The Work Pt3
August 1, 2021
This is a complex tale. I’ll tell it over a couple entries. Here’s part 3. Part 1 can be found here.
In fact, I was so inside out by then that what had originated as sheer and utter loathing for for my career had metastasized into a hatred of the creative process and began oozing out over every aspect of my life. Nothing was spared including my other passion–you know, the one I pay to partake in? That spigot I faithfully turned whenever the urge to create came front and center? I began to loath photography. But was my job-body-count the root cause?
The more I grew disenchanted with my career the more I turned my ire on my images. Shit, not just my images, but my process, my muses, my camera and even the fucking film in it. All of it was slowly turning to shit. I would go to my museums and go through the motions, all of a sudden, completely aware that I was going through the motions. All the frames I was finding felt uninspired; felt iterative; felt false and empty. I found myself making silly mistakes like forgetting to rewind the film before opening the cover. Or more than once forgetting to turn off the damn M7 so the batteries would run out and I wouldn’t be able to shoot. I would tell myself that I had done it by accident but the relief I felt when not being able to shoot made me wonder if I wasn’t subconsciously sabatoging myself to avoid feeling a sense of failure that I had never had with photography. Images and the making of those images has always been an outlet that I measure by my own enjoyment, so what the fuck was going on? It wasn’t just my unhappiness with work or that I was 20kg overweight.
I would shoot reams and reams of frames and wouldn’t process them because in my mind I had already decided that they were substandard. How did I know this you may wonder? What magic, crystal ball, tea-leaf bullshit whispered such sorrow in my ear you may be asking yourself.
Fucking instagram of course. Fucking social media.
…and boy did that shit sneak up on me. Initially I just wanted a place to show my work to a broader audience, one at the intersection of my career and the pros and the wannabes like me. Exposure there felt crucial in a way and if you believe in your work–and by work I mean the real work of image creation–then you want that work to be seen by as many and as diverse and audience as possible. Over time I had developed (pun intended) a decent following and most images were getting a fair amount of likes. It took time and was it’s own process but again, the idea was only to get the work seen.
In the beginning I thought “getting the work seen” meant “getting feedback, good or bad” and continuing to develop at my own pace. But after a while “getting the work seen” seem to mean “getting more likes and comments than the last posting” and just like my career pendulum swing from “always learning something on a job” to “brute force,” my creative pendulum was well on it’s way from “learning to improve the work” to “being liked and appreciated for what I post.” I had gone from enjoying my hobby to inadvertently creating Chris Noellert Fucking Street Photography LTD dot COM. I was unconsciously creating a brand, like one of my clients, fishing for clicks and views and the reality of this intersection between my two passions was too much for me to handle.
My self doubt and self consciousness had invaded my creative sphere and armed with its inverse-Midas-touch was slowly turning everything that was creative gold to complete and utter shit. And what a vicious cycle that turned out to be. Like a proper brand manager in crisis, I started curating and shooting more of the images that got lotsa likes rather than the images that I wanted to create… I began to pander to a style that I though would get the most attention–postulating that these images were good because they were liked so they must be good because they were like because they must be good.
But with each iteration, public interest waned and whatever creativity that existed in the original concepts was watered down more and more, the ideas becoming fuzzier and more nondescript–a VHS copied to many times, until there’s more error than image. A couple hundred likes dropped to 50 or 40 and I felt like the world hated me and hated my art and I hated the world I hated my art, just like I hated my job and my job hated and me and just like I hated my body and my body hated me.
So then one day I just stopped. I stopped it all. I crashed–bluescreen. My brand failed. I failed. I hated it all.
Shot on a LeicaM7, Kodak Tri-X pushed +2 at the Icon.