08 Killer Instinct

To make a living from your art, you have to trust your instincts. If you have them.

I don’t know what people like. I’ve never been a good judge. I’ve spent time on an image or a video that I think will kill, and then no one cares. The images or videos I just put out without as much thought, in an almost instinctual way, those do really well.

I learned about how little I had my finger on the pulse of what people like during my 2-D Design class in college. Basically, it was a collage class. I follow a lot of collage artists, but I’m too impatient to be one myself I think (maybe that’s why I like double exposures, it’s collage for someone that doesn’t want to deal with glue sticks). Overall, it was a fun class. I loved how collages could be full of loaded imagery and comment on culture through culture itself (meaning like magazines and stuff, which was a thing that still existed in 2011).

But I digress. Basically, I came up with a really “provocative” idea. I had a friend who was really into guns, and he took me to the range to shoot paper targets. The goal was to make a collage out of my actual targets. Genius.

No one cared. But my professor really liked the collage I made ten minutes before that class. We were supposed to make two, and I spent all my time on the bullet hell one, so I had to rush out another one. I think it was out of a watch ad or something. It wasn’t that interesting to me, but it ended up being the favorite.

The moral of the story, don’t work hard on anything. That’s guaranteed to be the thing that no one likes.

I joke, but the deeper I get into Youtube, the more it’s starting to feel true.

The Real Problem

I pull from all kinds of sources. Movies, books, music, photography, other types of artists, etc. All that stuff contributes to what I make in one way or another simply by “instinct”.

If I were to pick up a camera and walk around, I would take photos in the way I take photos, without thinking. I would point my lens toward the things that caught my eye. Now, when I try to exist outside my own eye and try to project the eye of say, a potential buyer, that’s the trap. Any time we deny our instincts and try to make what we think “will work” is when we are on the fast track to losing.

My problem is overthink. I overthought the collage, I regularly overthink my Youtube videos, and I overthink the photo series I invest in. But the data doesn’t lie: every time I overthink what I make, it fails.

A Big, Hairy “But”

What I’m saying is that you should go on auto-pilot as a photographer, and then you’ll finally be accepted, right? No, that’s also not how it works unfortunately.

I’m a lost cause. I’ve been doing whatever it is I do for so long now, that all I can do is get better at whatever that is. I’ve tried to be a successful wedding photographer, portrait photographer, real estate photographer, drone photographer, product photographer, etc. and I failed at all of them. Then I started just doing what I do on Youtube and I went from 100 to almost 1500 subscribers in a few months (and the first 100 took me like 12 years to get).

The photography work I make that has been the most maintainable for me over time is basically the only time that Will Malone and “uniqueness” could possibly even come close to being in the same sentence. So for me, the less I think, the more I relax, and most importantly, the more I have fun, the more successful I am. Yet, because I’m often impatient, depressed, and battling overthink, I convince myself that it isn’t that simple which continues to delay my push forward.

I’m naturally distrusting of my own instincts. Which is why I have to work better to follow them. But, many photographers who want to sell their work may not have enough data gathered to even have developed instincts that can be trusted. The only way to get those is to try stuff. Take a lot of photos. Take guesses at what people might like. Hone in on what you like.

And maybe you find your really specific, weird lane. It may not speak to a lot of people. Maybe you’re destined for a solid 10,000 followers as opposed to 100,000. But that’s way better than what comes of trying to chase the 100,000 followers when you’re not really designed for it.

Clean Work Sells

The mainstream photography that sells is clean. Plain and simple.

That’s the extent of my knowledge about what people like.

I knew a photographer back in Chattanooga, TN who made his living from his prints of Chattanooga for 15 years or so. He would be at the farmer’s market every Sunday selling canvases and aluminum prints of his work. He regularly sold the same five or so photos despite having a portfolio of at least 70 print ready images.

They were simple, clean, and look just as good in 2010 as they do now.

He was selling his images during a time where HDR Photography was at its pique. No photographer who went deep into HDR photography back in the early 00s is still regularly selling their prints. But in the 00s, they probably sold decently well.

HDR photography looks stuck in time. It looks like what the cave men made when they first discovered a digital camera. But, it was super popular at the time.

My farmer’s market photographer friend just did what he liked. He created images he liked, and it worked.

I’m sure HDR photographers did the same thing, they made what they liked. But, that also happened to be in fashion at the time. Following the trends of the now is a dangerous thing because trends often disguise themselves as instinct.

No one cares = freedom

It’s all hard. Making work and then selling it is a nearly impossible task. Not only do you have to make something people like, but you have to make something people like enough to actually pay you money, instead of simply giving you a cost-free “like” on Instagram.

I think the freedom comes from the moment when we realize that no one cares. No one is checking in on us. No one is religiously following the canon of our growth and work.

But there’s something freeing about that realization. It means that there’s nothing to lose. It means that if following trends won’t bring us lasting success, we might as well follow our instincts and make stuff that at least allows us to sleep at night knowing we aren’t lying to ourselves about what we want to do.

Don’t be like me. I am given proof that I can sell a double-exposure image to a medical office or some other commercial space and I still think, “Nah that can’t be enough.” And then I go off and try something else. I need to be better at trusting the instincts I’ve spent a lot of blood, sweat, tears, money, and more blood to develop.

More importantly though, just have fun. People like seeing other people having fun.

I screwed up.

Last week, I missed Day 151 of my Polaroid 365 Project by getting swept up in the chaos of life right now. It bummed me out.