Benchmark for success: being a successful photographer from day one.
Ansel Adams once said
'you don't make a photograph just with a camera, you bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved'
and I couldn't agree more.
As a photographer I am constantly being inspired by pretty much everything that I make a part of my universe. Every single thing I read, listen, touch, see, hear and taste become a part of my repertoire and in some intangible way molds the experiences I have and the experiences I offer.
At times I can see these influences almost instantly - to use an obvious example: every time I watch a movie with an intriguing lighting or colour scheme and aim to replicate on an upcoming photoshoot. Other times I might only see the impact of a reference I interacted with today coming back to me in years to come ‘out of nowhere'.
But to bring this rambling to the topic of today's post, I wanted to share that one of the things that have been inspiring me quite a lot lately are newsletter.
One day I decided to fully give up on Twitter - I tried joining the trend, I really did. But I just can't with yet another social media no matter how much I envy my partner that is always aware of what's happening with pretty much the whole world almost at the time that it happens - and to try and keep up with that I decided to go for newsletters.
Every morning I wake up and after the tongue scrapping and bladder relief ritual I go back to bed - my favourite place on earth - and start reading the newsletters I signed up to. It's a mix of world news, fashion business, creativity and random stuff that I curated to suit my everyday dose of inspiration.
And amongst one of my favourites is The Creative Independent, that brings daily (on weekdays only) interviews with artists of all sorts. To me it is an incredible tool to (1) find out the work of other artists I have never come across (2) read about their perspective of having a business as an artist and getting that ‘i'm not alone’ feeling.
Something I quite liked reading a last week was on setting benchmark on success for an Artist.
Coming from the corporate retail world, the benchmarks for success to me were always tangible and measured and unquestioned: staff retention and engagement rates, CSAT’s (customer satisfaction score), store conversion rate, average transaction value, and a very very long list of other key performance indicators would tell me - and the global business for anyone to see - how well was I performing.
But as a photographer, what do I really have to measure my performance or success? Or what even is success?
And author, editor and professor Alexander Chee who said to The Creative Independent ‘I’ve let go of a lot of the professional benchmarks I used to have to measure success or failure — because I probably know too much about the inner workings of those various institutions. When I do think of success now, it’s related to how creative I feel, how free I am to make what I want to make, to teach the way I want to teach, and to live happily.’
What he’s saying is pretty much achieving autonomy and the ongoing development of an artist to feel success in his career.
I love this. And to me, personally, I would only add another topic as a benchmark to measure success: relatedness - or the ability (and possibility) to relate to people while doing the work.
What I carry a lot from my previous life is the self determination theory as a principle to engage staff and ensure retention and performance.
It basically says that if you ensure these three things you will have a performing and happy team:
autonomy in any way - over time, over how they do their tasks or even geographically
development - the sense of growing and learning more
and relatedness and the ability to connect with others
So as an artist - former senior manager - that only 6 months ago changed career and took the leap to be a full time photographer, and already on my mid 30’s after years of a corporate career, I already dove into the new profession knowing that the goal was to ensure these three things were possible to me from the get go.
And I learn that they reciprocally connected to one another:
When working for myself, autonomy is a given: I get to work whenever I want, from anywhere I want and however I like to work.
But this would only possible if I mastered the work and managed to get clients this way. So I needed to learn and grow constantly, to master the lights, the posing, the styles, to shoot a little bit of everything before I decided on the directions to follow. But most of all I had to really learn how to connect with subjects, from the first contact to after delivering the gallery, and how this connection during a session makes all the difference in the end results.
So by working on achieving autonomy I had to develop myself - a lot - and constantly connect with people.
And the work to continue to develop myself in every little aspect of the work, specially with things that I feel I’m avoiding - as we tend to avoid what scares us, which is normally the unknown - is a constant in my life.
Because if I keep this self-determination theory cycle rolling, my benchmark for success remains on a growing chart and with a very productive LFL growth.
Meaning that no matter where I'm at in my (new) career, even financially, as long as I manage to ensure these three pillars, I can already feel successful.
Let me know your thoughts on this on the comments below.
(and thank you for reading)
F.