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The Tyranny of “Style”

Style has become both a fetish and a marketing device. We read or, more likely in today’s podcast- and YouTube-dominated world, hear and see over and over again that we have to discover our style as if it’s some buried treasure or a form of therapeutic self-realization (the alternative formulation, “we have to find our style” doesn’t change the point). The person telling us to find our style usually offers to help us do so, adopting a sort of guru or therapist role, or, equally often, offers to sell us a class to lead us along the path to illumination. All this focus on style seems to be, at best, misguided or, more likely, fraudulent.

Urban #230917. A black and white photograph of ghostly images in a cafe.
Urban #230917

Style is now a commodity that people sell. In marketing pitches, they link photographic success to finding a style. They dream up exercises and techniques, not for taking pictures or making photographs or thinking about what interests you, but for developing your style. They talk about visual consistency. Although they are quick to say style is more than a set of presets, they then reduce style to a set of prescribed actions that enables you to achieve this consistency of look, as if homogeneity were a desideratum. And they promise to help you find your look. Free newsletters are gateway drugs to $150/hour coaching sessions. Free YouTube videos are infomercials for classes and one-on-one sessions. Some talking head teases the viewer with promises of fame and success, usually through tedious and dubious claims about the presenter’s own overnight economic success. Style is always reduced to economic success.

Never do we hear these people promise your photography will be more fulfilling or more rewarding or more enjoyable. They don’t say you’ll be better able to realize your creative vision, or that you’ll make more important photographs (here, David duChemin’s distinction between good and important is relevant here). No. They can only promise financial success. How often they deliver on that promise is an open question.

Imposing a style, i.e., a signature look, has replaced any expression of creativity or individual intentionality, has reduced photography to an iterative almost algorithmic task. Find a particular scene. Photograph it from a particular angle in a particular light. Process in a particular way. To paraphrase and repurpose Lear:

That way madness and homogeneity and boredom lie; let me shun that.
No more of that.

To be clear, I think that after doing something over and over again and with intentionality, a person will create a style. Klinkenborg’s comment seems appropriate here: style is the “fusion of your command of [visual] language and your commitment to your own intent.” Importantly, “you don’t need to think about style.”

Countless artists developed a style, but not by focusing on style. See, e.g., Lucas Cranach the Elder or Albrecht Dürer or Hieronymous Bosch or Giuseppe Archimboldo or Pieter Breugel since I’m in a Northern Renaissance mood. They produced lots and lots and lots of drawings, paintings , sketches, and engravings. Their style emerged, as Klinkenborg puts it, through their command of the relevant language and their commitment to their own intent.

No, the style gurus can’t teach style. They can teach rules. But rules are not style, as Mavis Gallant reminds us:

Working to rule, trying to make a barely breathing work of fiction simpler and more lucid and more euphonious merely injects into the desperate author’s voice a tone of suppressed hysteria, the result of what E. M. Forster called “confusing order with orders.”

M. Gallant, “What is Style?” in Paris Notebooks, 259–260

Gallant’s comment applies equally to photography, and probably every other creative endeavor.