Are you a photographer if nobody ever sees your photographs? Today, we're going to delve into this question by contrasting the story of Vivian Meyer, an unknown photographer who took hundreds of thousands of photographs throughout her life, and yet never showed them to anybody with today's social media driven culture that has fed photographers and lie. Now as I have it, in today's modern world, it feels like you can't be a photographer unless everybody sees your work that is validated somehow by that echo chamber. And it's unusual to think that once upon a time there was a particular photographer who photographed only for herself with no thought about sharing the work. This is in stark contrast, of course, to today where you get told bombarded almost that you need to share your work to have people look at it. As we go through this video, think about your own views on this idea of sharing whether or not people need to actually see your photograph to be taken, you know, as a photographer, how those have changed as technology has advanced. Long before the advent of social media, there was a photographer or nanny more accurately who used to walk the streets of Chicago with her young charges. And on these walks through often quite rough neighborhoods, she would have her camera along with her and she would take photographs of the things that she saw, the people, the events, and quite often herself. There's a huge body of work, that camera seemed to go everywhere with her. And yet nobody ever saw these photographs. It was only after her death that the hundreds of thousands of negatives that she left behind actually came to light. This photography that she left behind was remarkable, not just in the quality of the images, but the breadth and the depth of her influences. So what she's taking into these photographs, it is no wonder that when these images came to light, that quite respected names in the photography world looked at her work, responded to the authenticity of her images and said, this is work that stands out as work for the ages. Vivian Meyer is beyond her photographs. Quite a mysterious figure. And we can never really know why she took the photographs, why she chose not to show them to anybody. But we do see the results, writ large, this kind of this trap that to be a photographer you need to show your work. The Way back when this channel started, I avoided, very consciously avoided, sharing any of my photographs on screen. And often people would say, how can you talk about photography? How can you be a photographer if you don't show your work? And it raised that question that if no one sees your photographs, how does it change the way that you take your pictures? And over time, photographers have grappled with the idea of what it means to be a photographer. Are we scientists? Are we artists? Are we many things? But throughout that, there seems to be a thread that unless you have somebody look at your photographs, then you are not a photographer. And of course, we get to today with social media and all these kind of places, which amplified this idea to the maximum that unless you are having an Instagram presence and a Vera presence, all these presences, then somehow you're not really taking photographs. You're just somebody with a camera. I wonder what Vivian Meyer would have made of social media today. I mean, the irony is of course that it's because of social media that she is as well known as she is. Had her work been discovered prior to social media, in the 80s, would she be as popular now? Her work certainly sort of stands up for itself. So it would have, I think, found its way. But this explosion of interest in her work, I just, we can only imagine what she would have thought about. And that raises a question that if she were around today, would she be influenced by this culture of life? There are echoes of other very influential photographers in her images. So she was quite clearly drawing on inspiration from people who were, I won't say popular at the time, that might be the wrong word. But she was certainly looking at what was, let's say, you know, the big, on her homepage feed. Right? Is it enough just to be somebody who creates work to say, ah, do you know what I like doing pictures for myself when I took time, when I took all of my work offline and I closed down my personal site and all that sort of stuff, it was great to be able to just reconnect with taking the photographs of that passion, of that creative urge to then photograph the things that I like because I'm not buying into this idea of having to photograph things that other people are going to react positively to. It may seem like I'm bearing my head in the sand by not asking for people's feedback on things, but it gave me a chance to reset, to rediscover my joy for photography and I think when you look at Vivian Mayer's work, no matter how she felt personally about this, what drove her to take photographs, it seems to me that she was enamored with the process. At the beginning of this video, I asked you to consider about sharing images and the importance of that in the wide world of being a photographer has changed over time. I wanted nothing more when I was young than to have loads of people see my work, have it magazines and books and and the irony is now that I have that ability and it's not lost to me that I have the ability and I've done so in this very video, I don't really care for sharing it. The more that I have the ability to share it, the more that these photographs have become something personal for me. My perspective audience for them, if I want to call them so I know that has contracted over time into maybe a handful of people who I really would like to share my work with. Think about what it is that drives you to take images to really engage with the process. Do you want to share your photographs? Do you just prefer to be like Mayer just quietly doing your own thing? No matter what you do for now with the camera, do try and take photographs without that need for external validation. One of the great issues that photographers face is also being told what to photograph. And if you're struggling with this idea and thinking there's nothing around to photograph, check this video over here. Thank you ever so much for watching and I'll see you again soon.