During the pandemic, I took a temporary customer support job online, something to bridge the time between being locked indoors and being able to photograph people again.
Of course, I was still a photographer during the pandemic, creating Lockdown Portraits with people from all over the world (though they weren’t for profit):
After a year, I left that job thinking I’d easily slide back into full-time photography, just like I had for the past 10+ years. But that didn’t happen. In my 11 years as a photographer up to 2020, I never needed any additional income and could live off being a fulltime photographer. Really well too.
What changed? Was it Covid? The lack of budget in the portrait photography world? I used to be a wedding photographer and never lacked any work there. Too many photographers flooding the place? Ai? Lack of connections? Lack of effort? Wrong strategies?
After four (five?) years of muddling through (how long has it been since 2020?), trying to network, get clients, market my work and come out on top, I spent every month anxious. Then, this past January, I got a new job. Not a 9-to-5. It’s remote, part-time, but still: a job. I log in, I log out. I sit in team meetings. I get paid on the same day every month.
Why? Because I was tired of being anxious.
Maybe I handled that better when I was 25. Or maybe I just masked the anxiety better. But life has changed. The cost of things has changed. My industry has changed massively - to the point where I’m not even sure what the future of photography looks like anymore.
I love photography and I will always be a photographer, I don’t doubt that. The role it has in my life might take a different shape.
For a while, I was still grappling with internalised shame around being an artist and being employed by someone else. But I’ve laid that shame down now, and it feels so good. Free, even.
Since this is still such a massive taboo among creatives, let me say the quiet thing out loud. And thank the ones who said it before me, the ones who already lived like this for decades and made me braver by example.
When I registered as self-employed at 23, and my photography business took off within a year, I didn’t mind the highs and lows. That was familiar to me. Life had never been consistent. Love wasn’t consistent growing up. Safety certainly wasn’t.
So when I chose this path - or it chose me- of course that felt right. Because I didn’t know consistency. I didn’t know safety. Baby Nadia laughed in its face: “Safety?! Who is she?! I don’t need her, I’d rather be freeeee!!!” (23 year old me throws her hair back laughing)
How things have changed. You could think that Capitalism broke me. And it might be true to an extent. But this is also true:
I am not attracted to highs and lows anymore. In all areas of life, be that relationships or work.
Unfortunately, under Capitalism, the highs and lows are baked in. And this is the message we are sold, or that I have certainly been sold all my life:
Real artists don’t have jobs.
Real artists just make their art and people buy it.
Real artists live off their art.
Or, on the flip side: The idea of the starving artist:
Real artists don’t make any money.
Real artists struggle.
Either way the common message is: The artist doesn’t get a ‘job’. The artist should rather starve than being employed by someone else. You either are successful and can live off your art or you’re not and should therefore suffer.
This is the binary I have internalised my whole life. Like there isn’t another way.
16 years ago I used to believe that being self employed meant being free. That could not be further from the truth. When you’re self employed, you’re always chasing: attention, validation, growth, clients, payment. More, more, more. You’re still trapped. Just in a different cell.
Nobody is free under Capitalism. You just get to choose which trap fits your life best right now.
Back in the day, artists had wealthy patrons who funded their lives so they could focus on making art. Some people still do to this day. But that mindset of supporting artists so that they’re free to pursue their work has been largely replaced by the idea of meritocracy. You get what you deserve and work for. Funding artists is seen as ‘handouts’.
Some people have the luxury to make art without worrying about food and bills because they have family money. Some people have the luxury not to have to pay rent. Some people have trust funds. Some people live in houses bought by their parents and can surrender to the creative process without a care in the world. Rent?? Mortgage?? Don’t know her.
For those lucky few, it’s great they don’t have to put in the extra work. For those who have to look after themselves in every single area of life, we just need that extra. Those are the dumb rules for now.
I didn’t take a job to ‘hustle’ or grind and build an empire. I took it so I could stop stressing about basic survival. This job doesn’t allow me to travel or splurge. It covers my necessary expenses without anxiety. That’s all. The bar is low.
There are very few patrons for artists now. It’s all connections and luck. And still, the message persists:
If you are a real artist (aka ‘good enough’) you will either make a living off your art or you’ll just have to struggle.
I am tired of this whole narrative. What does it mean to be a ‘real’ artist? Who decides? Who is standing at the gates ticking off points on the list?
Under capitalism nobody is free. So which freedom do I chose? Freedom of time and flexibility? Freedom of choice? Freedom of so-called safety?
Which trap am I willing to be trapped in?
The scramble to survive month by month? Or a job that gives me the illusion of security, until, of course, they decide to let me go?
The choices don’t seem that great right? It’s because they aren’t.
I have so much life inside of me. It actually makes me cry thinking about it. The last five years I have felt like I am walking around in a zombie body but my soul is pushing against it from the inside, so alive, roaring, wanting to get out and DO things, make things, bursting at the seams.
Meanwhile the outside is a walking dead. Focused on one thing only, paralysed, limited. I have so much desire to create, to experience, to share and innovate - and it has all been suffocated by the all-encompassing financial pressure to survive.
That, in itself, is a prison too.
And so is a regular job. The capitalist rat race exists in both places. Even if photographers were paid fairly, if people truly valued us, it would still be a hustle. Always chasing the next client, selling your value, network, proving yourself. Over and over.
Same race. Different track.
The only people who are somewhat removed from it are the ones who live off the land, make their own food, draw their own water and unplug as much as possible. But even they have to maintain some kind of connection to the system, depending on what structures they have built for themselves.
Which doesn’t mean, this isn’t a great idea! I love everyone who does the off-grid life, it is absolutely worth pursuing. Most of these people though, will tell you, they first had to exploit the system to then be able to ‘exit’ the system.
So what to do in the meantime? What to do when you aren’t in a position to fully exit the system?
If you can’t exit, you build bridges. In the meantime I distance myself as much as possible from it by building structures of care and community:
Also, in the meantime you get a ‘regular’ job that doesn’t crush your soul.
I am still a photographer.
I am still a writer.
I am still and always will be an artist.
I am still a creative (as we all are).
This job funds my life.
My art is still my main work.
We glorify the “brave ones” who have no safety net, who choose full-time art and suffer for it. We call it courage - but neglect to consider the amount of mental health and physical strain this puts on people.
All of it is brave. If you share your creation with someone, that is vulnerable and brave. It doesn’t have to be more than that.
Listen, I hate it here. Ok. None of this is ideal. It will never be. But here’s what I’ve observed since getting this job that pays my bills on time (bills, mind you, that shouldn’t even exist because food, housing, and water are basic human rights):
I actually have the desire to create again
My creative juices are flowing
I have more energy to create
I have new ideas again
I’m using different skills and learning new ones
I’m building new neural pathways
My sleep has improved slightly (still a work in progress)
My mind has space to breath
I couldn’t do a full 9-to-5, five days a week. That’s just too much of my life spent working. Nobody should give that much of themselves to labor. But this, a part-time gig? It works for now. This gives me some peace for now. I feel no shame and feel free to create with a little more ease.
If this is you, if you are an artist who also works a ‘regular’ job, or someone thinking about getting a job and feeling like a failure, I hope this lifts you up.
You are no less of an artist. Your creativity is not diminished by a regular pay check. In fact, the opposite might be the case.
Working a fulltime job as an artist is not a source of shame. It is a source of peace and pride - you are taking care of your sanity, your family, your health. Having a job as an artist can be a source of freedom (using the term loosely, because again, we’re not free here) but enough to free you to create. And that’s quite something.
What pays your bills doesn’t have to be your purpose. It doesn’t have to excite you. It just needs to not drain your soul.
I’ve had two part-time jobs over the last four years. One was awful. This one isn’t. It doesn’t spark joy, but it doesn’t make me want to jump out a window either. It’s calm and simple and I can just switch off after.
A job can just fund your life and your purpose can (maybe even should) lie elsewhere.
Creativity is not just in art, in explicitly ‘creative’ jobs or activities. Creativity is human behaviour. We turned it into a skill which means now it needs to be improved and then capitalised on.
But the way I do my dishes can be creative. How I tell a story to my friend in a voice note can be creative. The playlist I made for cooking on a rainy day is a creative act. The post-it notes I doodle on during a zoom meeting are creative. How I turn silence into something sacred when the day ends. It’s all creation.
Creativity is just our behaviour and it is in everything we do.
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Please watch this video on the topic by the amazing Joél Leon:
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