I am a failed photographer. I’m not proud of it, I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not even sure how I feel about it. However, the fact is I am one. I tried hard for around a decade to work full-time as a freelance photographer, and every time I really pushed and gave it my all, I found myself not living up to the standard I had set myself.

Does this mean I can no longer shoot photos? Of course not. That might be the dumbest suggestion I have ever made. All it means now is I can do the thing I absolutely love to do more than anything in this world, and the only person I have to answer to is me.

What I can also do, which I find to be far more beneficial to me mentally and possibly spiritually, is share my experiences from my time in the photography industry and try to impart some form of knowledge on those looking to do the job I found so depressing it nearly killed me. I have this also in video form on my YouTube channel, which I might link at the end of this post, just in case you wanted to see and hear what failure sounds like instead of just the voice you have inside your head, which I’m betting sounds pretty similar to every other word you have ever read.

Firstly, let’s get to the main point in this journey, which would be the end. Where else would I start but the best bit freshest inside this scrambled egg of a brain I am currently carrying around. Why did I leave the dream job for so many? The answer is surprisingly simple and often a quote from most online “creatives”…. Burnout.

I think recently burnout seems to have become glamourised and in my eyes is somewhat akin to what tragically was my first introduction to the mental health crisis in recent years. Burnout is not sexy or cool or “just a part of being a creative”. You can’t just light a candle, read a book, take a day or 2 off and then suddenly bounce back and start creating or performing even better than you were before. It is very similar to depression in the way in which it almost shuts you down and feels very physical for a mental condition. Just like depression, however, it hits us all in different ways and is “solved” by us in different ways also. I often used to hear from family, friends and therapists alike, “depression can’t hit a moving target”, well, burnout fucking loves a moving target. Like a heat-seeking air-to-ground missile, that bastard will hunt you down in the middle of a 6-day shoot week and fire bomb you to the point of mass extinction.

I was lucky. Burnout caught me in the slowest month, and luckily didn’t cost me anything other than misguided pride and maybe a couple of bad nights’ sleep. At the time, I had dealt with burnout before and thought this would just be another 6/10 week that would bounce me into an 11/10. Despite the doomscrolling on both Instagram and TikTok in order to revive my creativity ( as if that would ever work), the fog didn’t seem to clear, and the desire to pick up my camera became less and less. My D600 started to feel like a 100kg weight. I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to lift a motorcycle up a large step after a 7-hour ride, but it is one of the worst things I have ever had to do, and at that point, I thought that would be an easier option than putting an SD card into the camera.

After a very brave, on my behalf, conversation with my partner in which I opened up about what I’m thinking and doing in regards to photography, I had decided to do a reset. We had a week-long holiday in Greece coming up, and I didn’t want to ruin that with my mindset. I brought some colour film in both 35mm and 120, I found the stash of black and white I had been hoarding, blew the dust off my 2 Yashica cameras and packed my bags to do nothing but drink non-alcoholic cocktails, eat bad buffet food and lie like a beached walrus by the bluest sea I have ever seen. This holiday will be its own blog post at some point.

This break came at the perfect time and allowed me to really sit and think about what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to work part-time retail like I was to keep the “dream” alive. I didn’t want to beg for work on social media. I didn’t want to sell my soul creatively to be credited as a content creator. I certainly didn’t want to pay to assist a photographer who got their big break at 18 because mommy worked with the creative director of some brand I could never afford. I wanted to tell stories. Stories I think deserve to be told. Ones that I had a connection to and somewhat made me feel. I was officially done.

The freeing feeling of finally deciding to just live my life and not have to “push myself every day to find the creative limit” was better than any drug. I felt free. Free to just exist and work on projects I know I can be proud of. I went and got a job at the first camera shop I ever worked at ( again, this part of my journey is its own blog post at some point) cancelled pretty much every shoot besides 3. I stopped looking at SEO courses or “how to get more work as a freelance photographer” articles online. I deleted my website, got my personal favourites from my archive, uploaded them to this site, and sat down with 2 notebooks, planning the next step.

So what’s next, I certainly don’t hear you ask as I’m sitting on my own listening to early 2000s emo music whilst writing this. Well, I have a project I am currently working on, which will be around the UK motorcycle scene. I have already started shooting it and currently feel positive about what I have. I am also waiting for the first proof of my last project to arrive with me. This is my Brighton Retrospective. I spent 5 years walking around Brighton shooting, and have put it all into around 80 pages of a magazine. Once I have confirmed the proof is good, I will place a link on my site where you can buy it if you wish.

I will update this blog with more stories of my time in the industry and any lessons I learnt along the way. I appreciate your time reading this, and below are a couple of photos I really like that encouraged me to quit trying to get paid for photography.

A “Failed” Photographer

How It All Started