Social media trends
What I write here is merely my opinion about it. Maybe it is completely wrong. I’m very far from being a social media expert, don’t know any growing hack or strategy. In fact I even think these strategies are mostly pointless things, chasing some dreams outside of reality. We should keep social media at arms length and don’t take it too seriously.
The same goes with trends
Many experts, youtubers and even photographers tells you that you need to have one specific style and stick to it, otherwise any potential client might not know which style you really are and won’t hire you. This might be true, but I still think it is not a good idea to lock yourself into one specific style. It can even be boring after a while. Photography is much more diverse than this. The question is, is it reasonable to think that your style isn’t changing over the years?
For example, if you’re good at high contrast black and white and you’ve got a reasonable follower base, is it necessary to never ever try other things? Is it impossible that you might be just as good at taking amazing colour photos with multiple layers? Or amazing portraits?
I think for a talented photographer this closed thinking is like being in creative jail. I follow many really talented creatives on Instagram and while some of them really stick to one specific style, many are extremely talented in multiple genres, have different styles. So for growth, for brand awareness it might be better to lock yourself into one style, but from an artistic point of view I think it is not only unreasonable but even detrimental to your photography.
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs”
What about likes and followers?
I know, I know. Everywhere we can hear that these things does not count. And if we strictly use our social media platforms as a creative outlets then it’s fine. But if we would like to use it as an online mini portfolio to aquire clients, we might need a real strategie. But what if we hate these special social media strategies? Hope for the best? Or limit ourselves and post only pictures form one specific style? Honestly I don’t know.
I always hated the idea to lock myself into something and never do anything else. It is against creativity, against photography. Many of our icons also hated these things. Cartier-Bresson famously hated these compartmentalisations. I hear most professionals really against these things. With all that said I have no idea what we could do against these detrimental social media trends. And of course I’m not blind. I know it is much easier to build a brand if someone use only one specific style. But what happens if that style goes out of fashion?
The past
If we take a look at the history of photography we can easily see that this closed, trend following photography is rather new. Almost all the icons tried themselves in different genres, many even was excellent in multiple genres. Probably they didn’t have the “helping” hand of social media to shy them away from being creative. They photographed what was interesting to them, made portraits, or street photos on a nice sunny day, or geometric-architectural shots if they found some nice shadows, or some lifestyle shots if they felt that was interesting. Although I guess they didn’t know that lifestyle will be a different genre.
The verdict
I think it is only natural to develop, to try other genres, styles even if we stick to one specific genre at the end. The variety, the versatility can only help us grow as photographers. Don’t let the likehunt madness kill your creativity.
“Once you have a camera in your hand, you have a license to see”
See you soon, enjoy taking photos!
Tamas