The Importance Of Critical Friends

It’s great to have people like, or better yet love your work, because the recognition that what you’re seeing isn’t being lost on others means that you’re not wasting your time as a photographer – as an artist. Yet we all remember those American Idol auditions where a “singer” has been told by their mom, friends, and family their entire life that they have “a beautiful voice” now forces us to endure 30 seconds of their “talent”. That’s the product of an artist who judges themselves by “likes”, “shares”, and little else. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that positive feedback is bad – I’m just saying that if that’s all you’re getting then you probably need to show your work to more people.

There is a site that I am no longer involved with (another story for another time) that I joined so that I might get some more critical feedback than the likes and comments of Instagram and Facebook, and photo sites like Flickr and 500px were providing. While that didn’t quite work out like I’d planned I was fortunate to have met and become friends with a couple people there who, like me, were willing to be critical of my work in a way that greatly improved my photography.

I purposefully didn’t say, “Made me a better photographer”, because if you think about it unless the person is there with you shooting they can only critique what you’re showing them. Sure, that criticism can involve questioning lighting, angle, and other aspects of the shooting of the frame, but unless you’re willing and able to reshoot the only thing that can be fixed at that point is in the processing, and these folks made me a better processor of my photos.

Over the course of the two years I was on the site the virtual back-and-forth with one of the photographers developed into a friendship based primarily on the idea that opposites attract.

I’m a technically proficient, cereal over-thinker whose creativity stems from a combination of opportunistic and accidental capture along with a good side of mimicry, with an ability to fix all those things that a real photographer gets right when they squeeze the trigger – in other words I don’t make art, I try and find/salvage it.

She is a trained artist with a lifetime of experience in the world that defines and redefines what “art” is and an eye for things that I can never fully appreciate because I utterly lack the background, and she has come to the world of digital photography later in life with the aspiration to find the photographer in herself while simultaneously trying to grasp the tools of the 21st century photographer. In other words she knows art but is struggling with the technology required to produce it in her newfound medium. 

Over the time we’ve known each other suffice it to say that I have moved farther along the line from “picture taker” to “photographer/artist” than I could have without her feedback, and I’ve helped her become more proficient with the tools and techniques required to produce what she sees in her head. All without ever meeting face to face, even though we’re a mere 90 minutes apart.

What I truly appreciate about her is not the feedback on my work (though that’s wonderful), but her desire to introduce me to the works of others – works that she believes would inspire my photography. The latest introduction happened last Friday, and on Sunday I clicked on the link and did some real looking at it, and I was puzzled by why I was looking at it. Monday morning I started my stream of consciousness typing about why it was that I really didn’t think that this person’s work was in any way valid to me as a photographer, and while I appreciated the art that it was I questioned why I as a photographer would want to go there? I do not yet know what “Jake the ‘Artist'” looks like, but this is not what I imagined so why would I want to copy it?

I often use my experiences and development as a musician to draw parallels to my development as a photographer, and it suddenly dawned on me that my greatest learning as a musician came from copying other players, and while that mimicry lasted a short time it eventually became less of them and more of me, so even when I play something blatantly ripped from someone else it still comes off sounding more like me than them. That’s what time and experience does to mimicry – it discards what isn’t you and develops what is.

I’d suddenly realized that one of the biggest things lacking in my development as an “artist-photographer” was the mimicking the styles of others who I don’t necessarily have an immediate affinity with if only to understand what it is they’re doing. #LightbulbMoment

So it’s taken me all this time to let you know that you’ll likely start seeing some work here that’s a little more different than what you’ve seen in the past. I expect some of it will be horrible, but I think that’s the idea – we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. Some of it may be an attempt at blatant mimicry, most will likely be derivative of Landreth’s work along with that of others with similar styles. I plan on sharing more details with you about specific projects as I have more lightbulb moments, but for now I’ll just end this with a, “Thank you, Jane”, and a couple of my first attempts at finding something in this world of textures and composites. Good news is that I have 5 years of unused work to pick from.