Personal Expression in Photography - Blog Series Article 4
Developing our Personal Expression
In this article in our series, we address our approach & mindset, along with how we handle feedback on the development of our personal expression.
Firstly, personal expression begins in our inputs (processes) and manifests itself in our outputs (products of our work).
Process vs product – these are different
o Process (inputs) = ideation & creation of the image
o Product (outputs) = content of the image
We all experience personal expression and creativity differently, after all it is personal. However, we should concentrate on the process not the product, it’s the process that makes it personal and allows photographers to proactively input into their work.
“Being able to express oneself well in photography is a journey not a destination”
Can I claim this as a quote? Probably not!
Embarking on a journey of discovery & exploration brings us back to bravery & failures, to stretch our analogy here the failures are the stations along a train journey, each station stopped at is not a failure it’s a waypoint, a moment in the journey, it needs to be passed through. Great things will come of the experience of failing, the learning & the mindset development that ensues. We have to fail to succeed, ask any Olympic athlete.
To remind us: personal expression or a personal style is not a look, it’s a journey of exploration, change, development with some very interesting staging points & outputs along the way. Remember going on holiday as a kid? The excitement & discovery of the journey to the holiday destination was real, so relive it!
The impact of our work on ourselves & others is different for every image or series of work we create. So how do we measure our progress on this journey? Should we be measuring our progress, where does feedback come into this journey?
“Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.”
We should measure progress in terms of our understanding of our development of our photographic process, our learning, and our ability to absorb ideas & then put aspects of this into practice. Don’t measure your progress in terms of the work & outputs, this will come as plaudits along the way, over time. Those plaudits will be self-esteem, based on your personal satisfaction and occasionally externally, don’t forget it’s about you.
So where does feedback come in? Overt evaluation & judgement on your work has a place, but not for everyone & if you embrace this it must be only on your terms, when you are ready, & in the right forum.
The right feedback as you start your journey & ongoing throughout the whole journey is one of conversation, rather than judgement.
We learn the most on reflecting on our experiences, our conversations about our work & that of others. We need to be open minded, flexible in our mindset, open to discovery & change of viewpoint. Once we take on board, at least temporarily, ideas from others and experiment with them we re-establish our childlike learning mentality and lack of fear of failure. Do this & we progress faster, learn more and start to be unconsciously creative.
To tackle what this journey entails, we must allow ourselves to develop our sensibilities & then discover ways to express them.
I want to revisit our sensibilities first mentioned in Article one of this series. Gosh this is a highbrow word, I have heard several photographers talk about Bullshit Photography (excuse my language, but this is about how we feel), expressing sensibilities is a key part of the bullshit they are generally talking about. Here is our definition again:
Sensibilities – thoughts, feelings and emotions, (plus any other personal drivers) expressed through your craft
Sensibilities are personal to all of us, they can be highly altruistic, complex or very simple, they can be deep & meaningful or just simple creative expression, let’s get over this word it’s useful to help our understanding.
If we are going to be more expressive in our work, we need to feed our sensibilities & we can do this in many ways to kickstart or accelerate our journey.
In our mentoring programme we use an approach to building our sensibilities using our Look, Read, Collect, Think stages in photographic development. This is a subject of a later article.
Don’t forget an expressive photograph is not just aesthetically pleasing images (and there will be many times where it may not be that); it does not necessarily need to exhibit prescribed technical qualities either, & often will not & should not. You can express many things and a combination of things within your personal set of niche thoughts, so we need to work on developing the toolset to do so, to provide multi-dimensional avenues to personal expression and/or creativity.
Walk of Fantasy
In our next article in the series we will look at a key toolset to developing your personal expression.
