2025 01 06
Finding myself on the streets. Chicago, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
My Creative Resolution for 2025
After what I consider a very successful Creative Resolution in 2024 (this here blog!), I plan to continue this approach of pursuing a personal creative endeavor and introduce a new routine into my life. The blogging will continue (hopefully), albeit at a less-robust pace, but my big aim for the new year is to dedicate more time to making photos and videos, in addition to writing. In order to motivate myself to do this, I came up with a structure that I think will be fun, allow me to further explore my own city, and give me something bigger to work towards in order to keep the whole thing going for an entire year, and hopefully longer.
The system is derived largely from my own personal interests (projects and ideas I’ve wanted to explore) and inspired from the “artist date” approach as outlined in The Artist’s Way. Once per week, I will take some time to myself and venture out on Chicago’s CTA train system to explore a part of town that inspires me to create…something. Maybe this will be a gallery of images, maybe a short video, maybe just words. I aim not to put a bunch of pressure on myself, but hope that in getting myself out of the house in a more regular fashion, it will spur new thoughts and ideas that otherwise would not occur while sitting on my couch reading twitter. By year’s end, the goal is to have the whole train system covered.
Initially, this Creative Resolution began as an effort to get myself back into street photography. While I do still aim to explore this, I was worried that restricting this year-long exercise to making candid images on the streets would be too limiting and ultimately may not be what I want to focus my efforts on. I still have a love for street images, but it’s far more complicated than it was when I was a young photographer wandering the streets two+ decades ago.
That said, I’ve been getting quite inspired by seeing the work of many young street photographers (largely via Paulie B’s great youtube channel) and this has been pushing me to get back out to re-explore those same urges I had back then. I had a longer post in the works that attempted to define my thoughts on what street photography has become, revolving around the complications with today’s society and the need for consent, but ultimately that proved impossible to cohesively summarize with the perspective I currently have, largely as an outsider looking in.
The street is where my love affair with photography began. Today, the street is sort of the antithesis of how I make a living through photography. This analogy is not lost on me and is one I struggle with often. My photography style largely relies on authenticity (agency buzz word alert!), yet my commercial work is fully contrived. This might sound harsh, but we make commercial images in a controlled setting, with the help of a team full of stylists, assistants, and art directors. There is nothing natural about this!
Lately, I’ve been very inspired by the various younger street photographers. People are shooting film again and there’s an unmistakable feel of nostalgia in the air. At the same time, however, cameras are a constant way of life for everyone and no moment is innocent anymore. The vision of street photography that I yearn for is physically impossible in this day and time, replaced with a fear of exploitation and social media instant gratification.
There are two videos that help summarize my thoughts on this matter. The first, an interview with photographer Daniel Arnold, helps clarify my own personal internal struggle in the sense than I see many similarities between him and myself. The defining difference being his amazing body of work was made mostly for himself, while my body of work has been made mostly for paid clients. He also moved to NYC, where artists tend to get noticed, while I stayed in the Midwest. I sense that he’s in a place now where he is navigating the landscape of doing more paid work and sharing less personal work, while I’m attempting to do the opposite after years of focusing a bit too much on the paid assignments. Whether it’s possible to successfully do both remains to be seen but is what I plan to explore.
You can watch the Daniel Arnold interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Zywq5me3k
Secondly, this video perfect encapsulated my complicated and complex thoughts towards street photography today. It’s an inherently awkward and exploitive art form, but when mastered it’s perhaps the most human art form we have.
You can watch that video featuring photographer Matt Weber here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OXfztsnt7M&t=323s
See ya on the streets in 2025.
-Clayton
This is one entry in a multi-part series of self-exploration and contemplation-out-loud in advance of the new calendar year. Some of this may happen; none of this may happen.
For the complete list of posts, see 2024 12 25.
