There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with making a beautiful photograph and realizing that beauty is no longer enough. Not because beauty has become meaningless, but because eventually, if you keep making things long enough, you begin asking a different question:
Does this look like mine?
I have been thinking about that question a lot lately.
There was a time when creating an image that was technically strong, beautifully lit, carefully composed, and well finished felt like the destination. Those things still matter to me, probably more than they should sometimes, considering how easily I can lose twelve hours to six photographs and convince myself that one more adjustment will finally make them finished.
But technical competence has a ceiling. At some point, knowing how to make a photograph stops being the problem. Knowing which photograph you want to make becomes the problem, and that is considerably harder.
Influence Is Easy. Translation Is Hard.
Every artist begins by looking, and somewhere along the way we begin collecting. Paintings, photographs, films, clothing, faces, light, color, gesture, architecture, stories, things we cannot always explain but recognize immediately when we see them.
My own collection has always leaned toward excess and shadow: Baroque paintings and chiaroscuro, heavy fabrics and skin emerging from darkness, flowers beginning to decay, gold, red and black. I am drawn to religious imagery divorced from religion, mythology, Vanitas and Memento Mori, and women who look as though they belong entirely to themselves.
Then there is another part of me that loves what seems, at first, to be the opposite. Clean editorial work. Strange fashion. Hard light and artificial color. Vinyl, chrome and movement. Images that feel unmistakably contemporary and perhaps even a little uncomfortable.
For a long time, I thought those things needed to be reconciled, as though eventually I would have to choose which version of my work was the real one. Lately, I have started to wonder whether the tension between them may actually be the point.
The goal, after all, isn't to reproduce the things that influence me. It is to absorb them so completely that eventually they stop looking borrowed. Caravaggio does not belong in my photographs, nor does the fashion editorial I saved to Pinterest six months ago. What belongs there is whatever remains after all of those references have passed through me and become something else.
That process takes time. Probably an irritating amount of it.
Style Isn't Something You Pick
We often talk about artistic style as though it were branding: choose three colors, settle on a lighting style, pick a genre and repeat it until the work becomes recognizable. That may create consistency, but I'm not convinced it creates a voice.
I think a visual language develops much more quietly. It appears in the decisions we make repeatedly, often before we even realize we are making them: the way we place a hand, how much darkness we are willing to leave in a frame, whether someone looks toward the camera or away from it, the colors we return to and the kinds of faces that interest us. It is in how close we stand, what we remove, what we refuse to remove, and the precise moment in a movement that feels worth keeping.
Eventually, those decisions begin accumulating. Patterns emerge that weren't necessarily planned, and somewhere inside all of them is the artist, not necessarily the artist we decided we were going to become, but the one who kept showing up anyway.
Perhaps that is why trying too hard to find a style can be counterproductive. I can decide what I want my work to look like, but that isn't quite the same thing as discovering what I instinctively return to when no one is telling me what the photograph should be.
Learning When Enough Is Enough
This may be the more difficult lesson for me because I have a tendency toward more: more texture, more symbolism, more set design, more editing, more explanation. There is always the temptation to believe the photograph would be stronger if I could just find the right thing to add to it.
And sometimes it would.
Sometimes the answer really is a crown, a pomegranate, a sword, gold fingertips, flowers, fabric, smoke or an entire mythology. I love sumptuousness. I love photographs that give the eye somewhere to wander. I have no intention of abandoning that simply for the sake of restraint.
But sometimes a photograph needs absolutely none of it.
I'm beginning to understand that restraint doesn't require becoming minimal, and I don't think anyone is going to mistake me for a minimalist anytime soon. It means learning the difference between abundance that serves the photograph and abundance being used to rescue one. Those are very different things.
The same is true in editing. There will always be another curve I could adjust, another piece of skin I could retouch, another distraction I could remove or another effect I could introduce. I could keep working indefinitely if I allowed myself to. Eventually, though, the photograph has to survive without my hands on it.
Sometimes finished simply means I have said what I came to say.
Maybe Recognition Comes Later
I don't know that I have arrived at a definitive visual language yet, and I'm not sure artists ever really do. I don't particularly want to arrive at a point where experimentation stops because I have become too concerned with maintaining a recognizable aesthetic.
But I can see pieces of something appearing.
There is more darkness in my work now, more texture and more deliberate color. I pay greater attention to gesture and have become more willing to let an image be strange. I am increasingly interested in creating atmosphere rather than demonstrating technique, and perhaps most importantly, I am becoming less concerned with whether a photograph resembles what photography is currently supposed to look like.
That feels important.
Trends can teach us things. Editorials can inspire us. Old masters can haunt us and other photographers can challenge us. References are useful, sometimes enormously so. But eventually we have to close them, walk onto an empty set and stand there with a camera in our hands.
At that point, the question isn't What would make a beautiful photograph? There are countless answers to that.
The more interesting question is:
What do I want to see?
Maybe that is where a visual language actually begins; not when someone else can recognize your work, but when you can.
Portraiture doesn't have to begin with knowing exactly what the final photograph will become. Sometimes it begins with a color, a story, a piece of clothing, an old painting, or an idea you haven't quite found words for yet.
That's enough.
I think this reads much more like you writing an actual journal. It still has your little dry asides; “probably an irritating amount of it” and “no one is going to mistake me for a minimalist anytime soon”, but now those lines land because they're surrounded by developed thoughts instead of competing with dozens of other one-line paragraphs.
I also changed “I Am Learning to Leave Things Alone” to “Learning When Enough Is Enough.” The original heading made it sound as though your trajectory was toward minimalism, when that's really not what you've been doing. You're learning when maximalism is intentional and when it's compensatory, which is a much more interesting distinction for your work.