Photography & Creative Practice
Photography is not only about learning how to make images.
It’s about learning how to see, how to decide, and how to stay oriented over time.
This section gathers essays that look at photography as a long-term creative practice. They are written for photographers who have experience, but feel uncertain about clarity, direction, or meaning in their work.
The focus here is not technique.
It is judgment, authorship, and the slow work of understanding what your photographs are really doing.
Core Essays
Why Many Experienced Photographers Feel Stuck
Why confusion often appears after technical competence, and what that moment actually signifies.
Photography Is a Thinking Practice (Not a Technical One)
On judgment, decision-making, and why photography eventually stops responding to solutions.
Finding Your Photographic Voice Takes Longer Than You Think
A reflection on time, repetition, uncertainty, and why voice rarely arrives all at once.
What to Do When You No Longer Trust Your Own Photographs
About doubt, self-judgment, and learning how to read your work when familiar criteria stop working.
Why Feedback Often Makes Things Worse (And When It Actually Helps)
An examination of critique culture, opinion overload, and the conditions where feedback becomes useful.
How to Read These Texts
These essays don’t need to be read in order.
Some readers start with recognition.
Others arrive through doubt, frustration, or fatigue.
Wherever you begin is fine.
What matters more than sequence is noticing which questions continue to stay with you after reading.
Why This Section Exists
Many photographers reach a point where:
technical growth feels stable, but meaning feels unclear
feedback creates more confusion than confidence
progress becomes harder to define
These texts exist to slow that moment down long enough for it to be understood rather than avoided.
They don’t offer solutions.
They offer language.
A Natural Continuation
For some photographers, reading is enough to restore orientation.
Some photographers choose to pause first, through a single private critique session, before deciding how they want to continue.
For others, these questions feel unresolved and personal. When that happens, this is the kind of work I continue through private, one-on-one conversations, where photographs are looked at over time rather than in isolation.