In my early days of being a photography student, I felt like I was forcing everything. I was thinking too much before making images, being very specific and overly-controlled with how I wanted my photography to look. Not like the Crewdson kind of controlled, though.
I had this mentality that I could only make photos on a tripod, or of specific places, or at a specific time of day, and so on. I was abiding by my own set of rules too much. But what would happen if I removed those rules all together?
Prior to starting my current job, I had begun to treat my photography more casually — very different from how I would have gone about things only months earlier. In the grand scheme of my artistic life, it didn’t take me very long to change my approach, and if I put my work from before this next to my current work, there wouldn’t be much of an aesthetic difference.
I’ve technically been working in this idea of vernacular photography for years, pretty much since I started my formal academic career in photography in 2016. Again, not too long in the grand scheme of my artistic life. However, the sense of immediate perception of time makes it feel like it has been much longer to get to the point I am now.
I’ve been a photographer since 2010, and i started off being casual about my photography. Shooting the “cool things” that caught my eye that didn’t feel like tourist attractions. I can’t really say I’ve come full-circle, because I have much to learn yet, as well as much more to experiment in and progress in my work-flow. For all I know, I may go back to being a tripod-only photographer, or maybe I’ll end up shooting just black and white in the future. Who knows.
In recent months, essentially since mid-summer, I have been treating my photography much different than the year prior. I’ve been shooting anything that I can make a well-composed photograph of, anything with color that catches my eye, anything with interesting juxtapositions of object and/or words. Going to the true roots of vernacular photography. And in time, I hope to bring people into the mix, photographing formal portraits and “decisive moment” kind of photographs that utilize people within a larger scene.
Vernacular photography hasn’t necessarily grown in popularity in the past year, as it’s been common since the dawn of accessible photography in the early 1900’s with Kodak’s contributions. However, of course like film photography, vernacular photography really is a fad. And like any fad, some photographers and enthusiasts will keep it going for years to come, while others will stop shooting vernacular photos and move on to the next fad.
This isn’t a bad thing. I’m “guilty” of following fads in photography and music, and I gained a lot from doing so. I see these fads in art (visual, musical and so on) as strong learning points and opportunities for a large amount of people to try something new. That’s why I’m so happy to see film photography booming lately, while I’m aware that in a year or so, a handful of those people will stop with film or even photography all together. Matt Day did a fabulous video about film photography as a fad, but that not bing a bad thing.
And just like following trends or fads, being overly-stubborn about your work flow isn’t really a bad thing in the long-run. While it’s definitely not fun to work with a stubborn artist, in time they’ll learn a lot from it and end up becoming a stronger artist once they’re out of that stubborn mentality. And chances are very high that the photographs they’re making while in that “stubborn phase" will be absolutely amazing works.
While it may sound like I’m saying being a stubborn artist is a bad thing, I absolutely am, because it takes one to know one. I believe every artist is stubborn at one time or another in their artistic lives, but that it’s liek a “badge of honor” to get out of that phase and pursue their medium/media in a way that doesn’t stress themselves — or others — out when working.
Approaching my photography more casually has helped me really figure out what I’m interested in with my work, as well as where I want to take my work from here. I’ve found different subjects, themes and objects that I’m heavily interested in photographing. Take a look at my instagram and you can see what I mean. But i’ve also found that I want to photograph people by means of portraits or utilizing them within a larger scene, as mentioned before. I’ve dug through my archives to look for photographs that use people within them in a desperate attempt to tell myself that I’ve done it before, so I can do it again, and build on top of it.