I'm having an artistic identity crisis as a photographer
I've been doing photography for many years now.
When I first started, my photos were technically nice, but they felt like postcards or Instagram pictures. Pleasant to look at, but ultimately forgettable. Over time, I started including more people in my images because I felt they gave the photographs more emotion and weight.
I've definitely improved. In fact, several of my photos have been stolen by travel accounts to promote products and services. It's frustrating, but I also took it as a sign that my work had reached a level where people found it valuable enough to reuse.
Over the past few months, I've visited several photography festivals and exhibitions, especially in Basel and Arles. I spent a lot of time looking at the work, talking to gallery owners whenever I had the chance, and trying to understand why some photographers are able to sell prints for thousands of dollars, even when, on the surface, their work doesn't seem radically different from mine.
I also wanted to understand what it takes to eventually exhibit in a gallery myself.
The answer I heard most often was:
"Your work needs to say something."
And that's exactly where I'm stuck.
When I look at some gallery exhibitions, I don't always see an obvious narrative. Yet when I look at my own work, I feel like I'm going through an identity crisis.
What am I actually trying to say? How do I make that visible?
How do I choose the right images so that someone else can understand it?
For example, I'm currently editing around 500 photos from China. I wasn't interested in showing the futuristic, high-tech version of China that everyone already knows. Instead, I wanted to photograph a slower, older China, a place where life still seems to move at its own pace.
I also have around 1,300 photos from a road trip across rural Japan, mostly outside the major cities. Again, my goal wasn't to photograph the stereotypical tourist version of Japan, but a quieter, more rural side of the country.
The problem is that I don't know how to turn that intention into a coherent body of work.
Do I need a tighter edit? A written statement? A clearer narrative? Or am I simply overthinking all of this?
Has anyone here gone through a similar phase, where you felt like you had photographs but not yet a body of work or a clear artistic voice?
It’s like looking at myself in a shattered mirror: I see fragments of who I am, but I can’t pick the one with the best angle.
I'd really appreciate hearing from photographers who have been through this.
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EDIT: Thanks everyone for all the thoughtful replies, I didn’t expect this many different perspectives. Many years ago I would have pay for listening these thoughtful advices.
A lot of what you’re saying is starting to converge for me.
The notion of “what keeps drawing my eye” and identifying patterns in what I already shoot feels especially useful. I think there is already some kind of thread in my work, I just haven’t been able to clearly articulate it yet.
I also appreciate the more practical advice about printing, sequencing, and building small bodies of work over time. That feels like a much more workable approach than trying to define everything upfront.
This has given me a lot to think about and experiment with going forward, especially when I’m out shooting new work in my own city.