A Life Without Photography Isn’t a Life Worth Living

Make photos because it is your artistic power:

Why do a lot of us get depressed?

This is my theory:

Many of us feel depressed because we feel like we don’t have the power to make an impact on the world. We feel like we don’t have power to influence or impact others. Fusrhmore, we feel like we don’t have control over our own lives and existence.

What is a simple way to exert our power on reality? Simple: by rearranging reality and altering reality by making art.

Why street photography?

Downtown LA, 2019
Downtown LA, 2019

What I love most about street photography:

Your opportunity to engage with reality, real people, and to exert your social skills and power unto others.

The biggest problem we suffer in modern society is lacking the skills and opportunity to interact with others, especially strangers. This is the main thing of my workshops: to teach the skills of interacting with other people, and giving us the creative self confidence we need to exert our own individuality through our artwork!

More fun.

Downtown LA, 2019
Downtown LA, 2019

I don’t know about you, but I easily get bored. Why? Perhaps I prefer the stimulation of being outside, interacting with other people, and interacting with reality.

My personal hell is staying at home all day. Or not having the opportunity to explore.

Photography free-spirits

Saigon, 2018
Saigon, 2018

I think it is in my DNA to be a ‘free spirit’. I like adventure. I like living nomadically. I don’t like comfort. I desire to achieve my personal maximum — achieving the maximum creative power. And I think photography suits me very well, because:

  1. Photography gives me the opportunity for me to make my own artwork.
  2. Photography gives me the opportunity to travel, explore, and live more adventurously.
  3. Photography (street photography) gives me the opportunity to exert my social skills, and to also build my own social skills and confidence.
  4. Photography has afforded me the ability to become self-employed, to gain more freedom over my life.
  5. Photography makes life more exciting: life is more interesting, vivid, and multi-variegated with the power of the camera to transform reality.

Life without art isn’t a life worth living

For us, photography is our art.

Would you want to live without art? I wouldn’t.

Thus, if we treat photography as our art-work; a life without art (our photography) isn’t a life worth living.

We all have different ways of artistic self-expression and self-exertion. If photography is your primary art-power, then you MUST keep making artwork via your camera.


Practical ideas

  1. Treat your whole life like an art-project. Shoot anything and everything in your life, and make everything beautiful in your own eyes.
  2. Use any and every camera. No boundaries. Don’t aim for artistic consistency. Don’t be a prisoner of a photographic genre. Give yourself the personal freedom to make images however you see fit.
  3. Seek to impress yourself with your visual artistry.
  4. Strive to make beautiful images. When you’re post-processing your photos, you’re painting.
  5. Own your own platform. Delete your Instagram, and start your own blog. Strive to be prolific as an artist, and own your own means of production and publishing. Strive towards the maximum of independence in yourself — never be dependent on external people, external companies, or external means of publishing (Facebook-Instagram, or other social media platforms).

SHOOT ON!

ERIC