It’s a bit of a solitary pastime this, isn’t it? Of course, it’s fantastic to work with amazing models to create my figurative work – but as far as people who share my experience outside the studio, i.e. other photographers, is concerned, those connections are very few and far between. It is the perfect recipe for imposter syndrome really: seeing all this amazing work online and jealously imagining all the resources the photographer must have had access to.
Myself? I’m an engineer by trade – working in the energy industry in Aberdeen, Scotland. Work is busy, highly focussed and to be honest, often a little stressful. Until recently, I was part of a small group of engineers who could bounce ideas off each other and chat about our projects, sense-checking, sharing expertise, as well as chatting about the proverbial weather. That changed for me with the disbanding of our team to the four corners of the globe, and now that sense of community – that sense of belonging – has all but evaporated.
That started me thinking about the sense of community that photographers get between themselves. There are a few online spaces where photographers and models lob incendiary forum posts at each other, but I find these have very little sense of community. So far, I’ve not found a place where smaller groups can form communities and make genuine connections with other like-minded artists – at least, not somewhere that’s comfortable with the sharing of fine art figurative work, without heavy censorship.
The town where I live has a couple of nice galleries. They’re small, and mostly painted media, but they’re nice places to visit. No photography there as that’s no “proper” art, where I come from. There are never more than one or two people in there, but there are always a couple more chatting in the coffee corner. That got me thinking, wouldn’t it be lovely to have a virtual coffee corner, perhaps situated inside an existing online gallery space, where photographers specialising in a particular niche genre could simply chat? Not specifically about the work itself – or at least, not always – but just sharing their week. Maybe they have a shoot planned, maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re frustrated at not being able to shoot for some reason, or maybe they are struggling to squeeze their photography around their home life. Maybe they’re making do with a corner of the spare room – if they have a space at all. Maybe they just want to bounce an idea off someone on their own wavelength. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to share our experiences and not feel like we are paddling a one-man dinghy across the ocean?
It makes me wonder if there are other photographers out there that feel the same way. What would a space like this look like?
I’ve never seen a photography or model site ask, but I’d like to know: what’s your day job, what does a normal day look like for you, how often do you get to shoot, and what frustrates you most about it? Surely even the most visible photographers whose work we already admire fit their work around something else. Perhaps community means little to the highest achieving photographers – that gap just doesn’t exist for them, and that’s great – but for me, the gap is real, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Would a small, curated online community of fine art figurative photographers be valuable to you? By curated I mean people who are invited or whose body of work has been vetted, so everyone knows who they’re talking to. And rather than building yet another profile page on someone else’s platform, everyone would simply be linked to their own main web presence, website or wherever they primarily show their work.
And if you’re in a position to help build, host, or integrate something like that into an existing platform, I’d be delighted to chat about that with you too.
Leave a comment below with your thoughts or email me via the contact page.