The Evolving Photographer

I am not the photographer I once was—and neither are you. Change is inevitable (and desirable), and as you look at your work, I hope you see that change reflected in the photographs you have made. As the months and years roll by, the camera becomes a little more familiar, a little less intimidating. At some point, it just feels like a part of you: your fingers moving to buttons without conscious thought, your hands moving the whole rig left and right to frame compositions you aren’t aware you’ve envisioned. Slowly, ever so slowly, you become the photographer you are. Some of that is intentional, and some of it feels like it just…happens. And some of it is hard-earned, a matter of trial and error and (finally!) figuring out that one technical problem that’s been dogging you for years. The pictures become better when you experience this kind of growth.

Some of that growth forward is personal rather than technical, an evolution that is tied to the way you think and feel and see the world. It’s often this progress that is the most noticeable. A moment of courage to try something different, like the way (for example) so many people experiment with intentional camera movement, and it becomes their new thing. A moment of curiosity when you think, “I just want to try something,” and that something is so fascinating to you that it becomes one of those threads that unravels the sweater the more you pull it, only in reverse, because in this metaphor, the sweater becomes more complete, not less. Over time, this kind of growth leads to images that are not just good, but truly your own.

One could argue (here I go!) that the first kind of growth is a movement forward in craft, and that the second represents an onward journey in vision. The former satisfies the technician in us, the latter satisfies the artist. Both are necessary, perhaps not in the same measure, but I’ve found that they feed each other, even require each other. Learning some new technique, even just playing with some new piece of gear, gives me glimpses of creative possibilities I had never considered, and the technician nudges the artist forward. The artist, ever curious and disinclined to sit still, tries to do something, imagines something they don’t know quite how to do, and the technician is called in to figure it out, to find new ways or new tools. And the artist moves into new territory, makes something different than they’ve ever made or even imagined before.

The technician pushes the artist in us forward; the artist pulls the technician into places they’ve never been needed before. Iron sharpens iron, as they say.

I have long felt that this tension is one of the keys to growth. Most of us naturally fall more to one side than the other (artist or technician), but that’s not a liability; it’s an opportunity. It’s the way forward for the photographer who wants to evolve and keep up with the human being they are becoming. That tension is a gap—a space into which we can move—and it’s key to our evolution.

The question of growth or evolution is often phrased in the negative: how do I get unstuck? How do I escape my rut? Sometimes (often?) it just feels like boredom, a deep sense of dissatisfaction or ennui, but the need to escape from it remains. Everything hinges on opening the gap, or finding where it already exists, and exploring it. The tools of that exploration are curiosity, challenge, and change.

Learn New Things

Curiosity is the exploration of a knowledge gap. You realize you don’t know something, and a fissure opens. You can either shrug it off, accept a posture of “don’t know, don’t care,” or you can give yourself over to curiosity and peek inside. Sometimes that peek reveals something new that doesn’t particularly draw you in; other times, your eyes blink a little in the darkness, and what you see is a cave of wonders that invites you deeper. To accept that invitation, you move forward. Perhaps it’s the moment you look through the macro lens and see an entirely new world of colour and shape. Maybe it’s a first experience with a subject that so intrigues you that it pulls you down one of those rabbit holes from which you never really emerge.

Want to evolve as a photographer and get out of your rut? Nurture your curiosity, ask questions, follow the gaps in your knowledge, and you will open yourself to new directions in your work.

Do Hard Things

Challenge, often seen as an obstacle to our best work, is instead the way forward into it. I’ve said it so often it’s beginning to sound like a mantra: your creativity needs something to push against. It needs a problem to solve. Challenge leads to flow, but it also sets the stage for the kinds of microfailures that lead to learning, and learning pulls us forward. Learning is the engine of evolution and growth. If you want to continue growing as an artist, you must continually find new challenges, even create new challenges for yourself.

When people ask me how they get out of their rut, what they’re telling me is they’re bored.

Boredom comes when we lack challenge. Like curiosity, which is willfully stepping into a knowledge gap, taking up challenge is stepping into a gap created by what we can and can’t do (yet) or what we believe we can or can’t do. Bite off more than you think you can chew and see where it leads.

Do Different Things (In Different Ways)

Change is hard. But no growth happens without it. When you evolve into a new person doing new things in new ways, you must leave the old things behind. Scary. Hard. But that’s the cost. If the idea of pursuing your curiosity or creating challenge for yourself is a little too abstract, this one is concrete: do something differently. Change what you do. Change how you do it. Photograph new things. Photograph in new ways.

Most of us resist change, choosing to avoid it rather than chase it down. But it’s the price demanded by life if we’re to grow. We don’t love to be in a rut, but it’s so much more comfortable than change. Change is unpredictable. It’s the devil you don’t know. It’s scary. Change threatens the labels we apply to ourselves, and by which others recognize us. Change can alter the story we tell about ourselves: I was a travel/humanitarian photographer, now I seem to be a wildlife photographer. It’s difficult to know what to do with that, but unless we’re willing to explore it, we’ll never move forward into it.

All of this can be said about our passage through life. You don’t grow into the new without letting go of the old. For some, the struggle is to accept that; for others, the struggle is to accelerate it. If you’re among the latter and you long to move forward in your art, consider being more proactive about nurturing your curiosity, accepting and even chasing challenge, and re-evaluating your relationship with change. 

Learn new things, do hard things, and do different things (differently), and you’ll move forward. Life, and your art, will also be so much more interesting. 😉

For the Love of the Photograph,
David