The never ending quest of finding your photographic "style"

Hello friend,

Today, these questions that I kept… questioning, time after time, decided to plague my mind again.

What is my photographic style? What do I want to do with my photos? Why do I shoot? What’s the point of all this?

I guess it’s just my ADHD-ass at it again. I see one good frame from a movie or tv show and suddenly all I want to do is making “film stills”.

The other day I saw a retro shirt in a clothing story with a print that looks kinda like this:

And now I’m all consumed by making my photos feel like vintage travel posters. I haven’t actually figured out how I’d do it, but I imagine it would probably draw some inspirations from artists like Samantha Cavet.

These aesthetics hit me even more now because I’m all consumed by Lana Del Rey these days. If her music was pictures, it would definitely have that 50s-60s vintage, americana, retro looks I think.

Inspirations come and go, and they leave a mark on my “artistic vision”, if we can even call it that. Every few weeks/months, somehow I get the urge to upend my who portfolio of photos, re-edit them, or throw them all in the trash. It’s very exhausting.

Ultimately, I want film to be the base of my photographic style. It feels like I’ve shot some of my best work lately on film.

I love both the results and the process of shooting film so much, and I feel like I’m a much better photographer when I shoot film.

But the main thing is, film really fits in to the nostalgic aesthetics vacuum that I desire very well. It’s definitely much closer to that “vintage travel prints” look. If I color grade my film photos a bit more aggressively (and maybe I’ll do that down the line), I can probably get closer to the look I want, but I guess the point of this post that I’m wandering off topic again is, I don’t know what I want and I change my photographic north star every other month or so 🤷

The one thing with film that I just have so much anxiety is, airports in my country, and probably most of the countries I have any plans to travel to, have no concepts of hand-checking film. So I’ll always fear my films getting fried by X-rays and CT scanners, and therefore my film photos will most likely be limited to the places I can walk or drive to.

Maybe shooting film will make me understand what is it that I want my photos to feel like more (I think it has). It’s kinda dumb that the some of films (natura 1600, provia 100f) and cameras (xpan) I want to shoot are literally just not available or not reasonably attainable at all, which kinda sucks.

Anyways, I used to be so guilty that I’m not producing photographs that has any resemblance of a “body of work” or something.

I admire people that can just do one thing, and one thing really well, and never get bored of it. I really do. My brain is so guilty of not being able to do… that, for most aspects of my life.

But in my photography, I have to remind myself now that this is fine. This is the evolution of my taste, my voice, of what I want from these zeroes and ones that make up a photo.

You don’t find your style by taking someone else’s, you find it through the evolution of learning something you like, and do more of that. There will not be one thing you like, there will be a collection of small things you like from here and there. You may try something, and only like 2% of the outcome. Find those 2%, and try to do more of them, if that makes sense.

I guess that’s my way of making sense of all this.

Until next time,
Peter.

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I hope I can grow this thing, whatever this is, to something more sustainable, so I can have more time doing more art 🤷. Especially now that I’m back to the path of lighting money up on fire anytime I fire a shot 🙏👌.

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