Above: ‘By the lake’ (2006), one of my earliest clone pics which I still use alot in articles, exhibs etc.

For these artists, I’m looking at all of their work, and plucking out quite a wide range that spans back to their early days of photography, to meet with their reluctant and somewhat horrified responses. ‘You want that picture? That’s so old… I wasn’t thinking about concept at all back then… I just clicked my camera, and hoped for the best… the quality of the image isn’t so good, as I shot in the lowest of the low Jpeg format…’ and so on.

Now, where quality is concerned, unfortunately there is a limit to what you can do with a picture that is a grand total of 300kb. Let’s not forget, however, that quality can be rescued using tools like Genuine Fractals, and you can improve on what technology, or your budget, or your brain, didn’t do for you back then.

However, in an aesthetic sense, provided that the image is good enough quality for the purpose at hand, I find that I may be drawn to the artist’s earlier work, in some single cases, more than their recent work. Yet, they seem to think that their earlier work is somehow embarrassing, and take your suggestion as a reminder that they need to clean them off their webpage.

Do I find their response odd? Well no – because that is exactly how I feel as a photographer too, regarding my own work. If someone emails me with a query about a print, or a licensing request, and gives a link to some old crummy picture I either think they’re blind, or just a bit weird with low standards and a penchant for blobby Photoshoppery. I will follow through with their request, unless it involves publishing the image in a context (like an article or an exhibition) where I can choose another one to represent me as an artist.

My feelings are that those images were indeed wanton escapades with my camera, where I might have thought pressing ‘Raw’ would make the camera shriek like a zoo animal and that whiter-than-snow over-exposed highlights can be cured with the burn tool in Photoshop. If I have the opportunity to use newer work, I will push for it. After all, I’ve had much more experience since then, I think more about what I shoot, I shoot in better quality, etc etc…

That is all very well, so I understand these artists’ responses. However, I want to say to these artists (and anyone else who thinks this way about their work) that your early work (at least, aesthetically, even if it’s poor pixel quality) isn’t that bad. Just because you spontaneously clicked your camera and didn’t think too much about concept does not mean that your images are meaningless and therefore worthless. Sometimes, a lack of specific intention is the best thing. It is possible to produce your best work this way.

An artist’s earlier work might be messy. It might be amateurish. For some artists though, and for some of their work, their best images are their earliest pieces, because they let their true experimental side free, without reigning their techniques in to conform to rules they have learnt from research and reading. There will be the odd piece of work they created in their experimental days that is simply unbridled genius, yet the artist will dismiss it, with a blushing recollection of its lack of pre-shooting preparation. Even the more slapdash work will have some unmistakeable flavour about it that reveals the artist’s true style before they ODed on self-scrutiny. Generally, we are supposed to get better as we go along. We are all told that practice makes perfect, and that we get better with experience, and that we are only as good as our last piece of work, etc. At times like this though, I want to question this norm, because sometimes our most recent work can be our driest, least daring, over-thought-out, concept-heavy, mundane attempts at putting everything we know into our photography.

At times like this, then, I feel that the self-taught artist, the artist who does not study art and photography, is on top. When an artist is free to do what they want, without pressure of personal expectation, commercial motivations, artist reputation, etc, they can produce their best work.

Going away from extremes for a moment (for the artists who inspired me to make this post, I am not in any way referring personally to your work), all I want to suggest is looking at your own work from the point-of-view of an outsider. Does/would an outsider know that a particular image had no forethought, no planning, wasn’t shot with professional lighting, was inferior to your current way of working in all kinds of various ways? No – or not necessarily. There is also the diversity of personal opinions, and I encourage other artists to appreciate that someone might come along and love a picture that you’ve been meaning to delete off your Flickr stream for aeons.

Of course, I need to apply this encouragement to myself, and think about how my own earlier work can be seen as more than a bored student’s attempt at escaping into a dodgily composited, imaginary world full of multiple selves (though some pictures were so bad I did admittedly remove them from my Flickr stream). I am aware that some of my long-term viewers on Flickr prefer my earlier work which is characterised by multiple selves and slightly radioactive interpretations of sunny Sussex scenes. They like it when I upload something new that has a similar vibrant colour palette to the earliest stuff, that might have spent too long in Photoshop for me to deem serious (like this one for example), with a content that, intellectually, is as deep as the baby end of a shallow pool.

We then enter that problematic area of personal taste: one artist’s direction is appealing to some, and not to others. I am equally against an artist trying to please everyone, or feeling guilty that their change of taste doesn’t appeal to all their audience segments. Without making this blog post too long, I just want to mention that personal interpretation is everything. If there is something on your Flickr stream you absolutely abhor, take it off. You are the artist, and you are the only person who has the right to decide what represents YOU.

I just want to encourage you, though, to remember what it is that you’ve always liked about photography, what made you get into it at the beginning, and to carry that passion through.

You don’t have to have a master plan to create a masterpiece. Equipment, rules, and technical know-how really are second to all-important creativity.