It is hard to please everyone, impossible actually.
Don’t try.
We are all blessed with a different take on things, a set of likes and dislikes, or even more extreme loves and hates. These come from so many different influences and cultural imperatives, that even a sibling or partner’s are so different to your own, they are unrecognisable to some outsiders as closely connected.
So, who are you out to please with your art*?
If you want to please others with your work, impress them, to win them over, then you had better live with the reality that you will likely lose more often than you win. Sure you may have a huge “following”, be “liked” by many, but how are you getting there?
Is this really you or a fabrication made to fit the perceptions of others? Sometimes it seems the more likeable you are to some, the easier it is for others to go the other way.
There is only one audience that has the potential to genuinely like what you do and be honest with you about why or why not.
You.
You have to like you or at least the work you do.
If you do, you win every race, clear every hurdle.
The irony is, if you just do you, you probably have the same chance of impressing someone else as you have trying to be what you think they want you to be, but you may impress better people, people who are not impressed by falsehood or shallow ideas.
We all have a sense of not being enough, that the likes and dislikes of others are better, more valid or real than our own.
People in the moment are all that count.
You need to get over that, embrace the perspective that is yours, because something that it always is, that other’s will never be, is the best representation of you and you are ok.
Ok?
You should be able to make your art into what you want to see, no more no less and let the world deal with that. Nothing else has any meaning or is as honest and to be honest, too many choices confuse everyone.
It is easier to be yourself, like the truth is easier to remember than a lie.
There are people out there who only photograph one subject, but if they do it as their passion their "Ikigai”, literally “the reason to live” as the Japanese would say, then it is fine an their passion shows through.
I am lucky enough to be living my Ikigai in a way.
At the paper I managed “what I do well (enough)” and being paid for it. It should have been more, but the paper should have also and once was. At the school, I manage all four, if maybe the paid bit is a little thin, but it is enough.
My passion is to photograph people in their place of living, learning or work just being themselves, because I know a good image can make someone else’s life better and I feel I am good enough at it (better at it than I am at not doing it that way), but I also know that the same formula a little out of alignment, like at the paper, is not the same.
Why not?
The process of creation was more limited in opportunity and there was less need of my better images**, the steps between me the creator and the end product were mostly out off my control and most importantly, I generally did not care about what I shot. Often I did, but mostly I did not because I was not allowed the time for connection to care.
I realised that the main thing I needed was spread of audience, which I guess is the “what the world needs” bit. The world did not need, as far as I was concerned, a single file chosen by a third party from a range of story telling images or worse a single “set” formulaic shot, which to my mind said “I have given up”.
Passion in others, captured with passion is a thing. These island dancers at a school event were very invested in their work, it was spiritual, their Ikigai and capturing it fell inside the bounds of mine. For the paper it would have been a quick drop in for an interview, pose an image, get a caption, go to the next job, then let the journalist or editor decide which to use. For the school, I was there from start to finish and every submitted image (50 odd) went back to the dancers.
Rarely you got a job where a single image did scratch every itch, but it was more luck than anything else. This environmental protest had theatre, passion, commitment, lighting, composition, relevance. All done in a few minutes.
Sure, this way of working could have been my Ikigai by forced intent (a contradiction), but it lacked one of the other important elements. It was not “what I love” and it showed. I did not like my images, so why would I expect others to.
The rub is of course, doing stuff for an audience, not for yourself if you do it technically well enough will strike a cord with someone and it often did (which kept me going for a while), but with the hollowness of knowing I was not one of them.
I found the more that certain others liked my work, the further it was from my own ideal, with the exception of the sports team on the whole.
So you be you, because nothing else makes sense.
Easy to say, so all the advice I can offer is if you truly do not care what others think, then you are probably on the right track.
After at the beggining of a creative life, people are free to be themselves, because they are not sure what they are actually going to be. When some form starts to take shape, it becomes more dangerous. Many artists break on to the scene with reckless creative optimism, only to collapse under the weight of self doubt as they question how they got there and worse, how to stay.
If you stay in love with the subject, process and results, it is easier to ignore those doubts. You like it, so it is ok. When you ask yourself “what do others expect of me?” you are basically doomed.
Be you.
*Only the art matters, the craft, gear used and methodology are just processes perfected and nobody cares, or if they do, maybe they are also off the path.
**Sometimes down to something as simple as a page fit.