42 Discoveries – What I know Photography
#1 STYLE
Style comes first – everything else that follows on this list will lead us back to it. Style should be the single most important thing about your photography because it’s ultimately how you will achieve true creative fulfilment.
But it shouldn’t be difficult and it should not be daunting. It’s not something you need to strive for or think about too much; it’s enough just to like and engage with photography. Then, your style will come – and that’s a promise.
Firstly then, to actively like photography: What does this mean in practice? Photography is everywhere, but you need to find out what it is that you like. What is it about certain photographs (and photographers) that attract you? What is it that draws you to one particular picture over another? Start wondering how the photographer might have achieved the aspects you like so much. Maybe keep a scrapbook – A4 display books are fantastic for this. Willingly submit to falling under a photographer’s influence, try and copy them. As an impassioned teenager there were photographers that I actually worshipped: Ernst Haas, David Bailey, Sam Haskins. I then became obsessed with filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni (p. 268) who taught me so much about composition, and with cinematographers (more composition, framing, colour). Ultimately, fashion photography taught me this too, along with everything else (see 18).
Secondly, it’s about engagement. There is no shortcut to this stage but that’s why I can make the promise that you will develop your own style with great confidence. Engagement, in short, not only means always taking your camera out but also aiming to take pictures every day (see 4).
After a while, two things will happen. The magic will come first, though you will be the last to know about it. People close to you or, indeed, anyone that becomes exposed to your photos (on Instagram for example) will start recognising, knowing somehow, that these are your pictures. I suggest you don’t try and analyse what they see but just carry on doing what you’re doing. Before long – and this is the magic – you will have a collection of photographs that only you could have taken.
The second thing that will happen is, when looking back, you will start rejecting your very earliest photos. As good as they may be, your more recent ones will just seem better to you (and that’s because they are).
Finally, a word about cameras: Is your choice of camera crucial to the achievement of your style? Well it may sound controversial to say so, but actually, yes it is, though perhaps not in the technical ways you’d expect. The closer you can come to fetishising your camera and your relationship with it, the quicker and better your photography will become. By which I mean you must want to pick up your camera, hold it, look at it, admire it, not want to put it down. It will feel good in your hand and against your face as you raise it to your eye (see 2). It needs, in short, to become your partner and lover: you are both in this together. As a teenager the Olympus OM-1 film camera was literally by my bed every night. I considered it the most beautiful industrial object ever made (a view that hasn’t changed, incidentally) and just seeing it when I woke up in the morning would make me want to bolt straight out of the house, even before breakfast. Aesthetically speaking it might be harder to get that feeling these days, but most Fujifilm digital cameras have a good try in both the tactile and ergonomic departments. But in any case, find what you like (though go to a physical shop). Leica owners obviously feel this way about their cameras, as indeed they should when one of their bodies (without even a lens) costs north of £7k, but I achieved the same feeling with a Fujifilm camera for barely more than a tenth of that sum. (And, for those interested, you can still find an Olympus OM-1 for even less than that.)
But let's end where we began, with style. Style is the unique vision of one person, a vision which arrives into the world in the form of photographs, easily recognised as the product of their maker. Some may like them, some may not, but everybody will know that it was you who took them. And truly, this is the day that you will never forget. You will have become a photographer.