Photograph What Excites You

In a recent Print Lab session, a member asked a thoughtful question, the kind of question I could spend a whole hour discussing. He wanted to know if I’d ever done an exercise where four or five people describe the same image, looking at the commonalities and the differences, to see what that tells us about how viewers actually respond to our work.

I didn’t really answer the question directly, and I want to explain why.

It’s not that I think audience feedback doesn’t matter. The opposite, actually, I want my images to reach as many people as possible, to move someone, to make some kind of difference in how they see the world. Communication is the whole point, and without it, the work just sits on my hard drive.

So when someone tells me what they see in my image, I listen. And if it’s someone whose taste and experience I trust, I listen even more carefully.

But there’s a real difference between listening to feedback as one input among many, and allowing audience consensus to overly influence what your work should be about. The first is part of the artist path, but the second is a slippery slope that leads away from your inner creative voice—one we all have.

If three out of five people describe an image one way, what does that mean? That you should make more of those? That the other two viewers are wrong? That you should adjust your next image to gain approval by the majority? The questions all leave you in the same place, which is letting other people’s responses tell you what your work should be.

And that’s where many of us lose our footing.

Even the artists we now call visionary often weren’t appreciated in their time. Their work landed years or decades later, sometimes celebrated for the very thing the crowd had hated.

The point isn’t that any of us will be the next Van Gogh or Ansel Adams. The point is that audience consensus is an unreliable compass, and the work that lasts tends to be the work that wasn’t optimized for the vote.

So what do you do instead?

You build a foundation. You study the principles, because they exist for real reasons. Human perception is shared. The color red catches the eye in any culture, in any image. Strong shapes anchor a complex scene. These aren’t my preferences, they’re artistic principles that have stood the test of time.

Then you build your own judgment. You spend time with lots of artwork, your own and other people’s. You develop taste through study, through practice, through making bad images and learning what went wrong. You earn the right to your decisions by the time you’ve put in.

You ask people you trust, you hear what they see in the image. You take it on as data and weigh it honestly alongside everything else you know. And then you decide. You make the call from your own grounding, with all the input weighed fairly, and then you let the work go and see what happens.

The very best prints you can make are the images that excite you as a photographer and artist, even if others interpret them differently. You can’t control what other people see and think, but you can control how much you learn from others who have traveled the same path and asked the same questions before.

Master the principles, then use them to make your work as expressive as you can. There’s no better way to find intrinsic self-satisfaction, and you’ll make a difference in how others see the world around them.