If what we really want from our photography is popularity, or praise from supposedly-important members of the “industry,” or a lot of money, or if we don’t think of ourselves as making art, then we won’t care about this.  But our not-caring won’t change the crucial truth:  If our goals are shallow, our Photographs will be shallow.  If we mainly want to make our photographs bright and brilliantly-colored, in order to catch people’s momentary attention on a screen, then that’s what they’ll be.  If our principal aim in life is superficial, centered on worldly success or values, then our photographs will be superficial, no matter whether or not they’re shown in a prestigious gallery or praised by the writers for prominent publications.

. . . the limitations of photography are in yourself, for what we see is only what we are. — Ernst Haas

You can say that we have to be contemporary, we have to take trends into account, and such blah blah blah.  I’m sorry to say that one man whose vlog I’ve often (not always) enjoyed recently counseled viewers that we should, indeed, be sure to make “our Photographs Bright and brightly-colored,” because if we don’t, in these times, no one will see them.  Then so be it.  Not that a bright and brightly-colored photograph is necessarily facile, but if that’s the goal in itself, it will be.  You may have already read this here, but let me repeat something that Van Gogh wrote:  “I’d rather be an honest cobbler than merely a magician with colors.”  If we want to make great work, we can’t let the fear of anonymity lead us into cheapening that work, into diminishing the best that we might do – even though we may, understandably, very much prefer having people see our images, enjoy them, praise them, benefit from them. 

I’m sorry, but for the most part, Society does not want from us the best that we can do, if that best is of any real substance.  Just ask Rembrandt, Schubert, Bob Dylan, et al.  For the most part, the world of society (including artistic society) wants what flatters that world, explicitly or implicitly.  But no artist, no human being of any depth, can be happy with the ways of that world.  (See my recently-posted portfolio, The Perennial Society, if you will.  https://www.lawrenceruss.com/index/G0000VKSPHL4xUdc )

As Dylan wrote in his song, “You Gotta Serve Somebody,” we have to ask ourselves who and what we’re pursuing.  Are we just wooing the world, making a career, or are we “following the path” and allowing the rest to follow, or not follow?  “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”  What we are, what we desire, will shape and be seen in our art, like it or not.  That is more influential and important for the quality of our art than any instructional videos about equipment or software or technique — or what most pundits advise us to do in order to “find our voice.”

This will be all the clearer to us if we understand that it isn’t the “subject matter,” the surface content of a work that makes it great, but rather the perceptual sensitivity, the grace, the wonder, the power, the vividness, the compassion or imaginative empathy, with which the artist presents it to us.  It’s primarily the quality and abundance of the life in the artist that makes for the quality and abundance of the life in the art.