If You Lack Inspiration, Talk to people

I stopped photographing for many years. Nothing dramatic happened; it was a slow fade. I’d go out with a camera, walk around, come back without a single frame worth keeping. Eventually I stopped going out at all. The problem wasn’t burnout or crisis. It was worse: complete indifference. Danger de mort I tried the usual remedies. Looked at photobooks, scrolled through exhibitions online, forced myself to shoot anyway. None of it worked. The books were impressive but kept their distance. Forced shooting produced exactly the kind of lifeless images you’d expect from someone going through the motions, and standard advice about pushing through or taking a break wasn’t shifting anything. What finally worked was accidental. I ran into another photographer online, someone I’d briefly met in the early 2000s, a Dutch professional who shot medium format portraits. We got talking. Being genuinely useless at small talk, I asked about his process: how he approached the relationship between…