My angst and me

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Joan Didion. She’s the one I go to when nothing else works. I’ve also been thinking a lot about my place in photography, where I fit in (or will fit in), what kind of work I want to be producing and why. The two are connected, in ways that dawned on me this afternoon.

When I do this, when I look at other photographers and try to find someone who’s doing what I want to be doing, I often come up empty-handed. The art world drives me crazy with its valuation of inane artist statements. Stock photography makes my eyes glaze over. Journalism doesn’t do it for me. Editorial has possibilities—but only if I’m hired for my style, my vision, not to execute somebody else’s. But what exactly is my vision? What kind of photographer am I? What kind of photographer do I want to be?

I sent out two prints to each of the people who participated in my print sale—and they’re completely different in style. If you saw the two photographs, you’d never guess they were taken by the same person. That’s not a good thing—it’s a sign (or a symptom) of my current lack of clarity.

Before you send me an e-mail telling me I’m being too hard on myself or I’m overthinking things or I’m focusing on my angst, and I just need to get out and photograph, I should tell you: This is who I am. I overthink things. I focus on my angst. That isn’t going to change, and I’ll be better off if I learn how to put my obsessive-compulsive, control-freak tendencies to work for me in my photography instead of trying to fight them. As S. pointed out today over coffee, “I’ve seen you do this numerous times. You work things over, worry them, until you come to some understanding of what you believe. How many times have you talked for hours like this, and then said, at some point, ‘That’s it! I’ve got it!’ You need to work things out this way—that’s who you are.” (God, it’s good to be known like that, you know?) But it makes sense. There’s the noun form of worry—“mental distress or agitation resulting from concern usually for something impending or anticipated; anxiety”—and I’ve got plenty of that. But the worrying S. was talking about is a verb: “to shake or pull at with the teeth [a terrier worrying a rat].” I gnash at a thing over and over until I get to the heart of it. (That’s much of why I like Didion so.)

Anyway, in my worrying over coffee, talking this out with S., I came up with this:

• I need to not fight who I am (see above). Take Didion and Sontag. Both good writers, but completely different in their approaches. Sontag was all in her head, and Didion comes at things equal parts mind and heart. To read Didion is to have the very real sense that you know her; you can read lots of Sontag and never feel that way. Neither approach is better or worse—but they know who they are (make that past tense for Sontag). So when they approach a topic, they come at it in different ways. That’s what a good photographer has—a sense of who she is, what she cares about—and that’s what helps determine, even if subconsciously, the subject and the approach.

• I want to be in my projects. Not the way Amy Elkins is in hers—not in self-portraits. I don’t want to do projects that are directly about myself. But I want people who look at my work to get some sense of who I am, in the same way that Didion’s essays, though about, say, 1960s America, are also about her. I want to choose projects that I care about that much, projects that I have an emotional connection to, not just projects that are interesting or timely or that satisfy my curiosity. Those things are nice, but the most important thing is the connection, because if that’s there, it’ll show in the work. So whether I’m doing my own personal projects, or I’m doing an assignment, I want to come at it with who I am at the forefront. There are thousands of good photographers out there; the only thing that sets me apart from anyone else is my take, me. The voice, the vision, that’ll come in time. Until then, practice. And if I’m not in it, walk away.