Artistic Dismantling
I’ve been having one helluva time this year with my own creativity and photographic direction. This has even crossed into questioning my own personal identity…an even deeper journey I have actually made some strides in recently. The two being incredibly intermingled; creative direction and personal identity.
And maybe that’s exactly what is supposed to be happening.
Since completing my master’s degree in photography, I’ve found myself questioning so many of the artistic decisions I once made without hesitation. I’m questioning what I photograph, why I photograph it, how I present it, and even what I want my photographs to say or make people feel. Work that once felt completely aligned with who I was as a person and an artist suddenly feels less certain. Ideas I might have pursued enthusiastically a few years ago no longer hold the same attraction. Even photographs I’m proud of can sometimes feel as though they belong to a version of myself I’m beginning to move beyond.
It has been uncomfortable. At times, incredibly frustrating and even depressing. There have been many days I’ve told myself I’m going to go shoot because I feel I have to and then don’t. I want to be excited and inspired again.
Graduate school didn’t simply teach me more about photography. It taught me to interrogate my own work. Why this subject? Why this composition? Why this treatment? Why does this photograph need to exist? What am I actually trying to communicate, and am I making choices because they serve the work, or because they are familiar and comfortable? I made so many discoveries and opened my mind to so many possibilities. Sometimes it feels almost like having a little craving for something sweet when standing in front of 3 aisles filled with sweets from top to bottom. It’s overwhelming.
Once you have access to so much more information and learn to start asking these types of questions, it becomes very difficult to stop wondering and stop asking them.
There’s an irony in becoming more educated within our crafts: increased knowledge doesn’t necessarily bring increased certainty, perfection, understanding, or clarity. Sometimes it does exactly the opposite. The more I learned, the more aware I became of how many possibilities existed, how many decisions I had previously made almost instinctively, and inspired me to ask myself what kind of decisions do I want to make now.
That realization has sent me into what I can only describe as an uncomfortable period of artistic dismantling. I’ve been pulling apart assumptions about my photography that I’ve carried for years. I’ve been looking at my own work differently. I’ve been experimenting, second-guessing, abandoning ideas, returning to old ones, and occasionally wondering whether I have any idea what I’m doing at all.
For someone who has spent years developing a recognizable body of work, this can be unsettling. But I’m also beginning to understand that uncertainty can be incredibly fertile ground.
This has been a strange place between work I’ve known how to make and work I haven’t made yet. The old language and doesn’t fit into the new… I cannot articulate the change, the route, or the destination, which makes it hard to know where I am. Part of me has felt like I’m falling behind and I’m losing months of production, but I’ve realized this isn’t necessarily something I should try to rush through, either. Perhaps this discomfort isn’t standing in the way of growth, but that the discomfort is the growth. I’m just not sure what type seeds have been planted yet.
Given that my own work has increasingly explored impermanence, resilience, and overlooked details, I’m beginning to recognize an interesting parallel. The same themes I’ve been drawn to photographically, transition, adaptation, and ephemerality, are also becoming part of my own experience as an artist. Perhaps, without fully realizing it, I haven’t simply been photographing these ideas. I’ve been living them.
Maybe some of this artistic evolution is also rooted in questions about my own identity. There was a time when I defined myself, in part, by the things I did; I traveled the world, scuba dived in faraway places, and backpacked into remote stretches of the mountains where my photography was a perfect mate. But in recent years, life has shifted. I’ve made choices to support my family and build a business, and many of the experiences that once helped define me are no longer such a prominent part of my life. Perhaps part of what I’m wrestling with artistically is also a larger question: if those things no longer describe me in quite the same way, who am I now and what does that mean for the work I make? Perhaps some of the struggle is mourning the loss of a past life in a sense.
I’m beginning to recognize that what I’ve been experiencing may not be a creative crisis necessarily…it’s an evolution. This profound realization just hit me last month when I was edited and then delivered a presentation to a camera club on uncovering our artistic voice. I presented the idea that a path to uncovering your voice is by way of a journey that includes evolving. The first slide I shared under the Paths to Discovery is titled “Remember Photography as an Evolution.” I used bullet points that stated
Think of photography in an autobiographical way
Look at your work is a self-annotated account of your photographic life, detailing your experiences, growth, development, and insights
Consider how your influences change and how you discover new things you gravitate towards
Your photography becomes something that develops, adapts, and deepens as you do
Your artistic voice isn't something you find. It's something you learn to recognize and evolve with. Perhaps the larger lesson is that you may never fully arrive as evolution is a constant.
I hung the word “Evolution” on a massive white-board in my mind and now find myself sketching out smaller words and ideas around it. And then, erasing them and starting again.
I have felt very alone in this process. And yet, I also believe the destination is a place I have to at arrive on my own. What I’ve discovered, however, is that I’m far from the only artist currently questioning their own artistic path. There are others navigating their own versions of this uneasy growth, shaped by different experiences, different circumstances, and different questions. There is something reassuring in knowing that while the path itself may be deeply personal, the uncertainty is not mine alone.
While I believe our artistic reassembly has to come from traveling on our individual path. I’m curious what your thoughts are on this subject. Maybe we can share some positive dialogue to put on our mental white-boards as we continue to evolve.