Someone recently asked me what I shoot, my response was: “I am a swing dance photographer, who mainly takes candid images”. In that moment, I realised that I could not have developed a smaller niche for my work.
Yet, finding a niche has been my lowest priority in recent years.
Throughout my career I’ve tried to shoehorn my work into a category, flitting from events to portraiture, live music; and nothing’s ever ended up quite fitting the bill. I always felt pressured to find a genre and build up a style around it - you see photography magazines at the supermarket and almost every single one will feature an article on ‘developing your style’ or ‘find your unique voice’. Even if you talk to pros or look online, you’ll be bombarded with advice to actively try to discover your own uniqueness. I spent years consciously trying to develop my own style before I realised that, for me, it was just the wrong thing to do.
When you first start out in photography, everyone shoots all the time, everything is exciting and a potential photographic opportunity. We all remember that feeling of having your first proper camera and going out and shooting whatever you can: portraits, landscapes, abstract, macro – whatever!
As we develop as photographers, we tend to specialise. You discover what genres appeal to you, what gear you prefer to shoot with, do you prefer fixed lenses or zooms, do you like working with natural or artificial light and, most importantly find out what aspects of shooting you enjoy more than others. But, it's when we're playing with a variety of genres and techniques, we learn these lessons about ourselves.
For example, you learn whether are you someone who is so passionate about landscapes you will get up hours before dawn to wait for the perfect light, or are you someone who’ll fight their way to the front of a gig for the chance to shoot their hero in action? It’s only by experimenting and having a go at a range of genres do you begin to discover who you are as a photographer.
It didn’t take long before I realised that giving my work a narrow focus and striving to find my style was actually taking the joy out of shooting for me. I realised that I was more focused on developing an individual aesthetic that would stand out amongst the crowd than embracing the enjoyment of what I was doing. I was so focused on my uniqueness, I forgot how to just be creative and follow my photographic eye.
Eventually, I stopped thinking about my style and started to simply focus on what I enjoyed shooting. I took a break from photography and only picked up my camera when I was really excited to do so. I shot far less and concentrated more on my hobby, swing dancing. After a while, I was inspired to start to take my camera to events and shoot. I shot because I loved it - not to build my portfolio or because it was a paid gig - purely because of the love. The more I did it, the more I could clearly see the aesthetic my shots tended to have and the techniques I favoured - before I knew it, I had found my style.
As soon as I took away the factor of trying to be unique, and just expressed myself, a style fell into place. My current work uses all the skills I acquired from live events, but without an experimental phase and moving away from my normal work, I would have never discovered what I truly love.
Pigeonholing yourself into a genre or restricting yourself can cause you to block you from experimenting creatively. Of course, there are advantages to practicing a certain style, but varying your work can force you to look at your regular work with a new perspective and give you techniques from other disciplines that you never knew would be useful.
For some people – this isn’t their story. They’ve picked a genre from the start, worked tirelessly at it and come out at the top of their field, but it isn’t the road for everyone. Like me, if your niche isn’t emerging for you, take a step back and turn away from it for a second; you might not be seeing the wood for the trees.
You should always be working on yourself as an artist, try something new today - you never know what you might discover.
. digitalrev.com2017-9-1 03:00
