I was reading a blog post by Kirk Tuck where he talks about pushing yourself out of the rut that others try to place you in with commercial work and trying to give the client what you think they want. All in all it’s an excellent article, but what struck me was this comment from one of the readers:

I have been a member of a camera club here in South Africa for the last year and a half, and for the last few months I have been bugged by one thing, I know what “look” they want and either shoot or choose my entries for club evenings based on that (to get max points) rather than submit the stuff I really like. Just this week I decided not to submit pics at the club anymore, it’s just a principle thing.

First, I encourage everyone to listen to this series of videos on a lecture by Wayne Dyer from the 80s called “How To Be A No-Limit Person”. Yes, parts of it are pretty cheesy and it’s so 80s it hurts, but the message remains relative. Specifically the part where he talks about how no one can make you feel anything. When someone “hurts your feelings” what you are saying is that you value their opinion more than your own.

This is especially a tricky area when it comes to critiques. The person who made that comment is willing to sacrifice their vision for the sake of the camera club’s approval, and if he doesn’t get it, then he sees the best way to deal with it is to simply stopping putting his work out there.

I can understand where he’s coming from. I belonged to a camera club several years ago. My club was made up of about 85% retired folks, and correspondingly most of the photos were nature photos. Wildlife, landscapes, and flowers filled up about 75% of the photos on a given night. Needless to say that my style was quite a departure for the group, and I frequently got lower scores than I felt that I deserved as a result. But it didn’t matter to me. Very often I would get people coming up to me and talking to me about my photos that I submitted. They were curious or amused and even though they may not have wanted to buy it or wouldn’t have scored it very high, I was an anomaly and they were curious. Now here’s the thing. I would listen to their critique, and sometimes I would say to myself “that person just doesn’t get my vision”, or alternatively “I see their point, but I feel like the emotional impact of the piece over-rides the minor technical problems”, or perhaps “yeah, I see what they’re saying… I should watch out for that next time”. The point is I listened to their comments and I judged the value of their comments. It also never occurred to me that I shouldn’t submit photos to be judged. To me it was more important that people saw my images than what the score was.

Alternatively there’s a large photography community on LiveJournal that I’m active in. There was a gal who was a semi-regular contributor who organized these fashion shoots, and she would post the results and a description accompanying them. I saw that she was putting in some effort, but to me the quality was extremely poor. On-camera flash and the models all had a vapid, blank expression on their face and wooden poses. I regularly made comments to her trying to be helpful in what I saw as the problems with her photos. Her response always came down to “yeah, but this is just my style”. I got the impression as a critiquer that she was using “style” as a crutch to mask poor technical skills. Is that fair of me? Am I being hypocritical? I’ll be the first to admit “possibly” to both, but ultimately I felt like she was blowing off my comments so I stopped responding to her entries altogether.

The lesson is that we need to be both good critiquers and good receivers of critique. We should listen to the opinions of others, but ultimately it’s only ourselves that we should listen to and go our own way.