Yes, I did separate my and self in the title of this post.

In today’s hectic daily life, and while the rest of the world seems to be falling apart, I ask myself some questions. When a photographer turns to writing as an expression medium, there is a change that occurs in the thought process for creativity. Not too long ago, I wanted to pursue my studies in fine arts, but that idea was put on hold rather fast due to totally foreseen life circumstances: Making a living. I have a family now, a wife and a baby girl. While I sit back and watch this relationship grow stronger day by day, I also start to wonder about my path. My creativity has taken a solid punch lately. I think it’s due to a number of variables that collided with my old self and is slowly building a new self. It is also due to the influence of the web and all the semantics that come with it.

When I am not on assignment, I am doing my full time day job. I believe a lot of photographers out there are finding themselves obligated to find an alternate way of making a living. My full time job is self destructing by nature. It is not creative in nature, it is killing my perspective as a visual artist. This is what I am fighting. This is why I turned to writing about it. I write to remember what and who I am in the first place. Maybe this is an effort to make myself believe that daily challenges can make us stronger.

Somewhere between a portrait job and a vague voyage to the land of ideas, I am afraid to lose my most valuable ideology: Creativity and expression of my soul though images. While I run around every day to do things I am supposed to do, I remember writing this once about why I am a photographer:

In this partial differential metaphysical pseudoreality made of bits and bytes zeros and ones, i really don’t know about me – i am questionable. My whole nature is a big question mark. In my search for enlightment, along the way, I find things that make me laugh, sometimes even cry. To observe is what I do best and here is a piece of all that.

I also remember my favorite quote from author Josef Conrad:

Confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities — like the vulnerable body within the steel armour. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring — and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures for ever. The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition — and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; …

This comes to me every time I try to produce new work. Back in the day, there was a specific set of tools available to produce my work. I became good at it. I dedicated time and effort to master my field. Although I didn’t yet become a master of my medium, I find that I have been smothered and crushed with the advancement of technology in the very field where I once considered myself safe from outside influences, where I thought I could express my ideas through photographs using personalized techniques, where it didn’t matter to other people how something was done, where the very enjoyable moment of a visual experience was more important than the “how to” behind the product.

I find it frustrating and overwhelming that photography in itself has become to most, a daily chore, an insensible couple of clicks to create what use to be a process of patience and hard work, trial and error. This is the kind of evolution that will kill the artist. Photography seems to no longer be a capture of time, but mostly a modified version of reality. Maybe it should be a modified version of reality. I ask myself this question everyday. Where do I want to be? Do I want to mass produce photographic work on demand for lucrative purposes, just because I can and because it pays? Or do I want to be who I am, the visual artist that uses a camera to express his ideas, while not caring about what people think, how they see it, whether they like it or not, or why they want to know how it was done?

The danger I face, and this is partially what is tearing me apart as a photographer, is the saturation of information that I become exposed to. Too many new techniques, gadgets, ten thousand ways of making something and each of them being easier than the other. Computer chips processing my images, adding color where it shouldn’t be, killing my character.

to be continued…

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