How to Rediscover your Passion for Photography: Part I

Part I: The Drive to Create by Tony Luna, August 2008 (updated June 2010)

photography by Craig Barnes and Gail Mooney

• Tweet

Part I | Part II

Passion. What is it? Where does it come from? What does it need? Where do we find it? Where does it go? Once it goes how do we find it again? How can we continually rediscover passion in our careers? These are the types of questions that are put to me daily as I consult with emerging and seasoned professional photographers and other creative entrepreneurs. In this two-part series for photo.net, I will examine the dynamics of passion as it relates to the unique creative journey each one of us has embarked upon. In Part One I will concentrate on where our drive to create comes from, and in Part Two I will focus on why we lose enthusiasm for our creative careers and how some artists have managed to reclaim their excitement for what they create.

By some accounts, over ninety percent of the American workforce is disenchanted with their jobs, and a large part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that their jobs have lost meaning and substance, and these people want something more out of their lives.

The Drive to Create as a Photographer

My experience has shown that emerging professional photographers want to know what they can photograph that will allow them to travel and meet interesting people, make them the most money, and bring them fame. Seasoned professional photographers want answers as to why they no longer have the same excitement for their work, and why a career that was once considered envious is now mundane. The responses to these questions may seem convoluted, but they are not all that complicated once we acknowledge that as long as we choose a career in a creative field we are committed to a life based on change. It also implies that the choices we make must reflect the things that are most important to our individual artistic evolution. In other words, we have to be vigilant about tending the flame of passion in our lives, and that passion is a very delicate commodity that has to be treated with patience, discovery and enthusiasm.

In a class I have the honor of teaching, Crafting a Meaningful Career, at the Art Center College of Design-Public Programs, it is not uncommon for a participant to come in with a long and pained expression and complain that they feel a general unease with life. It may be because they feel they have no career direction, or maybe they had a direction but lost it along the way. It could be that competition has taken away their clients by underbidding them, or their clients are no longer calling them or returning their calls. Sometimes they feel overworked and that work is getting in the way of their creativity. Others have had the rug pulled out from underneath them when they recently got fired, or possibly a personal loss has disoriented them. And some are just plain bored and have no idea why they no longer are motivated. They now desperately need to jump-start their careers or they feel they will never recover. Do any of these observations sound familiar? They should because the creative process not only expects change, it requires change.

Digging into your Career History

Some years ago I had a few of those thoughts myself. I took a little time and dug into my own career history and found a few unsettling yet interesting things. First of all, I discovered that over the past twenty-five years, I had a history of getting all excited when I started a new career direction and I was gung-ho about showing new work, making new connections, renewing old ones, and generally enthusiastic about getting others excited about the work. But then, a few years later, once the work was accepted, there came a period of time when clients would ask for the same type of work to be executed over and over again, and eventually the work seemed unchallenging. The problem with this stage was made even more uncomfortable because by this time I had made multiple commitments (such as a house, a new car, a larger work space) and now I felt as though I was working to support my commitments, but I was not growing creatively. The next inevitable phase was the worst because the clients who had been supporting me went elsewhere in search of the latest look and I took it personally thinking they had left because I was no longer relevant; no longer a viable player in the marketplace.

It took a while but when I got over my pity party I pulled out a large piece of paper and made a graph of my career to that point. I labeled the y axis Income and the x axis Time, as in years. What I discovered astounded me. Roughly every five to seven years I had to reinvent my career. In other words, I recognized a recurring pattern of a period of excitement about new work, followed by a period of executing the same type of work over and over again, ending in a period of dismay and self-doubt, which then caused me to find something to get excited about all over again. I labeled the three phases respectively: The Creative Assent, The Plateau of Mediocrity, and The Valley of Despair. It was amazing to me that in retrospect my career had been so predictable, and what’s more, it opened my eyes to the fact that I could actually anticipate The Plateau of Mediocrity and be proactive so I could minimize, maybe eventually eliminate, that horrible Valley of Despair altogether!

But that wasn’t the half of it. The more I mentioned this process (that I thought was unique to me) to other people in creative fields, the more I realized that most of us go through the same experiences. I also realized that this is perfectly normal, maybe even necessary to our creative career growth to go through these phases.

It was then that I decided to put more energy into understanding this phenomenon and that has lead me for the past twelve years to study it, to discuss it with other creative entrepreneurs, starting with photographers, and to lecture on it, give classes, consult on its dynamics, and write a book titled, “How to Grow as a Photographer: Reinventing Your Career.”