Self-image is noise

Photographers often pride themselves on knowing who they are and what they do. In fact, a lot of us believe that it is a requirement to do good stuff. But this leads to a kind of self-deception that is hard to catch because it doesn’t feel like lying: we all have a story about the story we carry around, what attracts us, and what our work is about. That story is misleading us. Abandoned shoes Most photographers mistake it for self-awareness. In reality, it is a filter that stands between them and reality. That reality of what we’re making coming through the filter is distorted in both directions: images that don’t really work are inflated and praised, and others that do work, sometimes on an unconscious level, are dismissed for example, a photographer that decided he was a poet of everyday life will find poetry in images that a stranger would dismiss as pointless. The formalist would discover pleasant formality in images that are nothing more than competent snapshots. The…