Photographer in theory, if not practice.

Wire. 2024.

It’s Monday, and having just completed a chaotic week, editing client work, doing bits of report writing and administration for my part time job for Te Whare Hēra Artist Residency Programme, having meetings with people and writing emails and web posts and getting over the flu, I’m looking down the barrel of another week of lurching madly from one project to the next. Currently in conversation with an art-director about an upcoming editorial, my imagination is firing with all of the things we could do. Booking days of client shooting into my calendar, shoe-horning all of the busy things in. The irony is, I haven’t taken a single photograph in the last week, and that feels like a wiggly tooth.

I have always been somewhat compulsive - I bite, pick, I poke anything that hurts, over and over until it’s my own fault that it hurts. If my tooth is aching, I prod them with my tongue on repeat to check that it’s still sore.

Yep, still sore.

This feeling of not having used my camera is a bit like a wiggly tooth. I’m distracted by the urge, and yet, it sits in the corner of my office, waiting for me to prize some time from my full-but-sedentary day.

I guess I’m reflecting that this creative life has definite seasons and rhythms, and this week is part of that. I think there is a perpetual element of dissatisfaction for photographers - we think and plan and collect before we can actually do the exciting bit. And then we edit and process and deliver and go back to the beginning of the cycle. The fun bit is so fleeting. And if you’re lucky enough to be busy, which I suddenly am, those cycles intersect and clash, and that can be frustrating. Some photographers happily shoot every day, doing myriad different things. I’m not like that, I prefer to work on projects that are more complex, and require a few more layers of research and planning, reflection and editing.

I’m also becoming quite particular about what I’ll agree to photograph for others. Aligning projects with my values is something I’m finding more essential as I get older. But also, I want to be challenged. I want to find new ways to tell the truth and spark imagination. I’m fully aware what a position of privilege it sounds, to pick and choose the work I agree to, but there’s only so much time and energy available to me and I need to spend it doing things that are meaningful. I remember hearing someone (maybe Sophia Spring, on The Exposed Negative podcast?) say in an interview, (and I’ll probably remember this inaccurately)…, that the work she agrees to needs to tick at least one of three boxes. It has to be financially rewarding enough, or it must be creatively fulfilling. Or, it needs to be an amazing experience. One out of three might mean a ‘yes’ to a job, two or more are generally a heartfelt ‘absolutely’. So, tomorrow I’ll be taking some photographs - portraits of a colleague. I think they’ll tick two boxes, and they might be the domino that teeters and falls, bringing forth another wave of creative output. Fingers crossed.

Tomorrow night I’m heading to an event by Women in Photography NZ/AU, and The Handmade Darkroom. This meeting will be a discussion about being led by curiosity - idea to image or image to idea. I’m thinking a lot about that now, and an advocate for both methodologies or at the very least for a hybrid approach. The warp and weft of those strands of creative practice seem natural. That we do something, that triggers thinking and research and planning and doing more, new, different things. One discovery informing the next.

It’s an honour and a privilege to live a creative life, even if it sometimes brings out the obsessive compulsive in me. And even if sometimes we’re struggling to pay for school camp and guitar lessons. Thankfully, it’s all just part of a season.