BE A PERFECT STYLIST
1 - Finding Inspiration
2 - Exercising your Creativity
3 - Developing your Vision
4 - Achieving your Personal Style
Together these four essays represent, first, an exploration of the too-rarely discussed subject of inspiration and creativity,
and second a road map towards the development of a vision and the achievement of a personal style unique to you.
Each essay features a set of Skill Enhancement Exercises that allows you to practice and develop the skills discussed in each essay on your own.
1- Introduction
Personal style is the venue through which you share your vision with your audience. Your personal style develops, expands and becomes more unique as you continue making your vision a reality. As we saw in the three previous essays, this is a four-parts process: vision and personal style are related to inspiration and creativity. The more fertile your inspiration and creativity are, the faster your vision and your personal style will grow.
Achieving a personal style represents a significant amount of work. As you work towards making your vision a reality, you will need to become bolder. To compensate the detractions that will most likely come your way, you will need to find courage and motivation in your successes at describing your vision and at sharing it successfully with your audience.
As you become bolder you find new ways to express and share this vision. Each new artistic statement, each new piece, will become another step towards achieving your personal style. Each attempt is but one small step, but the sum of your attempts creates a stairway that eventually will lead you to heights that you could not have climbed in a single step. The only way to get to the top of this stairway is work as hard as you can at developing your style.
About 4 years ago I wrote my first essay on personal style, the essay was published in my book Mastering Landscape Photography. If you have not read this previous essay I recommend you do so because it features information that is not repeated in this second essay. The essay you are reading now is the result of my continued thinking on this subject over the past 4 years.
This essay is also the last in this four-essay series. It is the conclusion of the four-parts artistic process that I present in this series and it brings together the four parts of this process.
What is a personal style?
A personal style is the translation of your vision into an actual work of art, into a photograph in this instance. It is the translation of your ideas into something that others can see, something that you can share with your audience, something that represents the closest rendition of your vision that you are capable of producing at a given time.
The language you are using to create this translation is photography. Photography is a visual language that uses composition, tone, color, contrast, subject, light, angle, approach and more to translate your vision into images that anyone can see.
As with any translation, something is often lost, modified or left out. Therefore, each new translation, each new photograph, is a new attempt towards a more accurate translation or towards a translation that your audience understands better. It is also a new attempt at defining the language that you are using to make this translation. As an artist expressing your vision through a personal style, you are not just sharing a message through the language of your choice. As your vision becomes more refined and more unique so does your language. Eventually, the language you use becomes yours only. You invent it as you move forward towards an ever-finer representation of the ideas in your mind.
At that point you are both the inventor of a new vision and the inventor of a new language to translate and express this vision. You are the inventor of the image as well as the author of the facture of the image. Your personal style is a visual language in a way that you use to communicate your message, your vision, to your audience.
In other words you are not just the author of the work of art. You are also the author of the visual language used to create this work of art. You are therefore indebted to your audience because if you create a new language your audience needs to make the effort of learning this new language.
This language may be fairly transparent or it can be quite complex. You are therefore responsible for either teaching your audience how to read this language, or for having others help your audience understand your language. This is because your audience needs help understanding the structure of the language you are using. This is what was missing in much of Modern Art for example. For a long time there was no one available to explain the language of Modern Art to the audience and as a result Modern Art was, and to a large extent still is, incomprehensible to a large part of the public.
The process of developing a personal style is a process of evolution, of continual refinement and of fine-tuning the expression of your vision. A true personal style represents the outcome of this process: a consistent and ongoing expression of your vision. First it is an approach in which the technical and artistic challenges have been resolved in a satisfying manner. Second it is an approach that demonstrates a consistent solution to these problems, a solution that is implemented in a similar manner from image to image, throughout your entire body of work.
This is one of the most famous locations in the world and an icon of the American Southwest. As such I often say that it is easy to create a good photograph of Monument Valley because it is so dramatically photogenic, but difficult to create an outstanding image because so many good ones already exist.
This is one of my most recent attempts at creating another image from this location. While it is not for me to decide what is the level of achievement of this image, I can say that I find it pleasing, in large part because it was taken in mid-afternoon, a time that poses challenges for color photography because the light at that time is relatively flat and unsaturated.
What makes this image successful are the cloudy conditions present on that day. I waited until the sun lit the middle butte and I used the rocks in the foreground as leading lines towards this butte. I also selected a time when the clouds were grouped in the center of the image rather than when they were moving out towards the sides or the top of the frame.
The combination of leading foreground lines, of the lit middle butte and of the cloud position is what, for me, creates the fundamental structure of this image. My only regret is that I could not get just the middle butte in the light. The two others were also partially in direct light and if I had waited any longer the clouds would have been gone. One's desires sometimes go beyond what nature can do.
3 - Finding your own way of seeing
Achieving a personal style does not mean creating photographs that are outlandish, that rely on theatrics to be created, or that solely depend on bizarre content to be interesting. Style is relying on solid values and concepts. Style is creating a firm foundation from which you will create your work.
Achieving a personal style is first and foremost achieving a personal way of seeing. This is the avowed goal of numerous photographers. However, few actually reach this goal. Why? First, because there is a lack of methodology in regards to helping photographers develop a vision and achieve a personal style. Second, because many photographers underestimate the difficulty of the task: developing a personal style is a lot more difficult than it seems. And third, because there is really no comprehensive study of what is required to achieve a personal style. The literature on the subject is slim and the small body of work that exists treats the subject as if it was as simple as going out, getting a few tips here and there and then be on your way to finding your own way of seeing and developing your own photographic style.
The fact is that it is not that simple. In fact, it is not simple at all. The process that leads one to find his way of seeing is long and arduous and follows a logical progression. One has to understand what is involved as well as which pitfalls await one on the path to developing a vision and ultimately achieving a personal style. These pitfalls are specific and once known can be easily averted. We will be looking at a number of them in the next sections. And no, it is not as simple as going out there and taking photographs while making good use of a few tips on composition and on seeing like a camera. Those are prerequisites, and if followed will result in better photographs, but they are not enough to result in developing a personal style.
The issue of personal style has always been present in art. It may however have been less important in the past when photography was practiced mainly by trained artists with relatively few "aficionados" joining in. This situation changed somewhat during what I like to call the "darkroom craze" that took place from the 60's to the 80's, although even then the commitment in space (one had to build a darkroom) and time (developing film and prints is time consuming) was significant enough that only the super-motivated were joining the ranks of the practitioners.
The digital revolution changed all of that. All of a sudden anyone with a personal computer -which means a lot of people, just about anyone in fact-and a digital camera or a scanner could claim to be a photographer because they could process and print their own photographs themselves for a relatively low initial investment in time, space and funds.
The many possible variations that one can apply, inflict or otherwise subject a digital image to, depending on how you prefer to put it, means that potentially a personal style is only a mouse click away, or a filter away, or a new piece of software away. This pushes the notion of personal style to the forefront. Questions related to personal style quickly surface: do I have a personal style? Am I really that creative? Can anyone else do what I do? Is it me, is it the filter, the software, the camera or something else? Can I do it again? Do others like it? What do you, the master, think of my work? Do I have talent? Am I a genius?
The fact is that, if you need to ask any of these questions you most likely do not have a personal style. What you have is access to software that can do things to photographs that were never possible prior to digital photography. Doing something that is unusual, something that is noticeable, does not mean you have a personal style. This is an issue that has been present way before digital photography came about. It means you did something unusual and noticeable to your photographs. That's all. It makes you wonder if you have a personal style, which is probably the most important consequence. However, developing a personal style is still a long ways away. It is also a lot different than using strange compositions, applying cool filter effects to your images, or being "creative" during image conversion and processing.
4 - Style develops through work
personal style is primarily achieved through work. This work consists of developing the vision you obtained by following your inspiration and expressing your creativity.
You cannot force personal style into being because in many ways style finds us more than we find it. What you can do is work as hard as you can at expressing your vision. You may not even know for sure when you have arrived, when you have developed a personal style. This is in part because this process is a journey and not a destination. It is also because, as artists, we do not always recognize when we have developed a style; in many instances someone else has to point this out to us.
As you work keep in mind that there are no shortcuts to style. Some people erroneously believe that they can follow a number of strategies to achieve a style such as copying someone else's style, following a rulebook to style, following technical instructions to get a specific look, emulating a style and so on. Unfortunately all these shortcuts are ineffective because they are based in duplicating a preexisting style developed by someone else. None of these approaches will result in creating your own style.
A personal style is the expression of your vision. It is also the expression of your personal taste, of your personal choices. In this respect it is as unique as your handwriting. While using someone else's style as a point of departure is possible, such an approach needs to be considered as a starting point and not as a final destination. It should also be remembered that achieving a style is a journey more than a destination and that the most important asset during this journey is your willingness to work as hard as you can at developing your own style.
5 - Your personal style filter
Your style provides you with a set of guidelines or photographic approaches that you have developed through countless hours of trial and error. These provide you with what I call your personal style filter. This is a filter that exists in your mind rather than in front of your lens. However, you look through this filter and see the world through it just as well as if it was installed in front of your lens.
This filter consists of your way of seeing the world, from idea to print. It starts with your vision for your work and ends when the final print is matted and framed. It includes each and every part of the photographic process, both technical and artistic. It includes fieldwork and studio work because an artistic photograph is not completed when you click the shutter. A fine art photograph is completed after you are done making all the improvements to tone, contrast and color and after you have created a print that expresses what you saw and felt in the field.
As you work with this personal style filter, you need to photograph what you like rather than what you think you should like. Over time you will begin to develop a consistent way of seeing. You will discover that certain elements or characteristics are being repeated in your work without your conscious awareness. When this happens you will have made one more step towards achieving your style.
Your personal style can also be revealed to you through others. Listen carefully to what others say about your photographs because they can help you identify specific characteristic of your work that you may not have noticed.
19 - Conclusion
The achievement of a personal style means following your inspiration and vision, being creative, trusting your own instincts, leaving your comfort zone and not being afraid to take chances and make your own rules.
Your personal style is an extension of your personality. As such your personal style is as unique as your handwriting for example. The mistake that many people make when it comes to personal style is thinking that they have to have a model and that this model will help them find the right way and the wrong of making art. Such a model does not exist because art has no rules. Art is whatever you want it to be.
As long as you do not approach art that way, the achievement of a personal style will continue to elude you. If you forever try to continue following the rules, or try to copy someone else's work, your work will remain commonplace and expectable. To be unique, to surprise yourself and your audience, in short to achieve your personal style, the artwork you create has to be yours.
Think of art as being this one place where anything goes, where you can be yourself and do what you want, whatever that may be. Think of personal style as being able to create something unique and extraordinary, something that does not exist in any way, shape or form, something that others will want to own and admire.
Personal style is therefore about being cutting edge. As such it carries with it the risk of exposing yourself to potential disapproval, because anything that is cutting edge is bound to elicit extreme responses, either total acceptance or total rejection. "Mild" responses are rare once an artist develops a true personal style and this is one of the reasons why so many hesitate at doing what it takes to achieve a personal style. In other words, they are concerned, and rightly so, that the responses to their work will be polarized rather than neutral.
Having a defined and recognizable style means making decisions regarding what you photograph and knowing what is your subject. If you are unsure of your subject your audience will be unsure of it as well. As a result, it is unlikely that this audience will support your work. Why? Simply because if you are not sure where you are going they will not be sure whether they want to follow you or not. You are supposed to be the master, to decide where you are going and to show the way. The audience expects you to make these decisions and to lead them on the path to an understanding and an appreciation of your work. For this reason they cannot lead you. This is neither their role nor their inclination. This is not their purpose for looking at your work. Instead, it is your responsibility to lead them.
You must therefore make decisions about what is your subject, your approach, and eventually your personal style. Doing so is crucial because lack of decision in this instance means lack of following on the part of your audience. If you don't know where you are going, or if you believe that not making a choice will preserve all options for future decisions, your audience will drop you like a stone -if they ever give you any attention at all- to go see the work of those who have a firm idea of what they are doing. Audiences like strong positions. They like artists who know where they stand, even though the stance of this artist may be unlike the taste of a specific audience, or may be shocking, or again may be unconventional. They like a firm position because this is what is expected of an artist. In a sense, polarization of the audience is a logical outcome of art.
This series of four essays in now complete. In this conclusion I want to point out that although my focus has been photography, most of what I presented here is applicable to other artistic mediums, and that, eventually, the process I described is applicable to art in general.
This series is therefore not only about photography. It is also about the purpose of art and about the reasons why we create art. We create art to share a message with our audience. In the context of the visual arts, which include photography, we create art to share a different way of seeing, a different way of representing things visually. Eventually, when all is said and done, creating art is about expressing our personality and our vision of the world.