You Need More than ‘Natural Talent’ to Make it as a Photographer

To make it to the top in any endeavor, you have to either work incredibly hard, and over a long period of time. Or, you have to be young, cute and take your clothes off on stage.
 
Think we are speaking of several different things here. While it always sounds good to urge people to work hard, no amount of industry will create talent. And while business acumen may earn someone money that is no measure of talent either. Surely we are all aware of things being sold at a profit that exhibit no degree of talent at all. The title misleads - or maybe needs to define "make it" as a photographer. Should financial success be the only yardstick?
 
Shirley Creazzo said:
Think we are speaking of several different things here. While it always sounds good to urge people to work hard, no amount of industry will create talent. And while business acumen may earn someone money that is no measure of talent either. Surely we are all aware of things being sold at a profit that exhibit no degree of talent at all. The title misleads - or maybe needs to define "make it" as a photographer. Should financial success be the only yardstick?
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Perhaps as an artist natural talent is more important. I have no real natural talent for photography, but I fell in love with the process over 50 years ago, and have made a living with it for over 40 years (PJ). Because I love the process, I shoot constantly, though. Many tens of thousands of photos.

But, I'm no artist. And had no formal education in photography.
 
OP here... It's the quote I posted that interests me, which no-one's picked up on:
Any dips**t can take pictures, Mason. Art, that’s special. What can you bring to it that nobody else can?
​
In other words, talented photographers are two a penny, but that's not sufficient: to be a successful photographer you need to bring something unique to your pictures.

Good examples of this are Magnum photographers: that they've got an eye for a picture and have mastered their craft are givens – but they all bring a unique vision and approach to their picture-making, whether its the disturbing starkness of Trent Parke's images or Jim Goldberg's socially aware collages.

When I was at college, one of my tutor's – another Magnum photographer, Mark Power – said "Anyone can take a good photograph but it doesn't make you a good photographer."

Lastly, let's leave money and business out of it: I'm talking only about what's in the photographs themselves – i.e. as a body of work – not what you do with them (such as how many you sell).
 
I teach creative writing for a living, and a shockingly large percentage of my students have enough talent to become superb writers, or they could, if they happened to be obsessed with writing. Not many are, though; almost everyone gives up. I honestly think everyone's talent is already unique. You just have to develop it through lots of trial and error, and that process isn't to everybody's taste. Most of my good students are shocked when they learn how many times people completely rewrite their novels and stories, how much of a writer's work gets rejected or thrown out unfinished.

The ones who make something of themselves as writers are the ones who take a perverse pleasure in the endless, tedious cycle of failure that comprises most of one's life as a writer. I suspect this is probably applicable to any art form.
 
I'm just not buying it, Huss. A photo can be a success if it is never seen by anyone, let alone sold. It can also be judged a success by other people without it being sold. That being the case, selling them is incidental to their value as photographs.
 
I'm with Ranchu. Popularity - through sales or otherwise - is no measure of the quality of a photograph. Let's stick to what the photographer depicts rather than what they do with the picture...
 
CMur12 said:
My understanding from the OP's last post is that this thread is about what makes a photographer an artist, not what makes a photographer a successful professional.

- Murray
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I missed this comment from RichC (the originator of the thread)

"Lastly, let's leave money and business out of it: I'm talking only about what's in the photographs themselves – i.e. as a body of work – not what you do with them (such as how many you sell)."

And so I have deleted my comments as they run contrary to this.
Sorry for that!
 
RichC said:
OP here...

What can you bring to it that nobody else can?

...

Lastly, let's leave money and business out of it: I'm talking only about what's in the photographs themselves – i.e. as a body of work – not what you do with them (such as how many you sell).
Click to expand...

Yeah, lets leave businness aside. I strongly believe that the "value" of a photo or body of work, in artistic sense or contentwise, has nothing to do with (and can be much greater than) its sale results and popularity.

I believe in fact that there are thousands of potential, yet sadly undiscovered photography icons in the private collections of photographers whose names nobody knows. And that there are thousands of missed Vivian Maier, if not HCB, among us. Lack of luck, lack of acquaintances / contact network, bad timing or insufficient self confidence, more than lack of hard work or talent, may be the only reason those potential "masters" are still unknown.

And I do believe that once any name is well established, you'll always find millions of admirers ready to swear that this photographer is a good one and buy his/her books, as well as many detractors. It would be a nice experiment to do..

EDIT: and no, I absolutely do not believe that each and every of the well established names, or even masters of photography, has brought something to it that no one else did (or could). I do not believe that the photographs of many known documentary photographers bear any obvious sign of being taken by exactly THAT photographer. They could have been taken by several other famous (or not) documentary photographers, and you wouldn't be able to tell. That's what I beleive.
 
People purchasing one's work is an objective metric.

On-line view rates or even success in juried art shows can be contaminated with subjectivity. Being curated in a museum show is the most objective of these metrics.

When people consistently give you their money for your work, you have "made it". They are paying for their subjective preference.

All other metrics devolve into inconclusive subjective stalemates. They are futile.

Talent without hard work, purposiveness and tenacious endurance is not enough. For better or worse, non-artistic skills (mainly marketing) are what differentiate talented photographers. There are far more talented photographers than there are talented photographers who "make it".
 
Amen

Amen

mabelsound said:
The ones who make something of themselves as writers are the ones who take a perverse pleasure in the endless, tedious cycle of failure that comprises most of one's life as a writer. I suspect this is probably applicable to any art form.
Click to expand...

I've been writing music for 35+ years. I still may have to practice many hours before I can arrange and record a new song. I still put in 40 hours a week at it, and a good month's work nets me two tunes that each go by in three minutes.

When I was painting full time, a painting that took a month and a half to create was glanced at and passed by visitors in 30 seconds in a show.

In that regard, I think photography is more like painting than music, but without the hours I used to slave in the dark room, it has become much easier to create junk.
 
Interesting how a seemingly simple question generates such a complex set of answers.

I'm a little uneasy about the teachers' question : "Art, that’s special. What can you bring to it that nobody else can?"

Anyone can bring hard work, perseverance, and people skills to the table. Anyone has talent. No good being extra-special and original and out of the box if nobody recognises the quality of the work : good photography balances precariously on a thin line between 'Wow, I haven't seen this like that before' and 'This is exactly how that should look like', a dance between shape and content, recognition being the central node. One has to 'recognise' a photograph to want to explore it further.

To confuse the issue, recognition is the term associated with fame, name-recognition.
This is unfortunate, as fame has little coincidence with artistic merit. For every Van Gogh there are tens, maybe hundreds of painters who are just as interesting. Vivian Maier is one name that popped out of obscurity posthumously. How many others are there? How many others were there, with a camera and something to shoot?

If the question is about 'making art', talent is a given, hard work and perseverance are required. you need to be obsessed with taking photographs, and obsessed with taking better ones.
If the question is about 'making it', it's mostly luck. Like being a friend of the drummer in a group that turns out big, or getting introduced to the editor of Vogue, or going viral on social media with a complaint about how hard the life of a photographer is.

In answer to the teacher in the movie : art isn't all that special. It's just a name for a better class of craftsmanship.

cheers
 
willie_901 said:
All other metrics devolve into inconclusive subjective stalemates. They are futile.
Click to expand...

Inconclusive subjective stalemates are the whole point!

So, you have no way of telling which of your photos is any good, other than how probable you think it is that someone will buy it? Looking at other people's photos, you have no conception of the quality of them, since you aren't aware of the sales figures?

How do you frame a picture? How do you choose a subject? Do you move your wallet from one pocket to the other?

If there were no such thing as money, would all photos be equally good?
 
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