I have made my living with a camera for over 20 years. Photography has been at the center of my life for perhaps double that time. Having the day job also be my creative life has lots of interesting implications.
My father prides himself on the fact that he has never taken money for his photographs. He started photography as a teenager, headed the local camera club, and at 83 he is conversant with scanner settings and monitor profiles. He is in love with the creative act of making images, and has never wanted to be hemmed in by the requirements and dictates of doing it at someone else’s behest.
It is a common solution to the dilemma of “whose work is this anyway.” There is a kind of purity in the amateur’s approach to any medium, and it is to be respected. Creative activity is an important piece of a well rounded life for many of us.
I chose a different course, because I was a really intense kid, and because I wanted no barrier between who I was and what I did. That said, it took a long time to accept that my creative voice was something I could rely on to be at the core of my livelihood. There was about a ten year period of scratching at the margins, trying to get a foothold in the profession, before it finally took hold. It wasn’t until I stopped trying to be a “commercial success”, trying to fit into a mainstream image of what my work should look like, and instead pursued the photographic vision that was most compelling to me, did I finally begin to achieve a measure of professional success and security.
There is an inevitable, and useful, tension between being a commercial photographer and being an artist trying to push against boundaries. My success as a commercial shooter is contingent upon replication–I am hired to do the same thing over and over. My economic life is dependent upon regular praise for it. But without my alternate life as an artist, pushing at new ways of seeing, the commercial work would lose its edge and quickly become stale.
I have always had personal work that I did just because I had to. I have a continuous photographic trajectory I have followed in that vein, things and environments I work on, processes I master, print quality that I value. That specific work is not what built my commercial career however. Clients don’t hire me because I can manage chaotic complexity in landscape photographs. Nonetheless, because I have my particular attentiveness to a photographic sensibility, and a relationship to my surroundings because of my camerawork, I can bring that to bear when the job is to fulfill a client’s need. It has more juice behind it, even if what I am hired to photograph has no apparent bearing on my personal work.
It means I can be both very attached to the manner in which I make photographs, be completely engaged in the situation and the way the photographs come about, while having no attachment whatever to how the photography gets used in the end. That’s what they pay me for—to stay out of the room where those decisions are made. I have a blast on assignment. I love being completely engaged on a job. I may like seeing the finished product in print, but I never think of that as the “real” work. It pays the bills, and keeps me in equipment and in frequent flyer programs. But it’s not how I identify myself in the end.
Doug,
Very interesting article; it’s great to hear real stories of how someone’s art and life fit together. You wrote mostly of your professional life and how your commercial “product” is informed by your personal artistic activity. I’m guessing that you have also been more engaged than your father in showing and possibly selling that personal photography. If true, what impact does that have on the personal work? If not, is it because of a similar desire to keep the “purity” of the amateur in that arena?
Wow Doug,
Great post. It’s excellent to hear how you’ve worked out the difficulties between doing your art for money and doing your art for love.
It never ceases to amaze me that so many people assume it is otherwise with pros, when all the pros I know say similar things.
I honestly don’t get what makes people think it’s ever different than that, but I always hear these snarky comments whenever money is involved with one’s art. It is not an inherently unholy marriage. Often it is an inspiration in itself. The demands and needs of paying clients can be just the impetus an artist needs sometimes.
Doug,
Welcome to A&P, and thanks for introducing a new measure……how many photos did you take last year? Oh, about a million air miles worth.
It wasn’t until I stopped trying to be a “commercial success”, trying to fit into a mainstream image of what my work should look like, and instead pursued the photographic vision that was most compelling to me, did I finally begin to achieve a measure of professional success and security.
I’d be interested to hear about how conscious this process was at the time. From your description it could be that one morning you had a lightbulb moment, or it could be that you’ve understood what happened by analysing it after the event. Or, obviously, it could be a bit of both.
Any light you can shed?
Doug,
Your pictures are very special. I like that I can watch the show rolling by without clicking my mouse. But then, how can I look for a longer time at a given picture?
The “lightbulb” moment was one of those mortality moments, where I got my priorities more in order. I was on the care committee for a close friend who was dying of AIDS. After that, I couldn’t fake it anymore.
The other side of being a pro and an artist, though, is the backwash in the other direction. Professionally, I have to come up with a solution, no matter what. What I have to battle against in the personal work is relying on safe solutions, coming up with an answer, no matter what. Art requires much more tolerance of ambiguity and failure than commerce will accept.
Doug, it’s such a delight to see you posting here.
You’ve written eloquently about how your personal work (and the ‘pushing at the boundaries’ there) contributes to the commercial side.
Is there a similar flow in the other direction? Does your commercial work the commercial work inform the personal work any way? Do you feel that the influence of the commercial work on the personal work (if it exists) is positive or negative?
Doug’s last comment has the start of an answer to Paul’s question, but I also would like to hear more. I was just reading Doug’s great blog posts from Photo Lucida 2005, and I’m wondering to what extent he thinks he’s been able to get beyond safe solutions and to put more of himself into his personal artistic work. And how, if that can be articulated. That’s something we can all learn from regardless of the extent of our professional engagement.
Well Doug, that’s an interesting subject. I kind of feel the two things can create a feedback loop. You do a picture you want to do, the way you want to do it. Customers comment on the picture and that gives you ideas and inspiration for the next one. And so on.
It doesn’t always go like that of course, but it can.
Doug,
The “lightbulb” moment was one of those mortality moments
Ah, yes, I can understand that. Even if I’ve rather gone the other way.
Birgit,
You can select individual photos by first clicking on the Portfolios or the Archives links at the top of Doug’s page, and choosing from there. The first seems more commercial, the second more personal. However, the Sticks gallery seems to be broken, though I’ve seen some of it in the past. It’s particularly interesting for me to learn from, as I have a portfolio with similar subject matter.
Doug,
Thanks for this fascinating discussion of commercial and personal art making.
When I see a painting by Jan van Eyck, I’d like to think it is the “real” work, even if it was done on assignment — which most of it probably was.
Is it possible that your commercial work is more “real” than you admit? Do you think that important artists of the Renaissance didn’t consider their commissions as “real” work? It is possible, I suppose.
Being a commercial shooter means that most all of my attention is engaged with the photographic process in one way or another. It makes me fluent in lots of photographic modalities.
Photo Lucida 2005 was a shock that I’m still recovering from. There I really got the feedback that I do play it too safe in the personal work. Since then the digital transition has muddied the process a lot, in both good and bad ways. I can shoot more spontaneously, but then I have to deal with the flood of imagery and figure out what new it’s telling me. And much of my daily attention is to technology, not images.
What seems to be settling out is that I’m devoting a lot more attention to a body of work that most people don’t get, my “Stick Pictures,” landscape studies in dense, brushy environments. I shoot it now both on film (it’s the only thing I still do with film) and digitally. It is work with no commercial crossover. It is where I do my deep work as a photographer. When I show it to Tony Bannon at review events, he rips it apart and shows me where it isn’t yet fulfilled, where I’m missing the mark. I’m looking forward to him doing it again to me this spring at Photo Lucida 2007.
I’m also doing a documentary project, still with a deeply personal component, that I hope will have some commercial and popular appeal, a project on traditional contra dance. My commercial work bleeds over into this in two ways, one, it’s funding it (my grant applications have all been unsuccessful), and two, all my technical skills are required to make compelling photographs in this highly dynamic environment.
You can find links to both these bodies of work in the Archives section of my website.
Doug, excellent post, and I also really enjoyed looking at your work.
I’ve had a similar experience, though the effect the commercial work has had on my personal work was quite different, and unexpected.
I bring a great deal of my art skills to my film effects work, though I never think of it as art. And I’ve learned a lot of things from this and other art jobs in the past, that have given me a broad range of technical skills in many mediums, and improved my work habits.
But the unexpected thing that happened was that after I had been working for awhile doing realistic effects for films using computers, I had trouble going to my studio afterwards and being excited about making realistic oil paintings. Even though the medium was different, it still felt too much like my day job. I eventually put away the paint and started working in linoleum.
Doug, very interesting post. One of the things I enjoy reading about the most is the one that has been described as the “lightbulb” moment. You say this was connected with an understanding or recognition of mortality and priority which are sentiments in some ways similar to that described in “The Myth of Talent” by Craig M. Tanner, another excellent read.
The problem with these lightbulb moments is that many of us have the feelings and experience the motivating factors behind recognition but, when looking at the lightbulb, don’t even see a flicker. We know that things as they stand are not quite right but self doubt and responsibility for the welfare of others override the desire to immerse oneself completely in the dream and feed that inexorable feeling that one *needs* to create images. This quickly turns into a kind of disrespect for self and a cynicism of the whole notion of making a living through making images. Echoes of “don’t be silly” bubble of through the subconscious.
Hearing success stories such as yours help to temper these feelings and helpt to give a little more authority to that “creative voice”.