It’s either you or them.
You’re the message or the messenger.
You’re more, or you’re less.
This is an industry with too many debates and too much chatter. Talks that do nothing but distract you from the point of it all. Questions like film or digital, DSLR or mirrorless, Canon or Nikon, presets or pure.
With rare exception, they’re red herrings.
It’s Not About What’s Right
Art’s power comes from its mutability.
It lets us explore possibility, unshackling us from conformity. The point isn’t to find the right answer. It’s to find our own answers. And suggesting that there’s one way, some way, or the way will only cripple the pursuit.
In Structural(ism) and Photography, Lew Thomas argues “every visual image or system of images is equally biased…based on the tacit proposition that the structural relationships of the system are internally valid.”
In other words, the question isn’t what’s right. It’s something much more human: Do all the elements fit together? Does it work?
In the TV show Friends (let’s go old school here), to comfort Rachel after she accidentally makes a shepherd’s pie with bananas, cream, and beef, Joey proclaims “What’s not to like? Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, good!” But, of course, the humor reveals a greater truth. It’s not what works in isolation. It’s what works together.
Abstract discussions about process and technology cannot answer this.
Does your process get you the result you need? Do your pictures show your vision in a cohesive way? If so, who cares about the rest?
Summarizing the value of our life experience in questions of simple mechanics insults us.
We must be more.
Industry and Oppression
The Wedding Industrial Complex will tell you what to say. What to do. How to be. It’s going to tell you to dwell in conformity when who we are is exactly how we resist it.
Sure, you can copy the look, climb the ladder, be part of the cooler than thou. But it never ends. It’s a climb that doesn’t stop.
Or you can be yourself.
But make no mistake. The Wedding Industrial Complex will push back. It will make you feel weak, when you’re strong. It will make you feel lost, when you’re found. It will make you feel like a fraud, when you’re you.
It will deny your truest and boldest self, because your truest and boldest self exists outside of the complex.
But we only have so much identity capital, and it’s too precious to spare just to pray to the gods of style and cool. Do not listen.
We’re Still Not There
As an industry, we’ve matured. Our technique is now bullet proof. Our skill can shock and awe.
But it’s not enough.
We’re an industry chasing the chase, looking for the next big thing, deifying its leaders, where fine art is a label instead of a practice, reading Kinfolk makes you a style expert, and the rest of photographic history remains as foggy as a night in San Francisco.
Even a lot of the most talented and enthusiastic making their way up the food chain—people fully capable of rattling off every winner of the Rangefinder 30—scarcely recognize the work of the giants among us.
We need to go further.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Eugene Richards or Eugene Smith. Paolo Roversi or Paolo Pellegrin. Martin Parr or Martin Schoeller. Names like Jeff Wall, Sophie Calle, and Cindy Sherman are less than afterthoughts in our world. And yet, they exist as part of a diverse class of photographers, past and present, who forged the language we use.
This isn’t just History 101.
Knowledge is rocket fuel for the soul, and seeing the medium in totality is part and parcel to discovering the voice we all crave. Because voice is not a look. It’s a conversation. It’s a conversation built on the past and the present, going well past this industry or any other.
It’s not how other work looks, in other words. Replicating the look is comparatively easy. It’s what the look says. Only context and knowledge will give you this clarity. And no technique will tell you what you need to communicate.
The Choice
You either live by the belief or you live by the look. You pick.
Living based on the belief is individual and immeasurable. It’s living outside of the curve in a place that isn’t about the judgement. It is about being whole. Being more. Being able to know that some will love you, some will hate you, and none of it will matter, because you are enough.
Living based on the look is the treadmill. Running after running. Digging deep, one day after the next, only to turn up emptier and emptier each time you make the rounds. The look is outside of you. You can never get ahead of it. It’s a drug the world sells you and a tale people tell you that obscures the simple joy of doing that is always there for you.
Yes, it’s comforting to say this is this and that is that, but it’s vapor drifting into the wind.
It’s a deafening loudness that will cut you off at the knees, narrowing your vision and limiting your growth.
Because the problem with standing your ground is when you do so, you can’t leave it to discover more.
I’ve put together a killer bonus to help you see more. I break it down not just into who to look at, but things to see from them. Grab it!
Spencer I love your perspective. But dammit I clicked home and found you pimping a repeatable strategy for success, which sorta kinda kills your message here. Oh well. I love your perspective anyway. Love the work too.
Fair enough, Chris! I hear you, and I’ll think about how to streamline the incongruity. But read the strategy if you’re not signed up for the newsletter, and see what you think. You’ll still going to need to make it your own.
Love your writing Spencer. An interesting point above regarding the “belief” and the “look”. Is it fair to say though in the wedding world they’re almost interchangeable because we’re being commissioned only for the look (even if that look is born out of a belief) whereas art world figures are also presenting or at least trying to present a concept (which the look obviously has to go hand-in-hand with)?
Thanks, David! For me, I tend to think of the two as inseparable—flip sides of the same coin. Every visual choice implicitly endorses some sort of belief, whether people intend to or not.
When people don’t connect the implied belief with the end result, they lose control of the ability to understand their message, and to refine the craft. My favorite example comes from Avedon.
When deciding between two portraits (you can look up the story of the bee man picture) of equal quality and similar look, the choice came down to his philosophy and not the look. Without a belief, we have no way to gauge whether it’s better to select a warm light or cool light, a sign in the background that’s funny or that’s sad, all of which affect the look, as well.
With that said, I do think that fine art (in the sense that most people mean it) does deal with concept differently, and it’s different in that its audience explicitly asks what the belief is. It tends to be more meta. It’s beliefs about the medium itself, making it more conceptual.
But I think other forms of photography—photojournalism, portraiture, fashion—are certainly imbued with distinct beliefs about what their subjects are and what they mean, and I don’t think of weddings as different.
It may not be that the public knows how the beliefs play into the photography, but as creators, we always have the opportunity to let it guide us, and when it does, it seeps out in the form of a certain sense of shock and awe—there’s something compelling in the images that’s different, which grabs a hold of you, even if you just don’t know why.
Im fairly new to wedding photography and still trying to find my style. I stumbled across an interview with an editor of a wedding blog on how to get published. She advised that a photographer shoot with the blog in mind, capturing images that would appeal to editors. This is a very appealing concept and nothing really wrong with it but I think if you want to develop your voice it is a disasterous road to go down. Thanks for reminding me to stick it out and follow my gut.
Thanks, Anna!
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