Topic 8 - Audiences and Institutions

It can be easy to create work for the limited audience that you interact with regularly. For me, that would be my students, family, and social media. I find myself composing images that might directly demonstrate a certain technique or compositional principle for my high school students to explore. This can be pretty limiting and has stifled my own creativity.

In the past year I have tried to connect with working photographers, professionals, artists or creative agencies on social media in order to purposefully use that space to be exposed to work and grow from that exposure. When I do post my own work, it is often to share with a very limited number of close friends and colleagues and hardly ever an attempt to gain new followers. I view my social media followers as a larger group text but I do admit that a rush of adrenaline is felt when people I wouldn't expect acknowledge something I create.

I consider myself a professional in the sense that I do make money from my photographs, however I do this only in the commercial sense. The same applies for design. I consider myself a designer, but not an artist. I think the main block is that I have not figured out how to create something meant solely for my own audience. I am well versed in creating work to solve a problem or a commission of some sort. Through this course, I have been pushing myself to explore ways to practice this parallel world of photography and art and become comfortable existing in both worlds.