| About Success and Fame in Photography |
| Written by Shantideva |
| Tuesday, 02 August 2011 09:09 |
All along my short way in photography I have had the opportunity to meet a lot of people. I think everyone has his own interests in photography. Those of us who cling very hard to their passion have a driving force that distinguishes them from the basic mainstream photographer. I have used the word 'mainstream' in a neutral sense and not in a negative pejorative sense. In my eyes the mainstream photographer is the type of photographer with the healthiest approach to photography. Most famous photographers become mainstream photographers after having discovered that fame and success are transient and therefore, inherently contain a source of suffering. What is the price of success and fame? I think it is clear that one must work hard for having some success or even getting famous in photography. There are so many amateur photographers out there and you are just one of several millions. After getting some small reward for some extremely hard and time consuming work as success, you learn that this success is so ephemeral as a shooting star in a dark clear night. An empty gap is what's left behind. And this gap is filled with the fear of loosing your hardly established position or image. And what do you do to fill this gap? You start over again to work even harder to reach at least the position you attained with your last success. And this behavior goes over and over again while life is passing by and you get older and older. But what is this fidgeting all about? Could it be that it is a lack of self assurance and self-esteem that needs to be filled? An Ego that needs to be caressed? I wouldn't go so far to pretend that this is the case for every photographer in the quest of success and fame, but I certainly do for all of us, amateur photographers, feeling aggressed by criticism. And a big amount of us that have the illusion of having themselves established in the world of photography (certainly a lot of those reading this feel so, or still striving toward this goal) do not like their work to be criticized. They have become their work and the work is now an integral part of their identity. Who wants to loose his identity? Nobody wants that! Loosing the identity is one of the most horrible things the Ego can be faced to. Who really wants his identity to be debased by someone else? What is the Ego? The Ego is a complex of uncountable illusionary bribes of identity parts. It is always changing and evolving because the identity parts it identifies itself with, are always changing. It is always grasping to fulfill a goal that it can never reach because the Ego is an illusion in itself.
My biggest wish would be that some of us amateur photographers aching for success and fame, out of reach, could get free of this Ego driven vicious circle and find real success and fame as mainstream photographers, without pretension of becoming somebody else as they are now. That's the way of success... the way of personal success in life.
And finally two quotes I really like: We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.
- John Wooden
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