of thoughts, ideas, flaws, talents, perspectives, mistakes, and successes that make up one individual person. Everything about ourselves, all those things combined make us a truly unique individual that no one else can duplicate. This is our only hope for standing out.
This is what leads me to the thought that it would be much easier to go through life with blinders on. If our only option was to do only what occurs naturally to us, to our self, most of us would be starkly different people than who we are right now. But of course, it’s impossible to live life that way one hundred percent of the time, and it’s probably a good thing. How other people affect us often makes us better people. However, my new goal when it comes to my art is, for one, to view my work as that – as art – first and foremost. Art is meant to reflect what is inside the artist; it comes entirely from our own being. For that reason alone it is unique.
My other new goal for my art is to turn on my blinders and start creating what comes naturally to me. I won’t be affected by what others like and dislike. I won’t be affected by what sells and what doesn’t. I won’t be affected by the techniques that other people use. I won’t be affected by what other artists consider to be art – or what they consider not to be art. From now on, the only thing that my photos will reflect is me.
