“Variety, flexibility, experimentation, diversity–all these are essential in your work. This doesn’t mean that every new thing you make should be totally different from what you’ve done before, That’s a sign that you’re scared, lazy, or some kind of performative blowhard. (Careful, men.) The real value of inconsistency is that it can bring about what Milan Kundera called “sudden densities”–moments when something appears in your work that gives you an opening, some oddity or mutation that sets you off in a new direction.”

— Jerry Saltz, How to be an artist

In an era characterised by extreme conflicts and opinions clashing for the sake of doing so, there are some pillars that resist to the test of dissension. Among them, the fact that most books claiming to disclose the key of how to be something tend to be quite disappointing. However, when done with mastery and awareness of the means, challenging clichés is guaranteed to produce amazing surprises. And Jerry Saltz, through extreme honesty and humane wittiness, gets to poke those weak spots every photographer attempts to hide in front of every client–even more so to herself.

Quite a taboo, finding a photographic style that is unique to ourselves is both the photographer’s ultimate goal and the most dangerous comfort zone. No one will ever openly admit how consistently and intensely they work with the sole purpose of hearing some casual observer at their exhibition whisper “Oh, I don’t even like these photographs but hey, at least she has found her recognisable style”. Don’t lie: just by reading these words, your heart melted. Somehow, though, the importance of consistency is inculcated in the absorbent mind of any beginner. Almost like a myth, passed on from master to apprentice. And this is the point: style, as most people mean it, is a myth. What we admire in the great masters is rather an extremely lucid awareness of their point of view on the world, an unshakeable psychologic stillness that somehow withstands the tests of curiosity. Whatever the object of their visual study, their positioning is that of a closely involved but most certainly conscious observer.

Thus, by a resolute shift in our perspective, this obsessive quest for our style becomes rather a peaceful and accepting path towards a clearer perspective on society–something that cannot be rushed or forced by any means, but only welcomed when the time is right. And not only that. In order to establish where we stand, it becomes fundamental to express ourselves through multiple languages and defend contrasting beliefs. Only through contradiction and inconsistency one can realise which shoes prove to be more comfortable for her own peculiar path.

How can a photographer attempting to build a name, then, balance the temptation to persist in what is praised by others and the need to maintain the holy freedom to experiment visually? By forgetting about the issue of building a name altogether. By focusing on the work. After all, persistence is what matters. And persistence can only be obtained by exploring what excites the inner voice each of us still carries around–though the voice of social media feedback might be louder at times.

Consistent excitement and inconsistent perspective leave the door open for sudden densities, for odd revelations that infuriate us at first–how dare you, photographic language, rebel to my control?–only to bewilder us after that–how could you, thoroughly explored subject, open up such unforeseen backdoors? Sudden density. And now I wonder, how else could one describe the thrill of photographic enlightenment?