Your photography sucks! – A wake up call from 2007

It was in fall of 2007. I had only recently moved to Paris for a year of university abroad and had discovered a university photography association which I gladly joined. The concept of the weekly meetings was, each of the 3-6 people that joined brought a couple of photographs either dealing with a certain assigned topic or whatever he/she saw fit. The classes were informal and heavily based on critisicing the artist.
At that time, I was more convinced about the value of my photography much more than I am actually now. I usually had around five photographs on a USB stick with me and we huddled around an old computer screen to discuss them. One afternoon, as I brought in five pictures on a USB stick that I was rather proud of, I got very heavily criticised about my selection for a good. It was painful and I had a hard time understanding why it seemed like everything I showed sucked.

The realisation came later: Whenever you show more than one photograph, each image stands in the context of the rest.

Each of the individual photographs I brought may have been decent, but the combination did just not work at all. As a result, I attempted to focus a series of pictures showing the same subject under different angles and telling a story. You can see the result below: Its photos of the little plant that I had brought with me to Paris from an abstract to a realistic point of view. To put it under yet a new light, I now edited each picture to make it more individual. You can find the originals further below. While I don’t consider it an outstanding piece of my work, I like to remember the context of this series. The teacher was pleased with the result by the way.

The style of my work of those years were strongly shaped by my teacher. His focus was on geometry, lines, light, motion and harmony and thus much of my photographs were formed in that spirit. Eventually, I will post more pictures of the time that reflect this. I owe a lot to the long discussion sessions I had in Paris.

Thank you Tuong!

 

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The original and unedited images from 2007

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