For a little while I was exhausted. Tumblr, Facebook, Flickr and so on. … I felt like I was drowning in images. As a consequence, even work outside of that digital stream – the work I was seeing in books and exhibitions – started looking all of the same. More important, my own pictures started feeling the same. I was burned out. So I started experimenting. I made little videos and used disposable cameras. I played. I stopped making big, formal, large-format pictures.

–Alec Soth

via NYTimes.com.

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8 Comments

  1. Saturated. You were on overload. Social Media is exhausting. We’re all feeling this.

    • +1

  2. 500pix is a nice respot. I see some creativity there.

  3. Much of the work today does look all the same.
    It seems to be a vernacular, like $tarbucks.

  4. Well said Alec Soth. We all get burned out from time to time. Play is important and it’s also universal. We should all play as much as possible to avoid the feeling that comes with everything looking the same.

  5. Yes, so much work we would never ever have seen before digital/social media. But we learn, we absorb, block? I’m enjoying working a lot with my little G10 these days; sometimes wish it was all I needed.

  6. I hear you Alec! I think this hits home with everyone creative.

    It happens to me when I don’t put down the camera enough & enjoy the world around me fully vs. behind a lens. I to take a camera nap and come back to it with a fresh approach. new compositions, new subjects, new lighting, new angles. I shoot some film now and then so not to see what I am getting instantly.

    Remembering to be a human being vs. a human doing.

  7. Just keep on shooting. The worst thing we can do is to stop. Plus, today some of my time is spent going back to my archives and looking for photos that I may have not used, or may have used in a different way, or that I just didnt cared much about. The funny thing is that looking at your past archives with your eyes today, you may actually find new things that you where not expecting at all.


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