I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between having a concept for a photograph and simply having a vision for one. For someone who calls herself a conceptual fine art photographer, this has been a surprisingly difficult distinction for me to make, because somewhere along the way I started believing that every photograph I created needed to mean something.
Usually, that comes pretty naturally to me. I love mythology, folklore, symbolism and art history. I can happily disappear down a rabbit hole researching what a flower meant in a seventeenth-century painting or why an artist chose to place a particular object in someone’s hand. Some of my favorite shoots have been built around stories and characters, and in those cases, the meaning really does matter. The wardrobe, lighting, posing and objects in the photograph all become part of a larger idea.
But that isn't always how an image begins for me.
Sometimes I just see something.
Right now, for example, I have this vision of black vinyl, reflective silver surfaces, violet light and skin. I want everything glossy and slightly strange, with hard reflections breaking apart around the body. I want dramatic makeup, exaggerated poses and light that catches the edges of the figure before disappearing back into darkness. I know how I want it to feel—futuristic, sensual, artificial, a little uncomfortable—but if you asked me what profound statement I'm trying to make with it, I couldn't tell you.
I just really fucking want to photograph it.
And I've finally started asking myself why that isn't enough.
There is still intention behind a photograph like that. In fact, there are hundreds of intentional decisions involved in creating it. I'm thinking about how violet light will interact with skin, where a white highlight needs to fall, how the reflective material will distort the figure, whether a pose should feel elegant or aggressive, and how much of the body I want to disappear into shadow. I'm thinking about texture, composition, gesture, color, expression and shape. None of those decisions are arbitrary simply because I can't attach a metaphor to them.
I think that's where I've been confusing concept with vision.
A concept tells me what I'm trying to say. A vision tells me what I want you to experience when you look at the photograph. Sometimes those things exist together, but they don't have to.
That realization has been strangely freeing because artists are often expected to explain everything we make. We're supposed to have an artist statement ready to tell you what the work represents, what we're exploring and why every decision carries some deeper significance. Sometimes it absolutely does. Other times, if I'm being truthful, I saw a beautiful dress and immediately imagined what it would look like emerging from a black background under a very particular kind of light.
There doesn't have to be a goddess wearing it.
The flowers don't always have to represent death.
The color red doesn't necessarily have to symbolize desire, violence, passion or anything else I could pull from an art-history book.
Sometimes red is there because I wanted red.
That doesn't mean I want to stop making conceptual work. Quite the opposite. I love that part of photography far too much, and there are stories I haven't even begun to explore yet. What I want to stop doing is forcing a concept onto an image simply because I think that's what I'm supposed to do.
Because when I do that, I'm not actually making the photograph more meaningful. I'm just creating an explanation for something that didn't need one.
I'm also beginning to appreciate how much can happen when I start with a visual instinct and don't immediately try to define it. Maybe the way a model moves changes what I thought I was making. Maybe the light hits something unexpectedly. Maybe a photograph develops an emotional quality I hadn't planned for at all. Occasionally, I may look at the finished work and realize there actually was something underneath my attraction to it that I hadn't consciously understood yet.
Or maybe I won't.
Maybe I'll look at it and think, Goddamn, that's beautiful.
I'm becoming increasingly okay with that.
Last week I wrote about what we might look like if there were no rules—if, for a few hours, we stopped worrying about whether we were too old, too much, too strange, too dramatic or simply not the kind of person who gets to look a certain way in a photograph.
I've realized there is another side to that conversation. I have my own rules that I've quietly imposed on myself as an artist. Somewhere on that list was the belief that if I was going to create something beautiful, I needed to justify its existence with an idea important enough to deserve it.
I don't think I do.
Curiosity is enough. Experimentation is enough. Beauty is enough. Wanting to see what happens when I put this person in that clothing, surround them with this texture and hit them with that light is enough. Sometimes the entire creative process can begin with nothing more profound than an image appearing in my head and refusing to leave.
Maybe that's what a vision really is.
It isn't necessarily a story waiting to be told. Sometimes it's simply something that doesn't exist yet, but for whatever reason, I can already see it.
And then comes my favorite part.
Figuring out how the hell to make it real.
You don't need to come to me with a fully formed concept. Bring me the dress you've been saving, a color you can't stop thinking about, a painting you love, a strange screenshot buried somewhere in your phone, or even just a feeling you don't quite know how to describe yet. We can figure out the rest together.