How I Pieced Together a Personal Style in Photography
Learning the art of the steal.
Welcome to In the Flash, a reader-supported publication about intent and creativity in photography.
I struggled with developing a style for the first five years after picking up a camera. During my time at SVA, I experimented with portraits, landscapes, street photography, self-portraiture, nightlife, black and white, collages, nudes, and conceptual. Most students around me were fiercely focused on a single topic that molded their work into a particular visual direction, but I couldn’t find anything similar. The low-grade anxiety of never actually developing a style was an insidious, ever-present fear.
“How to develop a personal style” is one of the most common questions asked in photography interviews. The answers skew toward generic, something along the lines of being authentic and staying true to what you love. While not inaccurate, such an answer is both an inspirational calendar trope and a cop-out. Hearing this advice while in SVA made me even more nervous that personal style, which seems to come easy to those who are “authentic,” will always elude me.