Stop Trying to Find Your Style
Style is not something you find. It is something that finds you. Here is the difference and why it matters.
Find your style. Develop your style. Be consistent. Build a recognizable aesthetic. This is the advice photographers hear constantly from every direction. YouTube tutorials, online courses, photography podcasts, Instagram captions from photographers with large followings. The message is the same everywhere you look. Figure out what your style is and then execute it consistently.
It sounds reasonable. It is actually one of the most counterproductive things you can spend your creative energy on.
Style is not a destination
Style is not something you arrive at by deciding what it should be and then working toward it. It is not a choice you make or a look you construct or an aesthetic you select from the available options. It is a byproduct. It emerges gradually and inevitably from the accumulation of your genuine photographic interests, your instinctive way of seeing, the subjects you return to again and again, your relationship with light, the compositional moves you reach for without thinking, and the editing decisions you make when you are following your instincts rather than a reference image.
You do not find your style. Your style finds you. And it finds you through the work you make when you are not thinking about style at all.
Every photographer whose work is immediately recognizable got there the same way. Not by deciding what their visual identity would be and then executing it. By making a large volume of work driven by genuine curiosity and personal interest and discovering over time that the work had developed a consistent character they did not consciously create. The style was not the goal. It was the consequence of pursuing the goal.
What the style hunt actually does to your work
When you are thinking about style you are thinking about the photograph rather than the subject. You are asking does this fit my aesthetic rather than is this true. You are making creative decisions based on an imagined future body of work rather than the actual scene in front of you right now.
This is a form of self consciousness that is directly hostile to good photography. The best photographs are almost always made by photographers who were fully present in the scene and completely unselfconscious about what they were producing. The decisive moment does not wait for you to check whether it fits your brand. The quality of light does not care about your preset. The expression on a person's face that changes everything about an image appears and disappears regardless of whether it is consistent with the last twelve photographs you posted.
The moment you step outside the scene and into your own head to ask whether something fits your style you have already missed something. The self consciousness and the seeing cannot fully occupy the same space at the same time.
There is also the problem of what the style hunt does to your editing. When consistency becomes the goal you start editing for it. You keep images that fit and discard images that do not regardless of their individual quality. You apply the same treatment to every image regardless of whether the image needs it. You are making the body of work look coherent at the expense of making each individual image as strong as it can be. The consistency is real. The cost of it is also real.
The subject is the answer
Stop thinking about style and start thinking about subject. Find the things you genuinely cannot stop photographing. Not the things you think you should be interested in. Not the subjects that perform well online or fit an aesthetic you admire. The things that actually stop you in your tracks regardless of whether they are consistent with anything else you have made. The light that catches your eye even when you do not have your camera. The scenes you find yourself looking at twice. The subjects you keep returning to without fully understanding why.
Photograph those things. Obsessively and without worrying about what the resulting body of work looks like from the outside. Edit each image for its own quality rather than for its consistency with the others. Share what is true rather than what fits.
The style will emerge from that process. It always does. Because the subjects you cannot stop photographing and the light you instinctively respond to and the compositional moves you reach for without deliberating are all expressions of who you are as a person and as a photographer. That combination is unique to you and it will show up in the work whether you are trying to create it or not. You cannot stop it from showing up. Your style is not something separate from you that needs to be found. It is already you. It just needs the work to reveal it.
The photographers who never thought about style
Vivian Maier never thought about her style. She was thinking about the people on the streets of Chicago and what she saw in them. Daido Moriyama was not developing a visual identity. He was trying to capture something true about Tokyo and about photography itself. Diane Arbus was not building a consistent aesthetic. She was pursuing a specific and personal fascination with people who existed outside the mainstream of American life.
Look at any of their work and the style is immediately obvious. Unmistakable. Completely their own. Not because they worked toward it but because they worked toward something else entirely and the style was what came out the other side.
That is always how it works. The style is the shadow cast by the substance. Chase the substance and the shadow will follow. Chase the shadow and you will find that it has no weight and cannot be caught.
The irony
The photographers whose style is most distinctive are almost always the ones who were least concerned with having a distinctive style. They were concerned with their subject. With saying something that mattered to them. With making work that was honest rather than work that was consistent.
The consistency came later. Not as a goal but as a recognition. Someone else looked at the body of work and said this has a style. The photographer had been too busy making the work to notice.
That is the right order. Make the work. Make a lot of it. Make it from genuine interest and genuine attention and genuine care about the subjects you keep returning to. And then one day someone will tell you that you have a style and you will look back at the work and see that they are right and that it was there all along in everything you made when you were not thinking about it.
Stop looking for it. Go make the work it comes from.
Ready to see the world differently? The Monochrome Method is a complete video course with lessons and assignments designed to help you craft compelling black and white images and build a portfolio that's unmistakably yours. Start Learning Today.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO IMPROVE YOUR BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY TRY THE LESSONS BELOW.
A Beginners Guide To Black And White Photography