Consistency, output and visibility have become virtues of contemporary artmaking. The act of thinking leaves behind little evidence, and so increasingly fails to count as work at all.
Making things (art in particular) seems to have acquired the same obligations as work. The artist has become a creative, the creative then a practitioner, and finally the practitioner is now a personal brand. With this came tools and techniques to track engagement, schedule posts, map progress, maintain consistency and optimise output. Advice for artists increasingly resembles advice for business owners and CEOs. One is encouraged to establish systems, define goals, identify audiences and, above all, continue producing.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about this, and many artists benefit from routine. Most worthwhile work requires persistence, and there are certainly periods in which discipline matters more than inspiration. Yet there is a marked difference between persistence and productivity. The former asks only that we return to the work when we can, while the latter demands evidence that we have done so. It longs for visible outcomes: projects completed, portfolios assembled, newsletters sent, images posted or at least scheduled. Looking, thinking and considering do not count for very much because they leave little, if any, product behind.
Photography seems particularly susceptible to this way of thinking. Images are expected to belong to projects, projects should form bodies of work, and these things taken together ought to demonstrate coherence. The isolated picture can feel strangely illegitimate, as though it has failed to justify itself by not being applicable to some larger idea. So we photograph to complete a sequence, then we edit in anticipation of publication. Before long, the cycle of simply paying attention begins to resemble administration.
Even wandering with a camera has become something to monetise. We take our cameras to the streets to continue our craft, but even if the photos themselves aren’t up to much, an ever-burgeoning cohort will still return home with enough vlog footage and personal documentary material for a neatly packaged, thirty-minute YouTube showreel.
This is perhaps unfortunate because photography is, for many people, one of the few activities that initially escaped purpose, and even permitted aimlessness. It allowed someone to spend an afternoon moving through a place with no expectation beyond noticing what was there. The resulting images were often uneven, forgettable or unresolved, but that was not especially important. They were evidence of time spent looking and experiencing, rather than achievements to be accounted for later.
What is lost when artistic practice becomes productive is not simply pleasure but a certain kind of freedom: the freedom to make poor work, to abandon ideas, become distracted, or to spend months making nothing at all. Some creative activity resembles play more than labour. It accumulates slowly and unevenly, and at times disappears altogether. It is valuable precisely because it does not need to lead anywhere.
This may appear inefficient, and perhaps it is. But inefficiency is not always a defect. Art has always required effort, and will continue to do so (regardless of what the AI-bros may try to tell you). Whether art should also be expected to provide regular proof of its own existence is another matter, and something I’m not entirely convinced by.
Further Reading
Some of the ideas here overlap with a discussion I recently discovered in Issue 1 (May 2017) of Full Bleed published by the Maryland Institute College of Art, entitled The Artist as Entrepreneur. The panel of practitioners arrive at similar concerns from a broader cultural perspective encompassing many art forms, where my interest here is primarily in what this shift feels like for photographic practice.
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