How To Find Your Voice Without Building a Signature Style - Moments of Mood, 3.7

Somewhere in your archive, there's a photograph you cannot fully explain, maybe.
And I want to bet that you know exactly which one I mean before I finish describing it.
It's the frame where you remember the moment completely, but barely remember the making of it.
Where something arrived that you have never quite been able to take credit for.
And if you're an emerging photographer trying to find your voice, that photograph is more important than everything you have made deliberately.
In this video, then I want to show you why the pressure to have a signature style is probably what is actually mooting your work, where your voice actually lives if it turns out not to be something you own, and a way of working this week that might let you find it again in your own archive.
Because the photographers whose work moves us most are often not really saying anything at all.
And understanding why that is true changed how I look at every frame that I make.
This is one of mine, for example, and I made it in under 10 seconds by accident on a walk back from a shoot that had kind of failed, and it knows something about my voice that years of deliberate effort never really taught me.
Do you have a frame that was made in a similar fashion?
If so, picture it now and notice something curious about it, which is that you may just remember the moment far more vividly than you remember the making of the image.
There's a gap in your memory right at that point where your decisions should be.
So hold that image there because that is the gap where we are exactly going.
This is the Mood Podcast.
I'm Matt Jacob, and this is the show that helps emerging photographers find their voice so you can build a cohesive body of work, articulate what it's about, and then get it in front of the right people.
It's the only photography podcast that is itself a practice.
And every week I sit down with a guest or break down a single idea in a commentary like this one called Moments of Mood.
A couple of things I want to plant that I want to talk around in the next few minutes.
The first is why we treat this thing called our voice as this thing that we possess, you know, something that we build and defend and stamp onto every frame or try and stamp onto every frame, as though it might be stolen if we loosen our grip.
And the second is what happens if our voice is not really a message you transmit from you at all, but something that is close to the surface that the world passes through.
And we as photographers are simply just a conduit.
Now, I want to start with a story referencing a conversation I had with Christina Mittermeier, whom before she became one of the most seen photographers alive, had never really held a camera with intent, and was a young marine biologist at the time in Mexico City, sharing an office with a man who was writing a book about conservation.
He spoke no English, so she translated his captions and wrote his text, and she poured everything she knew into those pages, all of her science, all of her care.
And when the book finally launched, she stood in that room half expecting somebody to notice what she had actually written.
Of course, nobody did.
Nobody read a word of it.
The crowd gathered instead around the photographs.
And the questions people asked had nothing to do with carbon or plankton or the slow collapse of a reef.
They were human questions, almost childlike ones.
Were you scared?
Was it cold?
Where did you sleep?
Now she told me that something turned in her that evening, quietly and for good, because she understanded that her science was a wall people were afraid to climb.
While the photograph was a door they walked through even without noticing they had.
She had been guarding the wrong thing all along.
Now, most of us, I think, are still guarding the wrong thing.
And I include myself in that for more years than I would like to admit.
We believe that if we can just make the good picture enough, if we sharpen the light and refine the edit until the frame is clean and competent and unmistakably ours, then the meaning will arrive on its own.
And the industry encourages this in us from the very first day we pick up a camera, because from the moment you do that, seriously, somebody hands you a job description that says, have a point of view, develop a signature, build a brand, be recognizable within three frames.
And I know that because I do it.
So we grip, we chase a look until every photograph carries our fingerprints.
And somewhere inside all of that, gripping a quiet dishonesty creeps in because the photograph slowly stops being about the thing in front of the lens and starts being about us, about our taste, about our talent, our claim to be worth watching.
I have seasons in my own archive like this, whole months where every frame is straining so hard to be a Matt Jacob photograph that I can feel the strain in them now.
And the strange thing about those images is that they are competent, they're consistent, they're technically good, they're on brand, and they're mute.
Now, Christina has a name for what is going wrong in pictures like that.
And being a biologist, she reached for biology.
The photographer, she told me, is not a messenger standing in the town square or the public square shouting for everyone to stop and listen.
The photographer is a membrane, a semi-permeable skin like the wall of a living cell, whose entire purpose is to let a conversation pass between the thing in front of the lens and the stranger who will one day stand in front of the print.
You are not the message, in other words, you are the channel through which the subject and that stranger finally meet.
And your job is mostly to keep the glass clean enough that they can.
And how do you make yourself a semi-permeable membrane, almost like the skin of a cell that allows a conversation to happen between the thing that you're photographing that is the subject and the viewer, not you as a photographer, but the person that's looking at the photograph.
And if you can catalyze that conversation through your photographs, then you might achieve some big spark of wonder, curiosity, action, you know, whatever it is.
And what clogs this membrane and dirties the glass always is ego.
Not confidence and not conviction.
We'll come back to those, but the small, hungry ego, the part of us that wants the viewer to admire how clever we are.
She described and celebrated a photographer whose images are technically magnificent.
I won't name him here, you have to go watch the episode for that.
And unmistakably about the photographer himself, so that what you are really buying when you buy the print is not the wild thing in the frame, but the man who stood in front of it.
And it works for him commercially, but notice what has happened to the conversation.
It stops at the maker, it never really passes through.
When a photograph is about its author and just the author, the author is as far as anyone travels.
And I think if your voice feels fragmented right now, if it changes shape depending on who is looking at it, this is worth sitting with.
Not right or wrong, but because the fragmentation might not come from having too little self in the work.
It might come from having too much of the wrong kind.
Which brings me back to my frame, my image here.
And I want to tell you how it actually happened because the truth is kind of embarrassing.
I mean, I didn't plan it.
I was not even working.
It was late afternoon in the middle of nowhere, and I was walking back from a shoot that hadn't gone great actually.
The light had died early, and I was just having one of those days, finding things difficult.
And I was tired and a little defeated and thinking mostly about dinner and rest, given I was on my feet from before sunset until this point, sundown.
When learning, I missed so many opportunities by putting my camera away too early.
So I always have a camera in hand when I'm out with intent on those days.
And somewhere on that walk back, for no reason I've ever really been able to name, I turned around.
There was this ridgeline behind me with a single figure or a car or something moving along it, the last of the light just coming low across the grass.
And I lifted the camera and made one frame, maybe two, no tripod, quick snap, no thought, under 10 seconds of my life.
And then I kept walking and forgot about it.
Well, everything else I shot that day on purpose and deliberately is kind of forgetful.
The session I had planned for and prepared for and gripped, I don't really care much for.
This one, the accident, the afterthought has actually outlived all of it, which is strange, really, because why?
I was not really there when I made it, not in the way we usually mean.
There was no style being performed and no audience in my head, and no real intent, no Matt Jacob photograph being constructed.
There was just the turn and the seeing and whatever passed through.
And that is the paradox I want you to hold alongside your own frame.
The one from the still point, the photograph where I was least present is the one that sounds most like me.
And once you have seen that in your own archive and your own work, it becomes very hard to keep believing that your voice is a thing that you construct and make.
So let me say one thing here in the middle and then just get it out of the way, which is that learning what passes through you is almost impossible to do alone because everything around you is built to make the work about you, your numbers, your niche, your performance, your likes.
So I made a room where the scoreboard is switched off, and it's called the Mood Insiders.
It is a community first, and the people in it ask what you saw, not necessarily how you performed.
And if your voice feels scattered, it's the kind of room where it slowly gathers back into one.
The door is open anyway.
Find details in the description to this episode, and hope I see you there.
Now, if you've been listening closely, you may have spotted a problem and a contradiction in terms, certainly against everything I normally talk about, and how we find and uncover our voice when we do introspection and make it about us and about the author and about our story and about our experiences and about our pains and struggles and joys and all of the experiences and the mindset and philosophies, values, beliefs that get instilled in an individual like us.
So who am I to say that it doesn't stop at the author and nor should it?
Any voice should pass through us, and we should be a conduit to put that into the world for some kind of meaning.
Well, let me touch upon this now.
Because here is what I think.
The same Christina who says the photographer must dissolve into a membrane also insists, almost in the same breath, that the photographer must become a central character, an ambassador, a champion who will not release an issue, who inserts themselves, who does the loud and unglamorous work of dragging a cause in front of the people with the power to change something.
And I don't mean an existential change.
And I don't mean a really like glamorous and huge and dramatic change.
It could be an impact you have on someone else, however small it may be.
So I still believe that we have to have a little bit of ego.
We have to do the hard work for ourselves, about ourselves.
And you're entitled to ask which one we actually mean here: vanish or insert yourself, disappear or show up?
Well, the answer I've come to think is pointing at a division of labor rather than a contradiction.
And learning where that line sits might be the most useful thing I can offer you today with this episode.
Because inside the frame, you disappear.
You subtract that small ego so that no smear of your vanity dirties the glass.
And the subject gets to speak in its own voice.
Outside the frame, in the world where the picture has to travel and find the eyes that matter, you show up as loudly as the work demands.
You sequence it and fight for it and refuse to let it die quietly in a hard drive or in a sleeve or in an archive.
The self you subtract and the self you add are not the same creature.
One of them wants to be admired.
The other one simply decided that this mattered enough to fight for and that you know what you care about and you are willing to express that with your images.
And this is also why this membrane philosophy is not just a soft idea, which is the objection a sharp listener will be probably forming right about now.
That all this talk of dissolving sounds like a license to have nothing to say.
It's actually quite the opposite.
A membrane is selective, it lets some things pass and it refuses others.
And that selection, what you allow through and what you turn away, what you cannot help caring about is your voice.
It is your point of view.
And it is harder work than building a style because a style can be copied by anyone who downloads your fucking preset pack.
And your permeability cannot.
That permeability is your voice.
Now, Christina once took her master's degree in photography that never taught her how to hold a camera.
What it taught her instead was how to build a philosophy for her work.
The slow private labor of deciding what you have to say long before you decide how to say it.
And she believes most photographers never sit down to do that work at all.
And that you can feel the absence in their pictures because of it.
Flawless maybe in every technical respect, but strangely silent in others.
So let me come back to the two concepts I planted at the beginning.
Firstly, why do we treat our voice as a possession and an object and a thing?
Well, I think the honest answer is fear, ego, attachment, desire.
We're afraid that if we stop gripping, there will turn out to be nothing underneath, that we are just ordinary, that the work only exists because we force it into existence.
And I know that fear at two in the morning, as well as anyone watching this.
But look again at an image you might not be able to fully explain.
One of yours.
There's something that you did not force into existence.
No performance.
It passed through you.
And sometime later, it may be one of the most honest things in your archive.
And that, I think, is the answer to the second question.
Your voice was never the message that you transmit.
It is the shape of your permeability, what you let through and what you refuse, and what you cannot help caring about.
And it shows up most clearly at exactly the moments that you and that small ego vanishes.
Christina told me that when she dies, she wants no monument, just a single line carved on stone that she showed up.
And I have thought about that line since we spoke because it is the membrane made into an entire life, not a person with something to prove, a person clear enough and present enough to let the whole living world pass through her and out the other side.
So I encourage you, go and make a single photograph where your only job is to get out of the fucking way.
Choose a subject you genuinely care about because the membrane still needs something worth letting through, of course.
And then try, honestly, try to vanish.
No style, no signature, no social media pressure, no imagined audience grading you from the back of your mind.
And afterwards, sit with the frame the way we sat at the beginning of this video with mine.
Just for a little bit and ask one question of it.
Not whether it's good, but what passed through.
You may find, as I keep finding, that the frame with the least of you in it carries actually the most of you.
So show up, then get out of the way.
Happy shooting.