The Secret Misery and Bliss of Finding Your Signature Photographic Style

The Secret Misery and Bliss of Finding Your Signature Photographic Style

Following on from my earlier post about Marius Vleth
http://warrenjonesphotographylandscape.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/finding-your-inner-creative-soul-as.html

There is a really interesting article in a similar light written by Lindsay Adler in DIY Photography. Lindsay discusses how to find your own style in 3 succinct areas:

ANALYSE YOUR WORK

FIND THREE WORDS TO DESCRIBE YOUR STYLE

GIVE YOURSELF ASSIGNMENTS TO DEVELOP STYLE

I've made this bold as I want it to stick in my mind.

The article can be found here:

http://www.diyphotography.net/the-secret-misery-and-bliss-of-finding-your-signature-photographic-style/

Fortunately the OCA Photographic pathway allows many assignments and as a personal series I have had encouragement from several tutors to follow up on themes that I've started within assignments.

This passage from Adler particularly stuck a chord with me in how to develop a style and how to build a cohesive style of work:

"I decided that the images I liked best in my portfolio were (1) bold, (2) graphic, (3) fashion photography and often featuring the color red. I kept these three words in mind, and shot once a week for a year in order to develop a portfolio that reflected these words.

I remember when I first looked at my new portfolio and felt, “Wow, these all look like they were taken by the same photographer.”

I realized that all the fears I had were ill-founded. My images weren’t static, or uncreative. They looked like years of work, not all the same shoot. They were a cohesive body of work. When I could finally see this in my portfolio, I felt a huge sigh of relief."

This approach is something I'd like to develop within my own practise. I need to further develop my own ideas but Vleth and Adler have certainly helped me understand how to develop my approach.

Looking at Adler's on her website you can indeed see her own style:

http://lindsayadler.photoshelter.com/

Her series New Work details her choice of the colour red as a distinctive element in her images and a style she refers to in the article above. Her images are often simple, elegant but extremely well lit, some images even containing a Grunge style within them.

As I think about my pwn practice I recognise that syle does not necessarily mean complexity, its something individual and cohesively binding and recognisable as belonging to a single photographer.