Ok, so we put countless hours into learning light, waiting for the strike of good idea, looking for a perfect model for it, building a team, developing, shooting, retouching… and finally the pictures are ready and maybe they are even good. Phew..so now, why did we do this in the first place?
Money is known to be a good motivator, but in our day it’s easier to make them in literally any other industry then fashion. You start in fashion by doing stuff for free to learn and then you do stuff for free in parallel to client jobs to not die of boredom.
Depicting of true events — well, it’s a bit more believable, for journalists, sports photographers, event and wedding photographers. But not for me — I just make my stories up.
In a nutshell, I do the photoshoots because I know I have too many emotions and the only way I know how to deal with them is to create. And amazingly there are a lot of people (around 85k that I know of) who enjoys seeing my work so I feel like my emotions are accepted and I am accepted by extension.
What do we know about emotions? In psychology there is a lot of research that tries to catalogue our emotions like the Plutchik’s wheel above. There is also some research about functionality of emotions (fight-or-flight and more), but the more specific we go, the less psychology can really say about how we feel.
I mean there’s a machine to tell how much you are sweating and it is related to stress, but when you want to answer a question of “how do I feel right now” it’s already too hard to measure and hard factual measures give their place to verbal and descriptive — from behavioral science to psychodynamics and all the way to the famous Freud.
And we can categorize and rationalize and analyze, but we truly are coming to feelings — that live, fluent, multifaceted things that drive us crazy — in art. So with all the humbleness of what I produce right now, my own emotions and seeing them through my artistic eye is an inspiration that I hope will keep me creative for a long time.
