I have been making pictures for more than 10 years, mostly of or involving other people. The voice that says don’t has never fully left. What has changed is that I no longer believe it most of the time. So in this instance I did stop, and I introduced myself and after a little small chat I asked, and took some photographs. And the worst that could have happened, was nothing at all.

I have been sitting with that small, recurring cowardice ever since I recorded a MOOD Podcast episode with Rory King. I’m not alone in those types of thoughts, but I don’t feel the need to identify with those thoughts anymore. It’s just my ego, my fear (of rejection, of awkwardness, of even being unsafe), wrapped in fabricated appearances in consciousness, that are irrelevant and mean nothing.

I digress.

Rory is an Australian photographer who works in black and white, mostly by hand, in a near-empty community darkroom in Canberra. He came up through performance art, nearly lost himself in the years after art school, and turned a decade of pictures into a book called Gumsucker, published by Charcoal Press.

Early in our conversation he said a line he’d carried out of a psychedelic experience, from a moment when the ego had been quietly pushed aside. It became the shape of everything that followed, and the title of the episode: “Nothing matters and everything matters.”

Well, what the fuck does that mean.

The half that says nothing matters…

Ask most photographers what their work is about and they’ll reach for a concept, a thesis, a project with a beginning and an end. Rory refuses the question. Gumsucker, he says, isn’t a project he set out to complete; they’re just pictures of his life. People he loves. Places he’s been.

So he did something most of us would find unnerving, and unbearable at worst. He handed the publisher close to 2,000 darkroom scans and said, more or less, do what you want with these. 4 years and 12 or 13 drafts later, the book was ready. He didn’t hold a physical copy until the launch in Paris, when he sat down to sign a book he had only ever seen as a PDF.

It terrified him at first. Lack of control. The certainty that he had taken these pictures, he knew these people, so surely he had to be the one telling the story. And then, slowly, he let that go. What came back to him was a book he says he never would have made on his own.

This is the half of the paradox we resist. Nothing matters. Drop the concept. Drop the grip on the outcome. Drop the need to be the author of the meaning. The picture you’re too scared to take costs 50 cents of film if it fails (although importantly that price is rising as I write this!), and nothing if it doesn’t. The work doesn’t have to say something to be worth making.

Almost everything that gets in the way of someone photography being ‘better’, Rory believes, is ego. The need to prove. The need to be validated. The need for the photograph to certify that we are who we hope we are. That is what keeps the real work from arriving.

A note before we go further. The reason I built The MOOD Insiders is that I spent years believing this work had to be done alone, white-knuckling my own doubts with no one to push back on them. It’s a small, serious room of photographers who care about the slow work: monthly masterclasses, weekly book reviews, photo critiques, ad-free episodes, and direct access to me and my team. The doubts don’t vanish in there. They just get named, and that changes everything. I’d love to see you inside.

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The half that says everything matters…

And yet.

Every person in Gumsucker is a friend. Some he has photographed for 10 years, watching them grow as he grew, the relationships shifting frame by frame. The darkroom isn’t a workflow for him; it’s where the work comes alive, where he plays his music and spends 10 hours alone reflecting on the people and the places in the prints. He won’t scan anymore, and actually he can’t believe he ever did.

And when he talks about the years that nearly ended him, the depression from 18 to 24, the kitchens, the survival mode, the camera he kept in his hand through all of it, he doesn’t reach for metaphor. He says it plainly: “it’s not a hyperbole to say it saved my life.”

So which is it. Nothing, or everything?

It’s both, and the order matters. The work becomes truest at the exact moment you stop needing it to matter. When the stakes drop away, when the ego steps back, when you are no longer photographing to be seen as a photographer, what’s left is the only thing that was ever worth keeping: the people, the place, the quiet accumulation of a life paid attention to. You care less about the result so that you can care more about the act. That’s not detachment, it’s more like devotion.

Momentum, and the long percolation

Rory has been thinking lately about momentum; positive and negative. Even a bad frame, he says, even one that fails, builds something behind you when you commit to taking it. You’re more likely to lift the camera next time because you’ve got a little steam at your back. The first step is hard, but the second is easier. By the time you notice, the third one’s already been taken and you’re away.

The other thing that struck me: he is now going back through pictures he made 10 years ago, frames he completely overlooked at the time, and finding himself in them. There it is. The voice was there all along. He just couldn’t see it yet. “Part of finding your voice is finding how to get access to your voice”, he said.

Not a destination, but a practice - something we may spend the rest of our lives walking towards, but it’s the walking that is the point. You take the picture, and you let it not matter. You let time do its slow work, and one day, looking back, something has emerged that is unmistakably you.

You

So here’s the small, uncomfortable question I’m leaving with, and the one I’d offer to you.

What would you photograph this week if you genuinely did not need it to be good? If no-one was going to see it, score it, validate it, or measure it against the better-equipped stranger on your feed. If the only stakes were 50 cents and the only reward was that you stopped, you looked, and you pressed the shutter.

Nothing matters. So everything can.

I asked Rory, at the very end, what he’d tell the version of himself standing outside art school, certain he was about to be broken by all of it. He said: “that you are not gonna die and it’s gonna be all good.”

I think that’s true of the picture, too.

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

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The full conversation with Rory King is out now on The MOOD Podcast - the darkroom, the years that nearly broke him, letting go of his own book, and what it costs to make work that’s unmistakably yours. And if something in this is asking to be drawn out of you, that quieter, more honest thing your camera keeps circling, that’s exactly what we do inside The MOOD Insiders community, so come find us!

It sounds like the destination, but I think it might be the death of the thing.

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A few months ago I wrote here about the story we tell before anyone looks, the little explanation we offer as armour, and how withholding it invites the most honest response your work can receive. This piece picks up where that left off, because behind the armour sits a larger architecture that has questioned how I think about what a photograph is actually for.

Between you and any viewer of your work stand 3 points: 1. what you intended, 2. what you actually made, and 3. what they experienced. There are 2 gaps that sit in between each pillar, and every photograph you have ever shown has had to cross both. In their book ‘Art and Fear’, David Bayles and Ted Orland write that making art delivers “uncomfortably accurate feedback” about the first gap, the one between what you intended and what you did, and anyone who has planned a picture in their head knows the animal that comes back is never quite the one they sent out. The second gap opens on the other side, between what you made and what a stranger finds in it. We spend our whole lives as photographers trying to shrink the two of them: practising so the print draws closer to the vision, then captioning and contextualising so the viewer draws closer to the meaning.

Rarely do we ask what we would be left with if we succeeded. A photograph with both gaps closed is a closed loop. There is nothing left in it to discover, no room for the viewer to bring their own weather, no space for the readings you never chose, nothing the image can say back to you that you did not already know. It would be received the way an instruction manual is received: accurately, completely, and once. The photographs that have marked me have never worked like that. They stay open, and I have loved them precisely because the photographer did something they did not fully intend, and I saw something they never planned for me to see, and the picture was large enough to hold the 3 of us at once. Perhaps a successful photograph was never the one that bridges the distance. Perhaps it is the one that makes the distance worth standing in.

If that is true, then the misreading, the moment someone finds melancholy in a frame you made on one of the happiest days you can remember, stops being a failure of transmission and becomes the picture breathing. A viewer reading your work “wrong” is not hallucinating. They are looking at the thing itself, unaccompanied, and telling you what it transmits. You are the one person alive who cannot do this, because you were there; the memory of the day sits between you and the image like a pane of tinted glass you have long stopped noticing. And when the same wrong reading returns, from different people, at different times, that is no longer noise but pattern, the work reporting a preoccupation that has been walking into your frames uninvited for years, a note sounding through the archive while your captions point everyone somewhere else.

Garry Winogrand made a whole philosophy of this surrender. “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed,” he said, and the line only sounds like a riddle until you notice what it refuses: he was not carrying a message to the world through a camera, but more like he was photographing to be told something. He held that a photograph is not the scene it shows but its own object entirely, with its own behaviour, and if that is true then your photograph is fully capable of saying things you never put in it. The only question is whether you can get out of its way long enough to hear it. The threads I now edit toward in my own work were mostly found by other people, in readings I wanted to correct at the time, and it took me embarrassingly long to admit that my explanations were never protecting the photographs. I think they were protecting me from the photographs.

None of this can be practised alone, and that is not a small caveat, it is the whole mechanism. It needs eyes that were not there, and it needs you to stay quiet while they look, which is far harder than it sounds. That is what the MOOD Insiders is for, at its heart: a room of photographers who receive work with no framing attached and tell you what it actually carries, a room that will read you back to yourself. If you are curious what your photographs say when you are not standing beside them, that is where you find out.

Now, before this sounds like an argument against ever speaking about your work, let me draw the line where I believe it truly sits, because the difference between explaining an image and articulating a body of work is mostly a difference of timing. Explaining happens before the seeing, and it is defensive: a fence built around one frame to keep the unchosen meanings out. Articulation comes after the seeing, after many seeings, and it is earned: the ability to say what the whole body of work is about, which you cannot honestly do until you know what the work transmits on its own. The misreadings are not the enemy of your artist statement, but they are its raw material. Silence first, words later, and the words come out better for the wait, because they describe the work that exists rather than the work you meant to make. How to build that articulation is a letter of its own, and it is coming.

So I will leave you standing in the place this whole piece has been walking toward: the moment someone reads your photograph wrongly, and the correction rises in your chest. Let it rise, and hold it there, unsaid. Those few seconds of exposure are the education, a stranger reading aloud from a page of your own handwriting that you can no longer decipher yourself. Ask yourself honestly whether you would want the gaps closed, all of them, forever, every viewer receiving your exact intention like a delivery signed for at the door. I do not believe the goal was ever to be perfectly understood. So show the work in silence, let it be misread, and listen, carefully, to what comes back. Somewhere in what they keep finding is the voice you have been looking for.

I talk about this more in my latest Moments of Mood video, links below.

Happy Shooting,

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I got some film developed the other day, and some came back with scratches, dust marks and what looked like x-ray damage (although I’m usually so very careful with this when on the road). It surely happened somewhere between the camera and the scanner, in a bag, on a road, in a dusty room. My hand reached for the spot healing tool before my mind had time to arrive. 4 seconds of work and the frame was clean again. Healed, apparently…

I kept both versions open for a week and could not understand why the dirty one held me and the clean one did not. Maybe just I have too much time on my hands to think about this kind of stuff, let alone write about it…

With the faith that you’re still with me here, and that I’m not going insane, eventually I realised that the scratch was the only thing in that file willing to admit that the photograph had travelled to reach me. Everything else was a claim about a place. The scratch was a fact about a journey.

We are trained to defend our work from the world, and we have learned to call that defence ‘craft’. We back it up, we colour manage it, we keep it away from weather and fingerprints and time. It is worth asking what we imagine we are preserving, because a photograph that shows no evidence of having lived through any time at all makes a peculiar witness to time.

There is a difference, and it is not a small one, between work that is about loss and work that has itself suffered loss. The first describes, and the second carries. An audience cannot always name which one they are standing in front of, but they can feel it, the way anyone can feel whether a room has been lived in or arranged.

Odette England spent more than 20 years photographing the dairy farm she grew up on, and then asked her elderly parents to walk that ground once a month for a year with her negatives tied beneath their feet. A year of their walking, on the land that made them and then let them go, pressed into the film she had spent 2 decades making, so that “they look just forlorn enough and broken enough to represent everything that I feel on the inside, put into material thinking on the outside.”

Now the harder half of this (I think).

Consider the word ‘finish’. In a craft workshop it may mean the layer applied last, the varnish that seals the grain and stops anything further getting in. We use the same word for completing a piece of work, and I no longer think that is an accident. Every pass of refinement seals a little more of the surface, and somewhere in that sealing the maker stops being able to get out.

Polish is a consensus product. There is broad agreement about what clean looks like, which is exactly why clean feels safe, and exactly why it can never belong to you. I don’t think artists get recognised by their absence of flaws.

The instinct to make something good is very often the instinct to make it recognisable, and recognition of that kind runs entirely on resemblance. So we sand, and chip away, and what comes away first, every single time, is the part that was awkward, the part we could not defend in conversation, the part that was ours.

I feel that any applause that might tend to arrive from this comes at the precise moment you disappear from it.

This is the thing that is almost impossible to catch alone. Nobody notices their own smoothing, because in the moment of smoothing it feels like improvement, and there is no internal alarm for that. It takes another person in the room, looking closely enough to say the uncomfortable version out loud. That is what The MOOD Insiders was built for. A small group of serious people, monthly masterclasses, a weekly book club, and critique that goes considerably further than encouragement.

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So what do you actually do with any of this? Just log it away in the annals of your distracted subconscious, and onto the next piece of forgettable rhetoric that doesn’t really mean much to you, tangibly, right now, in this moment, and beyond?

Maybe. Maybe the utility of this article is just for me to offload some fanciful and impracticable thoughts.

Or, go back to a recent edit and find the frame you cut for being awkward rather than for being weak. There is almost always one, and often that frame usually sits closer to your thesis than anything you kept.

Stop one revision earlier than instinct wants, and live with the roughness for 2 weeks before deciding anything. Most polish is applied inside the first 48 hours of doubt, which is the worst possible window in which to trust yourself. Then ask the only question that matters here. Does this work describe the feeling, or does it contain it? If it only describes, something in your process is protecting you rather than protecting the work.

None of this is an argument for damage as a style. Scratching a negative for effect is simply polish running in the opposite direction, another surface applied in the hope of being admired. The question was never whether your work looks wounded. It is whether your work has been anywhere at all.

There is a folder somewhere in your archive that you keep meaning to fix and somehow never do, and I would wager the reason you have not fixed them is that some part of you already understands what fixing would cost. Trust that part - it has better judgement than your taste, because your taste was assembled from other people’s work, while that instinct was assembled from your life.

Your work does not need to survive you looking flawless. It needs to survive you looking like you.

Happy Shooting

x

The full conversation is on The MOOD Podcast now, link below.

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We call this being modest. We call it reading the room. It is neither. It is a confession, made in public, of what we actually believe, because every offer of your work, a post, a print, a price, a portfolio slid across a table, answers 3 questions at once whether you mean it to or not. Do you believe in yourself? Do you believe in the work? And the question almost nobody thinks to ask: do you believe in the person on the other side of it?

Everyone preaches the first 2. Believe in yourself, believe in your work: the posters have been printed, the podcasts recorded. But the third belief is the one that changes everything, because your audience is already paying you, and has been from the beginning. They pay in attention, either directly or latently - the least renewable thing they have, minutes of a life they do not get back. Asking someone to look is asking them to spend. And when you apologise your way into their feed or your way into a space with them, when you shrink the caption and discount the offer before anyone asked you to, you are not being humble. You are telling them their attention is probably being wasted, that their taste in giving it to you is a small mistake they will shortly correct. Under-offering is not modesty. It is a quiet insult to the very people who showed up.

The artist Miriam Schulman, author of Artpreneur, told me a story on the podcast that proves the point from the money side of the same law. She once priced a commission assuming her collector would choose 1 painting, and the collector chose 3. The ceiling had never been the client’s budget or the market’s appetite; it was a ceiling she had built herself, out of assumptions about what someone else could want. She has since doubled prices she once agonised over and watched the work sell without a blink. The resistance was never out there. The flinch was always hers, and it is always ours.

So here are 3 ways to practice the third belief, whichever currency you are currently paid in.

1. Take the apology out of the offer. No more just, no more sorry, no more probably nothing. Present the work the way you would introduce one person you respect to another, plainly and with a straight back. And when money enters the room, let the numbers stand straight too: round figures state worth while odd ones apologise for it, which is why the 40 dollar bottle outsells both the 39 and the 41. Quote 500, not 497. What you lose in loose change you gain in the sound of someone who is not negotiating with themselves.

2. Speak to what receiving it gives them. Nobody follows a feed for pixels or buys a print for pigment. They take away who they become: the one who found you early, the one whose attention is repaid with something worth having, the one whose wall says what no catalogue can. So ask of your own work the question your audience is silently asking: what does receiving this give them? Then offer to that, because you are not presenting paper and light. You are presenting a slightly better version of their own taste back to them.

3. Test the flinch. Belief without evidence stays fragile, so run the experiment in whichever currency you deal. Share the frame you have been protecting in the drawer, the one that feels like too much to ask of people. If you sell, take one print or one commission tier and raise it to the number that makes you slightly uncomfortable. Then watch what actually happens, and let reality, rather than the small-hours voice, tell you where the ceiling is. Likely it’s not where you built it.

Of course, none of this is a license to flood the world with everything you make, and the distinction matters. Discernment is practiced through taste and skill, after all. Belief in your audience is not the belief that they owe you attention; it is the belief that they mean it when they give it, and that they deserve your full nerve in return. The half-offered photograph cheats both of you. They never get to be right about you, and being right about an artist early is one of the quiet pleasures a person can have.

So find it, the last place you flinched. A caption that apologised, a frame still in the drawer, a number that shrank between your mind and your mouth. Offer it again, in full this time, calmly and without the disclaimer, not as a demand for their time or their money but as an act of faith in the people on the other side: that they are serious, that their taste is sound, that they can be trusted with the whole of what you made. You have spent years learning to believe in your work.

The next belief to build is in the people it is for. They were never the ceiling, you were.

The full conversation that sparked this letter is on The MOOD Podcast, linked below.

Happy shooting,

x

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I was walking back from a shoot that had failed, my head already home with dinner and rest. On the walk back, surrounded by dark landscape, I kept my head up. A ridgeline rose behind me, a single figure moving along it, the last of the light lying low across the grass. I lifted the camera, made one frame, maybe two, and kept walking. I had forgotten it before I reached the road.

Everything I shot that day on purpose has sunk into the archive without a ripple, while the accident has outlived all of it. Stranger still is the gap it left behind, because I remember the moment completely and the making of it barely at all, as though something arrived in that turning which I have never quite been able to take credit for. The photograph where I was all attention and no author, where I got out of my own way, is the one that sounds most like me. But this seems to undo nearly everything we are told about finding a voice.

We are taught to hold a voice the way a person holds a deed: as property, something to build and defend and stamp onto every frame in case it might be stolen. From our first serious day with a camera, the industry hands us a job description that reads have a point of view, develop a signature, be recognisable within 3 frames. So we grip. We chase a look until every frame is watermarked with us, and somewhere inside the gripping a quiet dishonesty creeps in, because the photograph slowly stops being about the thing in front of the lens and starts being about our taste, our talent, our claim to be worth watching. There are whole seasons in my archive straining to be ‘Matt Jacob’ photographs, and you can still feel the strain in them. They are competent, consistent, on brand, but mute.

Cristina Mittermeier gave me the word for what goes wrong in pictures like that. Before she became one of the most seen photographers alive, she was a young marine biologist in Mexico City, translating the captions of a colleague’s conservation book. At the launch she watched the room walk straight past her careful science and gather at the photographs, asking human, almost childlike questions: “Were you scared? Was it cold?” Her words had been a wall people feared to climb, while the pictures were a door they walked through without noticing, and she carried a biologist’s lesson out of that room. The photographer, she told me, is not a messenger shouting in the square but a membrane, a semi-permeable skin like the wall of a living cell, whose whole purpose is to let a conversation pass between the thing in front of the lens and the stranger who will one day stand before the print. You are not the message. You are the place where the subject and that stranger finally meet, and your work, mostly, is to keep the glass clean enough that they can.

What clogs the glass is ego. Not conviction, but the small hungry kind that wants the viewer to admire how clever we are. When a photograph is about its author, the author is as far as anyone travels, and the conversation dies politely at our feet. If your voice feels fragmented, shifting shape depending on who is looking, it may not be because there is too little of you in the work. It may be because there is too much of the wrong kind.

There is a contradiction folded in here, and it deserves daylight, because the same Cristina who asks a photographer to dissolve also insists that we become champions and ambassadors, people who insert themselves and drag their cause in front of anyone with the power to act. Vanish, or show up? The answer, I have come to think, is a division of labour rather than a contradiction. Inside the frame, you disappear, subtracting the vanity so the subject can speak in its own voice. Outside the frame, where the work must travel and find the eyes that matter, you arrive as loudly as the work demands, sequencing it, fighting for it, refusing to let it die quietly in a drive or a sleeve. The self you subtract and the self you add are not the same creature. One wants to be admired, and the other has simply decided that something matters enough to fight for.

This is also why the membrane is no soft idea, no license to have nothing to say. A membrane is selective - it lets some things pass and turns others away, and that selection, what you cannot help caring about, what you refuse, what you keep letting through, is your voice. It is your point of view, and it is harder won than a style, because a style can be copied by anyone with your preset pack, while your permeability belongs to you the way your walk belongs to you, impossible to counterfeit. Excavating it is slow, private labour, the labour most photographers never sit down to do, which is why so many technically flawless portfolios stay strangely silent. That excavation is most of what I now do with photographers inside MOOD Insiders, because a voice cannot be installed like a preset. I believe it has to be drawn up slowly, like water from a deep and half-forgotten well.

So maybe, return, at last, to your own archive, because somewhere in it I would bet there is a frame you cannot fully explain. The moment is probably vivid, the making a blur, a gap in the memory right where your decisions should be. That gap is not a flaw in your attention, but is the clearest recording you own of what passes through you when the grip lets go. We grip, in the end, out of fear, the 2am suspicion that if we stopped forcing the work into existence there would be nothing underneath. But nothing about that frame was forced, and it may be the most honest thing you have ever made.

So, go and make one photograph where your only job is to get out of the way. Choose a subject you genuinely care about, because the membrane still needs something worth letting through, and then try, honestly try, to vanish: no style, no signature, no imagined audience grading you from the back of your mind. Afterwards, sit with the frame and ask it a single question. Not whether it is good, but what passed through. You may find, as I keep finding, that the frame with the least of you in it carries the most of you, and that the voice you have been gripping for was never a possession at all, only the shape of what you let through.

Show up. Then get out of the way.

Happy shooting,

x

Rather watch or listen? The full Moments of Mood episode is below.

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We are taught the opposite almost from the moment we lift a camera. Beauty, the lesson goes, is a property of things, waiting out in the world for whoever will travel far enough or wait long enough to find it, whether that is the golden hour bleeding across a ridge, the striking face, or the coastline that does half the work for us. So we give chase. We save for the trip, we hunt the light, we envy the photographers who seem to have been born somewhere more photogenic than we were, until our own street and our own ordinary days begin to feel like a disqualification from beauty itself.

But beauty is not prettiness, and it was never the subject. Beauty is form, and by form we do not mean the composition rules pressed into our hands at the start. We mean the whole held architecture of a picture: where you chose to stand, how close you dared to move, the distance you kept without ever deciding to keep it, the breath on which you pressed and the small mystery of why that breath and not the one before.

Form is everything in the photograph except the subject, which is only to say that form is the maker, pressed invisibly but permanently into the frame, the way handwriting carries a person even when the words are borrowed. The meanings we argue over, the politics and the associations, live in the mind and nowhere else. The form itself, the light and the distance and the held order of the thing, is actually there in the picture, as the picture, and it reaches us first, before a single idea can land. The shape of a thing has to move us before its meaning ever can.

Beneath this lies a floor that turns craft into something worth a life, and I found it in Robert Adams, who once asked (in his book ‘Beauty In Photography’) why form should be beautiful at all, and answered that it helps us meet our oldest fear, “the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.”

Stand before the disorder of the world, find the single place from which it suddenly coheres, and you are not decorating anything. You are driving a small anchor into the chaos, a standing proof that the world can still hold together, that once, from where you happened to be standing, it did. This is why the photographs that move us most are never the airtight, over-perfected ones, but the ones whose order holds only barely, as fragile as meaning itself so often feels.

In my podcast conversation with the photographer Tim Carpenter, he said that were he 6 inches taller, or 6 inches shorter, every photograph he had ever made would be different. The camera hangs from the body, and the body cannot lie. It opens the shoulders when we are happy and folds us inward when we grieve, and the lens records all of it, a faithful seismograph tracing tremors we never meant to confess. Your form, then, is not a set of decisions so much as a fingerprint, the particular signature of how you, and no one else alive, come to meet the world.

Editing his first book, Tim noticed a strange emptiness recurring in his foregrounds, a gap he kept leaving between himself and everything beyond him, and rather than smooth it away he asked what it confessed, whether he had become a distant man in that season of his life. He had. His pictures had understood his interior long before he did. There is an inherent beauty in that, too.

That same quiet miracle is waiting in your own archive right now, not as a heap of failed attempts at beauty, but as a faithful ledger of one creature finding one kind of order, again and again, in a hand nobody else could forge. The body writes all of it down without asking permission, and the only real question is whether you can learn to read it back. You can, and the skill goes by a plain, unglamorous name, which is attention. Not necessarily incense and silence, but the slow discipline of noticing what pulls at you before you can explain it, of catching the distance your body wants to keep today and gently asking why, of stepping out of the current long enough to hold your work up to the light and wonder what, exactly, you have been making. It is for the sake of that one instrument that I sit each morning before I lift a camera, not to grow calm, but to sharpen the single blade every photograph is cut with.

Attention, like anything alive, deepens fastest in company, and that is most of why I built The MOOD Insiders, a room where the scoreboard is switched off and we learn to read one another’s work the way Adams read his own, going first to the structure and the footing and the held order of a frame, long before anyone asks what it is supposedly about. If that is the way of looking you have been wanting to practice, the door is open.

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What I would leave you with is quietly consoling, I think…

If beauty is form, and form is made by attention, then nothing in your life is beneath your camera, not the tired street you have stopped seeing, nor the room you gave up on years ago.

Adams built a lifetime of work from the suburbs his peers thought unworthy of film, coaxing a garden out of bare municipal soil, and the whole argument of that work is that coherence can be made almost anywhere, by almost anyone willing to attend to it with love. So walk to the most ordinary place you know, and make one photograph in which the form, not the subject, is the thing that holds. Then sit with it, and ask honestly what kind of order you have made, and what that order reveals about the way you meet the world. Do that even once, and truly, and you will have conjured something from precisely what everyone else walked past without a glance. Beneath it, faint at first and then unmistakable, you will hear the first clear note of the voice you kept traveling so far to find, the voice that was never out there among the subjects at all, but living quietly inside your attention the whole time, waiting only to be read.

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

If you are an emerging photographer, somewhere in the long middle of trying to find your own voice, I hope to offer something in this piece that is not a tip, a technique, or a preset. I hope to give you a practice. A way of sitting with your own work that, by the time you reach the end of this, might loosen the quiet panic I think a lot of us are carrying right now.

In May a company that makes photo editing software, VSCO, put a single sentence in front of every photographer it could reach. “Your eye, the way you see the world, can't be generated. It can't be prompted. It's irreplaceable.” And it landed with me initially like a bit of relief. The real impact of AI is obviously on a lot of our minds, not just as artists but as humans throughout society.

I’ve been sitting with one of my photographs that I made it in a place that is quietly disappearing, and I keep returning to it, because it seems to know something about my voice that I keep forgetting, and as such I am drawn back to this place, time and time again. By the end of this article I want you to be holding a frame like it in your own mind. The one that is still unmistakably yours, even on the days your voice feels broken into a hundred pieces by everyone else’s opinions.

But to get there, we have to start with why that reassuring little sentence felt so good, and what it quietly gives away, but I am not going to answer that just quite yet.

2 questions sit underneath everything I am going to say today.

1. Did we really need a company to tell us that our own eye was worth something, and

2. What if your eye was never yours to begin with (and what if that turns out to be the best news you have heard all year)?

OK, kind of 3 questions then.

Before we go any further though, sit still with me. Wherever you are, bring to mind one photograph you have made. Not your most liked and not your best performing, but the one you would still have made if you knew no one would ever see it. Picture it now and notice that you do not have to defend it to anyone here. There is no number underneath it in this room. There is only you, and the thing you saw, and the fact that you were the one who saw it. Hold it there, because we are going to come back to it.

The panic, named plainly

Let me name the worry, because it is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Images can now be conjured out of nothing. Infinite, instant, costless. Brands that used to hire photographers are generating what they need instead. The platforms we built our names on bury our best work beneath whatever is trending that afternoon. And somewhere in the back of the room there is always a voice, sometimes other people’s, sometimes our own, asking whether any of this is still worth doing.

So I look back at this one photograph from a place I won’t name - it’s precious to me and a world I want to keep as fiction - and I admit the machine could approximate it now. It could render the light, the dust, the faces, the texture. What it could not do is be there. It was not the one standing in that heat, invited into that moment, carrying whatever I carried into it. All my thoughts, fears, worries, hopes and desires. My physical exhaustion, the games in my head, the external pressures of time, people, light and environment, and so much more.

And here is the part I kept turning over. The same company that told us our eye cannot be generated also builds the tools that generate. It runs a whole lab of Artificial Intelligence. Its own research found that an overwhelming number of photographers already use these tools every single day. And woven through the very pages of that reassuring campaign are invitations to subscribe. I am not saying this to attack them - I use their app, and I love it - and I think the sentiment is probably sincere. I am saying it because it reveals something; the reassurance is also a transaction, and the comfort is also a product. And if comfort about your own worth has become something that can be sold back to you, we have to ask who first convinced you that you needed to buy it.

So here is what I have come to believe. The crisis is not necessarily AI, but that the sentence ‘your eye cannot be replaced’ felt like rescue. And rescue is only sweet to someone already drowning. We were drowning long before the machines arrived, and we had slowly handed the verdict on our own work to everything outside ourselves - the likes, the algorithm, the client’s nod. The small grey number underneath the picture…

If you are an emerging photographer and your voice feels fragmented, like it changes shape depending on who is looking, this is the reason. You are carrying a dozen judges in your head, and not one of them is you. AI is simply the newest judge whose approval we are terrified of losing.

When I look at this frame, the reason it still feels unmistakably mine is almost embarrassingly simple. For once, I made it for no verdict but my own.

Koudelka, the witness

I have been thinking, all through this, about Josef Koudelka. In August of 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Koudelka was 30. He was not a news photographer, and had never photographed anything you could call an event. He photographed theatre, and the Roma communities of his own country, quietly, for no one but himself. And then the tanks came into his city, and something in him simply had to lift the camera.

Those negatives were smuggled out under the name of an unknown Czech photographer, because if he had been identified he could have been imprisoned, or worse. He won one of the most prestigious awards in the medium, and could not tell a soul the pictures were his. For 16 years he carried that silence, and it did not diminish the work by a single degree, because the worth of those photographs was never out there.

It lived in him.

That is what I am after in this one frame. Not to be Koudelka of course, but to remember that the seeing was the thing, not the applause. A machine can render the smoke and the crowd, but what it cannot be is the witness.

Relearning to trust your own eye is almost impossible to do alone, because everything around you is built to keep you looking outward for the verdict. That is the thing that fragments a voice in the first place. So I made a room where the scoreboard is switched off. It is called MOOD Insiders. People there ask what you saw, not how it performed. If your voice feels scattered, that is the room where it slowly gathers back into one.

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The fear, and the comfort underneath it

Now, I am not going to pretend the fear underneath all this evaporates because a Czech man was brave in 1968. So let me say it out loud, the real one, the one at 2am…

• What if my eye is ordinary?

• What if I am not bearing witness to anything, and I am just photographing the same coastline as everyone else?

• What if the machine really is good enough now, and the world quietly stops needing what I make, and my voice never gathers into anything whole?

I have sat in that myself, more than once.

Let it be here for a moment. The comfort I am about to offer is worthless if I rush you out of the fear before you have felt it.

Here is the first thing I have come to believe, and it begins as something almost embarrassingly practical.

Real photography is about to become more valuable, not less.

When something becomes infinite, it becomes cheap. We are about to be buried under an avalanche of images that cost nothing, that no one lived, that no one stood in the heat for, that no one returned to a disappearing place 3 times to make.

And against that flood, a frame like this of mine, with actual experience inside it, becomes rare. People feel the difference even when they cannot name it, and they reach for the real thing, because the human heart has always hungered for what is true. The work that costs a person something is becoming scarce, and scarcity, in the end, is value.

But there is something larger moving underneath the economics, and it is the part I find genuinely hopeful. There is a phrase going around now, coined by a man named Steven Johnson: “The revenge of the humanities”. For a generation we were all told that the safe future belonged to the technical, the coded, the automatable, and that the artists and the writers and the people who studied the human soul were indulging something quaint. And now the machine has arrived and quietly swallowed exactly the work we were told was safe. What it cannot swallow is the rest - the taste, the judgement, the lived understanding of why a thing matters, and the voice that arrives at a conclusion that is genuinely its own, rather than the most plausible average of everything everyone else has already said.

Even the people building these systems are saying it out loud. Daniela Amodei, who co-founded one of the largest AI companies in the world, studied literature, and she has said the things that make us human will become much more important, that studying the humanities now matters more than ever. Sit with how strange and how reassuring that is. For decades the market treated your sensibility, your eye, your years of quiet looking, as a soft and unserious thing. The machine is about to make it the most valuable thing you own. Not because you can out-produce it - you can’t of course - but because you can do the one thing it will never do; you can mean it.

This is why I am not afraid for my photograph(s). A thousand synthetic versions of this place could exist by tonight, and not one of them will have been there. Not one will carry a single hour that was actually lived, and in a world drowning in images that no one lived, the one that was lived becomes the only one worth looking at twice.

So here is what I want to say to you, plainly, as the emerging photographer I am actually talking to.

Go deeper.
Not louder.

Deeper.

Find the voice that is yours and follow it past the point where it is comfortable. Because in amongst the noise, in amongst the endless AI slop scrolling past every thumb on earth, the one thing people are starving for is a human being who saw something and meant it. We want to hear your voice. We are going to need it more than we ever have. Do not go quiet at the exact moment the world is finally desperate for the real.

But the practical comfort is not the one that I think is actually liberating. Koudelka, late in his life, after the tanks and the exile, said something that resonated:

For me, I don’t go back to that location where I took the photo to prove I am irreplaceable. I go because the seeing moves through me when I am there, the way it moves through anyone who slows down enough to look. And that is the thing I want to hand you. Your eye was never a possession, and it was never something you could own, or lose, or have stolen by a machine. It moves through you whenever you stop and pay attention. You cannot lose what you never owned, which means you can finally stop gripping it. Stop proving it. Stop measuring whether your work is original enough, or seen enough, to justify the years you have given it. Those were never the industry’s rules, yet they were the ones we wrote for ourselves.

And we are allowed to put them down.

What to carry

Let me gather this into a few things we can ponder.

1. The concern, and in some places panic, was never really about the machines. It was about how much of your own worth you had already handed away, long before they arrived.

2. The work that costs a human being something is becoming rare, and rare things gain value. You do not have to win that argument. The market makes it for you.

3. Your eye was never a possession. It was never yours to own or to lose. It moves through you whenever you slow down and look. So you can stop defending the imperfect frame. It is okay that the work is not perfect. It just IS. And that is the freedom.

Here is the reflection I am leaving in your hands, the one I will be sitting with myself this week. Go and find the single photograph that is unmistakably yours. Not your best. Yours. The one you would still have made if the internet had never existed. Look at it without defending it to anyone, and ask what it already knows about your voice that you have been too scattered, too busy, too afraid of the verdict to hear.

That frame is not fragmented.

You are not fragmented.

You only forgot which judge to listen to, and it was always the one looking through the lens.

It is okay that your eye was never yours. That was never the loss, but was always the freedom. And it was never theirs to take.

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

If you want to keep doing this work, finding the frame, switching off the scoreboard, with people who ask what you saw and not how it performed, that is what MOOD Insiders is for. The door is open.

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Rather watch this ramble? The full Moments of Mood episode is below.

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Someone puts their work up for group critique. A handful of images, or a full project they have been working on for some time, and before anyone else speaks, they speak, and they explain. They might tell us what they were going for, where they were standing, what the light was doing, what they hoped we might feel. It pours out of them, this preamble, and I understand it completely because for years it poured out of me too. We treat the explanation as a courtesy, but really it’s closer to armour.

Then the room looks. And almost without fail, what comes back is not the thing they prepared us for. Someone names a feeling the photographer never planned, someone reads a tension in the frame that the maker did not know was there, sometimes it is gentler than intended, sometimes stranger, occasionally it is the exact opposite of the point. And you can watch the moment land on their face, that small flinch of recognition, because they are hearing something true and unrehearsed about their own work for what might be the first time.

That gap - the distance between what you meant and what they felt - is not a flaw in the work or a failure of the viewer. It is the work telling you what you did not know you were saying.

The picture is not finished when you press the shutter

We are taught, or assume, somewhere along the way, that the photograph is complete the moment it leaves the camera, or the moment we finish the edit, or the moment we post it. We treat the viewer as an audience for something already whole.

But a photograph is only half a circuit, if that at all. You make the image, and the person looking at it closes the loop, and they close it not with your life but with their own. Their childhood, their grief, the argument they had that morning, the thing they have been carrying for years. You are not transmitting a message into a passive eye. You are offering a surface that someone else completes, and what they complete it with will always exceed your intentions, because your intentions were only ever one ingredient.

This is why the most valuable sentence in photography is not “this is good,” and it is not “you should fix this.” Praise keeps the work yours, and correction keeps the work yours. Both of them leave you safely in charge of what the image means. The sentence that changes you is the one that begins “this made me feel,” followed by something you did not predict. That sentence hands the work back to you as a bigger and stranger object than the one you thought you made. It is the closest thing we have to seeing our own photographs from the outside.

You cannot get there by yourself, sitting at the screen. Alone, you are still inside the frame, defending it, narrating it, loving it for reasons that have nothing to do with what is actually on the paper. You know too much - you know what you were trying to do - and that knowledge sits over the image like a fog, and you mistake the fog for the picture.

Let yourself be evicted

What a critique does, that editing in solitude never can, is force a separation. The instant a stranger looks at your work, it stops being entirely yours. You are evicted from it, and that eviction, uncomfortable as it is, is exactly where growth lives, because you finally meet the work on the same terms everyone else does, stripped of the story you have been telling yourself about it.

So here is the practice, and it is harder than it sounds. Show one image. No title. No series to lean on. No “I was trying to capture.” Just the frame, and a single question to whoever is looking: what did you feel?

If that proposition makes your stomach drop (as I know it does with many of my community members), pay attention to that, because the drop is the diagnosis. It is telling you how much of your work has been propped up by the explanation, and how little of it you have ever let stand on its own.

And if even that feels impossible, do not start at the deep end. There is no rule that says the first eyes have to be a thousand strangers on a feed. Show it to one person you trust, then a small room, then a slightly less safe room. You are not trying to overcome the fear in a single leap, but you are widening your tolerance one honest exposure at a time, until the act of being seen stops feeling like a threat to your survival and starts feeling like information.

A word of caution, because this only works under one condition: the gap is only useful if the room is honest. A room organised around kindness will hand you nothing but warmth, and warmth does not teach. A room organised around cleverness will hand you performance, and people competing to say the sharpest thing. What you are actually looking for is rarer than either, and rarer than community itself: a room of people who owe you nothing, know none of your reasons, and will still tell you the unflattering true thing gently. That room is not easy to find, yet it is, frankly, most of the reason I built the one I did.

What you are protecting yourself from

So I want to leave you with the part that is yours alone, because everything above is just the long way around to a single question: what are you afraid they will see if you stop telling them what to look at?

The explanation you always reach for, the one that arrives before anyone has even looked, is not generosity toward the viewer, but it’s more like protection for you. It pre-loads the reading, and it tells people what to see so that the honest, unguided response never quite gets the chance to arrive. So as long as you keep offering it, you will keep getting feedback on the story you told, never on the photograph you actually made.

The next time you show your work, try withholding the story. Say nothing and write nothing about it. Let the image sit there naked in front of someone and survive any silence that might follow, because it might be one of the more uncomfortable silences of your creative life.

But what comes back through it will be truer than anything your caption was ever protecting.

And it will be the first honest conversation you have had with your own work in a long time.

If you want a room built for exactly this, honest, unhurried, and serious about the work, that is what The MOOD Insiders is. A small number of photographers who will look at what you actually made, not the story you tell about it. The door is open.

Join the community

A studio in Bali, 3 photographers, a stack of prints on the floor. A Sunday book club session where someone, almost in passing, said something about a book that quietly rearranged how I thought about my own project for the next 6 months. A portfolio review at Chico Hot Springs where 5 minutes of honest looking did more for me than a year of online tutorials ever could.

Rooms. Small. Specific. With people who have agreed, at least for an hour, to look properly.

The internet has given us many things, but it has not given us many rooms. It has given us scrolling, which is different. It has given us output, which is different. The room is something else, and once you have spent time in one, you begin to understand that this is where the work actually lives. Not in the making of it, but in the looking at it together. That is where it grows up.

For 3 years, I have been trying to build rooms like that. The podcast has been the main one. The book club has been another off the back of it. And quietly, behind the scenes, both have been running on borrowed time.

Today I want to tell you what is changing, why, and what it means for you, whether this is your first letter from me or your hundredth.

The problem

The MOOD Podcast has been free since the day I started it in early 2023. The book club has been free since the day it opened in 2025. That has been a gift to give, and a joy to give it and participate within it.

But it has also meant that everything I have wanted to build on top of it, better production, bigger and better guests, a real weekly calendar, more community engagement, extra features, bonus content and the kind of community space that holds shape even when life gets in the way, has had to fit around the edges of a full pilot career, a young business in Bali, and the limits of one human’s time. The work has stayed alive, but only just. There were Sundays I almost did not show up. There were episodes I almost did not release. And looking honestly at the year ahead, I could see the shape of a quiet ending if something did not change.

I do not want a quiet ending. I do not think you do either.

So I have built something that gives all of this a proper home. A foundation under everything I want to make next. A way for the work to be sustainable for me, and substantially deeper for you.

The solution: The MOOD Insiders

The MOOD Insiders is a paid membership at $19 a month, or $195 a year (which saves you about 2 months).

Here is exactly what is inside, no fine print:

• The MOOD Podcast, ad-free and sponsor-free. No mid-roll reads, no sponsor breaks, just the conversation. Episodes 2 days before public release. New conversations land in the Insiders feed first.

• Bonus episode content. Behind-the-scenes from each shoot, audience questions answered by guests, extended cuts of conversations that did not fit the public edit, and occasional live recordings.

• Weekly book club sessions. Guaranteed every Sunday, 2 live sessions covering both sides of the Atlantic. Across the month we move through book reviews, photobook reviews, photo critiques, and now Q&As, masterclasses, and special guest appearances. All recorded and added to a growing back catalogue.

• A chat forum and dedicated photography feedback spaces. A place to share work in progress and get real eyes on it, between sessions.

• Direct access to me and the team. For the questions that do not fit a public space.

• Free resources such as my ebooks, tutorials and guided meditations.

• 10% off everything else, current and future. The course. The mentorships. The Bali expeditions. Any new offer that comes after.

• A 48-hour money-back guarantee. If the room is not for you, you walk out, no questions, full refund.

This is the project I have wanted to build for over a year. Now there is finally a structure underneath it that lets me do it properly.

sign up now

If you are already in the book club…

If you have been part of the book club at any point before today, I consider you a founding member and you do not need to do anything at this stage.

Starting today, 1 May 2026, you are moved into The MOOD Insiders automatically and you get 3 months free. No payment, no signup, no friction. The door simply opens and you are already inside (click the button below). From 1 August, the standard $19/month begins, unless you are in the top 10 of the engagement leaderboard at the end of August, in which case your first paid month is also on me.

go to the community page

If you are new here…

If you have been seeing these emails come across your inbox and enjoy my odd rant, but have not yet stepped into the book club or the podcast yet, or indeed any of our community activities, then this is the moment.

Founding membership opens today, 1 May 2026, at mattjacob.co/insiders. $19 a month, founding rate, locked in for as long as you stay. The 48-hour guarantee comes with it, so if the room is not for you, you can leave and we part as friends.

Come in. See if it feels like yours.

Why this, why now

For 3 years, the podcast has given. Every episode, every interview, every late-night edit at the end of a flight rotation. It has reached people I never expected. It has built friendships I did not know I was capable of. It has, in quiet ways I am still understanding, become the centre of my creative life.

But work that only gives eventually depletes. Work that gives without being given to in return eventually thins out and disappears. I have watched this happen to too many things I once loved, and I am not willing to let it happen here.

So this is me building a home for it. A real one, with walls and a roof and a Sunday calendar you can plan a life around. Somewhere the work can keep growing without quietly running out of breath.

If any of that sounds like yours too, I would love to see you on the other side of the door.

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

The jury chair of World Press Photo 2026 said something last week that has been circling in my head ever since.

She did not present it as a contest at all. She presented it as a kind of moral arithmetic. The math of attention. What we choose to look at, and what we choose, day after day, to leave outside the frame.

Kira Pollack said it in the context of 57,376 images. Fires, conflict, migration, bodies in water, children at borders. Submitted by 3,747 photographers from 141 countries. Reduced, eventually, to 42 winners. And then, on Thursday in Amsterdam, to a single photograph: Carol Guzy’s Separated by ICE.

2 girls. A father’s shirt. A federal courthouse hallway in lower Manhattan. The man’s name was Luis. He was Ecuadorian, and was the household’s only earner. He had attended an immigration hearing and was being detained as he came out of it. His daughters were 13 and 15. There was a younger boy too, 7 years old. Pollack described the image as a record of a disappearance. The family has since stopped showing up at the church that was helping them. They have, in the literal sense, vanished from the frame.

I am not a photojournalist. I have never stood in a conflict zone with a camera. The closest I come to courthouse light is the soft afternoon glare on the floor of a coffee bar in Bali. But something about this announcement kept returning to me, and I have been sitting with it long enough now to understand why.

The question Pollack is really asking does not just belong to photojournalism.

It belongs to all of us.

What you choose to photograph is also what you choose not to ignore.

Most photographers spend their careers - mine included - at points, optimising for the safe subject. The beautiful light. The elegant frame. The image that will not unsettle anyone, that will perform well on a feed, that looks the way a “good photograph” is supposed to look.

There is nothing wrong with that. Beauty is real. Craft matters. The world has space for images that simply remind us it can still be lovely.

But somewhere underneath every decision about what to point your camera at is a quieter decision: what am I willing to actually see?

Not what looks impressive. Not what an algorithm will reward. Not what your peers will admire. What you are genuinely willing to stop for, stay with, and witness.

Pollack put it another way. The job, she suggested, takes photographers “to the quiet corners of the world where history is being made without witnesses.”

Yeah, I had to re-read it again too.

I have spent the better part of 5 years trying to find a way to say it. The whole impulse behind my long-form work, the reason I keep returning to the same villages in Sumba, the reason I am suspicious of arrival as a concept, the reason “quiet ends” became the only phrase I could trust, is that I believe history is not only being made in the courthouses and the conflict zones. It is being made on the ridges where ancestral land meets a new road. In the kitchens where languages are forgetting themselves. In the gestures that nobody photographs because they do not look like history yet.

The photographers awarded this year are not extraordinary because they had better cameras or better light. They are extraordinary because they were willing to stand somewhere most of us would not, and keep looking at something most of us would have turned away from.

That willingness, that specific act of not looking away, is the whole skill. Everything else is execution.

I think about this in my own work constantly.

I have spent years working with communities across Indonesia - Bali, Sumba, the archipelago, long-form. I live where I work. I come back. I ask permission. I try to understand before I frame.

And still, there are moments where I pull back. Not because something is not worth photographing, but because photographing it feels like a line I am not sure I have the right to cross. A private grief offered casually, without the person knowing what it means for me to record it. A face that holds 3 centuries of erosion and whose name I learned only after the camera was already away.

I have left those frames in the field. Some of them I still think about.

I am not certain that is always the right call. But I have come to believe that the act of asking, of genuinely pausing and asking should I be here, with a camera, right now, is part of what makes the rest of the work honest.

The question “what are you willing to see?” has a twin: “what are you willing to be responsible for once you have seen it?”

Most of the time, those 2 questions arrive at the same answer. Sometimes they do not. The photograph that gets made and the one that gets withheld are equally part of a body of work. The contact sheet of frames you did not take is the truest portrait of your discernment. Nobody will ever see it, but you will know.

This is not about conflict photography. You do not need a war zone to grapple with this.

The subject that feels too small. Too unglamorous, and too personal. The thing in your own life, your own neighbourhood, your own family that you walk past because it does not look like a “good photograph.” Because it is too ordinary, too uncomfortable, or too close.

Point the camera at it anyway.

There is an exercise in that, maybe one day this week or weekend. Something you have been avoiding - not dangerous, just honest. The frame that does not flatter you, nor the moment that does not perform. The corner of your life you keep cropping out of the picture you tell about yourself.

The willingness to look, really look, without knowing in advance whether it will produce anything worth keeping, is where the work starts to become yours.

That gap, between what you photograph and what you were willing to photograph, is the only place a voice can grow.

There is a second half to Pollack’s reckoning that I have been thinking about too.

She was speaking to audiences. The photographers, she said, have done their part. They have spent the years, taken the risks and made the record. The act of looking, now, belongs to the rest of us.

But she could have been speaking to any photographer who has decided, consciously or not, that their job is to make beautiful things rather than true ones. That their work is decoration rather than witness. That craft is a way of keeping the world at arm’s length.

The 42 photographers awarded this year stood in places that demanded something of them. Sudan. Gaza. Guatemala. Ukraine. A federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. Places that demanded they see clearly and not look away.

You do not have to be there to ask the same of yourself.

Every time you aim your camera honestly, at something real, something you genuinely see rather than something you think will perform, you are doing the same work on a different scale. The record you are making matters. Even if it only matters to you. Even if no jury ever sees it. Even if the only person you are bearing witness to is yourself.

The question is not whether what you photograph is important enough.

The question is whether you are actually willing to see it.

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

The Flagship World Press Photo Exhibition 2026 opened on Friday at De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. It runs through 27 September, then begins a tour of more than 60 cities. The full gallery of winners is online. Spend time with it.

The photographers have done their part.

Now look.

References & further reading

• The winning photograph: Separated by ICE by Carol Guzy, ZUMA Press, iWitness, for Miami Herald

• The full body of work: ICE Arrests at New York Court by Carol Guzy (also winner in the Stories category, North and Central America)

• All 42 contest winners: World Press Photo Contest 2026

• The 2 finalists: Saber Nuraldin’s Aid Emergency in Gaza (EPA Images) and Victor J. Blue’s work for The New York Times Magazine, both available on the Photo of the Year page

• The jury statement and full announcement: Photo of the Year and Finalists announced (the source of Kira Pollack’s “quiet corners” remark)

• Carol Guzy and Kira Pollack in conversation: WPP 2026 Photo of the Year video

• Guzy’s NPR interview: The Picture Show, NPR, 23 April 2026

• The Amsterdam exhibition: World Press Photo Exhibition 2026 at De Nieuwe Kerk (24 April – 27 September 2026)

I don’t mean I suddenly understood my work or knew where it was going. I mean the opposite, actually. I stopped pretending I knew. And in that surrender, in the space that opened up when I finally let go of the version of myself I’d rehearsed on a hotel bed in Vancouver, the week started giving me things I hadn’t thought to ask for.

If what I wrote in part 1 a few days ago was about what the week took from me, the ego, the illusion of cohesion, the fantasy that I was almost done, then this is about what it gave back. And what it gave back was stranger, harder to hold, and infinitely more valuable than any feedback on a sequence of prints.

Here is something I did not expect to learn at a portfolio review: nobody is finished.

I don’t mean that in a motivational poster kind of way. I mean it literally. The people I had placed on pedestals, whose books I’d studied, whose careers I’d quietly used as measuring sticks for my own, they are all still searching. Still unsure. Still waking up wondering if today will be the day they prove to themselves they’re not a fraud.

Jesse Lenz (photographer (The Seraphim, The Locusts), publisher and founder of Charcoal Press, Charcoal Book Club, and Chico Review), who created this event 10 years ago, is one of the busiest, most prolific people I’ve ever encountered. 6 children, a publishing house, book club, workshops, art book fairs in Paris and New York etc. etc…And when I finally cornered him (I actually felt bad) long enough to ask what he looks for in the work that crosses his desk, he said something that reframed my entire understanding of why I was there:

“I’m not looking for work that’s finished. That’s actually kind of a turnoff for me. I want to see something with potential, but find somebody that maybe hasn’t quite realised how good they’re doing just yet.”

Read that again. The man who runs the event considers finished work a turnoff. And I had arrived believing mine was nearly there. The irony is so sharp it almost draws blood. But it also released something in me, because if the gatekeeper himself isn’t looking for perfection, then maybe the point was never perfection. Maybe it was always about showing up with enough honesty and enough unfinished questions that someone could meet you inside them.

Harrison Miller (photographer (Yellow Pine, Valleys), designer and publisher through Underlife Editions) confirmed this from the other direction. He’d been an attendee here in 2021, arrived with early self-published work and some fragile confidence, and left feeling like he didn’t fit in. Shattered, was the word he used. But instead of retreating, he went deeper into bookmaking, experimented with printing and binding and materials, found himself through the craft rather than the concept. And now, 5 years later, he’s back as a reviewer. When I asked him what he looks for across the table, he didn’t hesitate:

“Intimacy, emotion, movement, beauty, immediacy. I want to impulsively know as soon as I see what I’m looking at that I like it without even having to think about it. I don’t want to hear the story, I don’t want to read the words, I just want to know that by just touching the object I already like it.”

That progression, from shattered attendee to someone who can articulate what moves him with that kind of precision, is maybe the most hopeful thing I witnessed all week. Not because it’s a success story. Because it’s a permission slip. It says: you don’t have to arrive complete. You just have to keep arriving.

Tim Carpenter (photographer (Little, Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road), educator at Penumbra Foundation, and co-founder of TIS Books)), who has been reviewing at Chico for 7 years and who reviewed me on day 1, told me he comes back every year because the attendees inspire him. Not in some abstract, noble way. In a gut-level, I-need-to-go-home-and-make-better-pictures way. (You can hear Tim’s review and many of these conversations in Part 2 of the podcast episode.)

“Everybody can make pictures that I’ve never seen before,” he said. “And I love it.”

And Matthew Genitempo (photographer (Dogbreath, Jasper) and publisher (Trespasser)) - one of the most respected photobook makers working today, and someone whose work I have spent serious time with - told me that he still walks into Chico feeling like a student. He mentioned seeing Odette England here for the first time and going up to her like a fan. He used the phrase “excited nervousness” to describe how he still feels every year.

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room,” he said. “And every single time I feel like I’m in the right room here.”

I keep coming back to that. Because if Genitempo still feels it, if Carpenter still needs it, if Harrison had to be broken before he could be rebuilt, then the myth of the finished artist is just that. A myth. And the sooner you let go of it, the sooner the work gets honest.

But here’s where I have to talk about something that most of us in this world avoid. Not because it’s uncomfortable, though it is, but because acknowledging it feels like it might undo the romance of the whole endeavour.

The model is broken.

Ann Hermes (photojournalist and attendee) said it more plainly than anyone I spoke to all week, and I think her honesty deserves to be heard. Ann is a former staff newspaper photographer. That job, she told me, has almost entirely disappeared. She now freelances for editorial outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post, places with great reputations that don’t pay enough to live in a major city. She came to Chico with a personal project and every reviewer told her the same thing: this is a book. Just not a photobook. An academic press book. Which means more time, more energy, and still no money at the end, because nobody makes money from photobooks.

She called her situation “working in 2 broken models.” Editorial journalism and the photobook world. And then she paused and said she might be staring at a 3rd, because commercial photography is ripping at the seams too.

It would have been easy for that conversation to spiral into despair. But it didn’t, because Ann isn’t despairing. She’s adapting. She talked about “commercial documentary,” a term another attendee had coined, the idea that the skills you develop as a photojournalist (flexibility, critical thinking, working fast and alone) are exactly what corporate clients will pay for, at 10 times the editorial rate. She talked about passing those jobs to other photojournalists when she can’t take them, because she wants them to be able to fund their personal work too.

And then she said something that landed differently than maybe she intended:

“We really have to help each other keep at it, because there are so many valuable voices and stories being told here. And I just want everybody to be able to continue the work that they’re doing.”

Chico exists in this strange, beautiful contradiction. It is a place where art and commerce intersect but rarely shake hands. Everyone here is making extraordinary work. Almost nobody is making a living from it. And yet nobody is stopping. The question that hangs in the air, unspoken but heavy, is: why? What sustains this? What keeps people flying across the world to show 43 prints to strangers who will tell them, lovingly, that they’re not done yet?

I think the answer lives in the next thing that happened to me.

On the penultimate day, I had a review with Odette England that opened a door I didn’t know existed, and then a review with Jonathan Levitt that walked me through it.

Odette is one of those rare people who makes you feel like the most important person in the room without ever diminishing anyone else. A photographer (Isn’t X Beautiful, The Long Shadow) and educator, her new book is a 26,000-word novella about the relationship between the letter X and photography, built on autobiography and growing up in deeply rural Southern Australia. When I asked her what the best part of reviewing was, she didn’t talk about finding talent or shaping projects. She talked about eyes.

“The best thing that you can experience with another human being is when you say something to them and there’s this expression that comes on their face, and you think, oh my goodness.”

She gave me that expression. She pulled things out of my work that I hadn’t seen, connections between images I’d treated as separate, emotional threads I’d been weaving without knowing it. And she did it with such tenderness that I felt, for the first time all week, like the work wasn’t a problem to be solved. It was something alive that needed careful attention rather than aggressive editing.

But it was Jonathan Levitt (photographer (Echo Mask)) who gave me the metaphor I’m still living inside.

He talked about my project as if it were a piece of music. Not a narrative. Not a document. Not a sequence of evidence, but a composition. He asked me what I’d want to listen to over and over again, and why. What I’d want it to make me feel. And something in the way he said it unlocked a way of thinking about photography that I’d never accessed before, one where the images aren’t illustrations of a story but notes in something felt rather than understood. Where the edit isn’t about logic but about rhythm, tension, release.

I’ve been turning that conversation quite a bit, because it doesn’t just apply to a photobook. It applies to everything I do. The podcast, the newsletter, the way I try to help others, the way I try to live. What would I want to listen to over and over again? And am I brave enough to actually make that the work?

Andrew Aiello, one of the attendees I connected with most deeply during the week, had a parallel experience with Claudine Doury (photographer (Amour, Sasha) and former photo editor) that crystallised something I’d been circling. He’d come to Chico with street photography, carefully composed images of people in cities, framed in beautiful light. Good work. Competent work. And then Claudine pulled out the images he’d almost left behind that she felt were the connective tissue and the poetry of the work. The distinction she’d drawn, between narrative and poetry in a body of work, had blown him open. And I felt it resonating with Levitt’s music metaphor, with Odette’s tenderness, with everything the second half of the week was teaching me. That the most powerful work isn’t the work you plan. It’s the work that slips through when you stop performing.

And now I have to tell you about the irony. Because it’s so precise it almost feels designed.

My project is (was?) called To the Quiet Ends. I’m not going to say much about the images or the narrative, because there’s still so much work to do and I want to protect the space around it while it grows. But I can tell you what it’s about emotionally, because that’s what this week forced me to articulate over and over, 10, 15, 20 times, to as many different people, until I finally heard myself say it clearly enough to believe it.

It’s about displacement. About the experience of existing between places, geographically, emotionally, metaphorically. About not quite being one thing anymore but not yet being the other. About the turbulence of identity when the ground keeps shifting under you, when the landscapes you came from no longer recognise you and the ones you’ve arrived in don’t yet feel like yours.

And here I was, at Chico, carrying that work about fragmentation and not-belonging into a room where, for the first time in longer than I can remember, I felt like I belonged. Among people I’d never met, in a state I’d never visited, at an event I’d almost talked myself out of attending. The project about displacement found its home in a room full of strangers who turned out not to be strangers at all.

I’m still sitting with the weight of that. I think it might take months to fully understand. But I know this much: the work isn’t separate from the life. It never was. I was making images about the thing I was living, and this week held up a mirror and said, yes, and look, here it is again, right now, in the way you’re afraid to show these prints, in the way you cry when someone sees you, in the way you flew halfway around the world looking for a room that would understand.

Rory King (photographer (Gumsucker) and Chico alumnus), who was attending for the 3rd time, described the evolution in a way that brought everything together for me. He said his first year was a dream, surreal, overwhelming, his contained creative world suddenly exposed to people he’d admired from a distance. His second year, he started building real friendships with those same people. And now, on his third, photography had taken a backseat entirely.

“Tell me about your life,” he said. “Tell me how many times you’ve been heartbroken. Tell me what your relationship with your parents is like. That feels like it feeds back into the photography. But that’s why I come back.”

That’s the thing I’m taking home. Not a list of edits. Not a sequencing strategy. Not a publishing contact, though I have a few of those too. What I’m taking home is the understanding that the work and the life are not 2 separate things, and that the community you build around your searching is not a bonus. It’s the whole point.

Matt Genitempo reads poetry and painting books to feed his photography. Daniel Arnold (photographer (You Are What You Do, Pickpocket)) insists on doing curveball assignments that have nothing to do with his personal work, just to see what happens when he mixes it all together at the end of the month. Odette wrote a 26,000-word novella about the letter X. Marshall To (photographer (Blank Notes) and Chico alumnus) found that success meant having dinner with the right people, not a bestselling book. Bryan Schutmaat (photographer (Sons of the Living, Grays the Mountain Sends) and publisher (Trespasser)) told me to stop shooting and start excavating my archive. And Jesse built a 10-year institution on the premise that what photographers need most is not instruction, but proximity to each other.

I think they’re all saying the same thing in different languages: that the work comes through us, not from us. That it lives in relation, not in isolation. And that the most dangerous thing an artist can do is believe they’re finished.

I still don’t know exactly where To the Quiet Ends goes from here. I have a core of work that multiple reviewers confirmed is strong. I have a much clearer sense of what belongs inside this project and what doesn’t. I have Levitt’s music metaphor ringing in my ears, telling me to stop thinking in narratives and start thinking in rhythm. I have Brian’s advice to spend an hour every day in my archive, not shooting new work, but excavating what I’ve already made. And I have the knowledge, which I didn’t have before Chico, that what I’m making is not just a collection of photographs. It’s architecture. And architecture takes time, and craft, and a willingness to tear down walls you were proud of building.

But I also have something I didn’t expect. I have people now. People who saw the work and understood not just what it looks like, but what it costs. People I can send a PDF to in 6 months and say, I changed everything, does this hold? People whose work will keep teaching me long after the hot springs have gone cold and the Montana sky has faded from my phone screen.

If this week taught me anything, it’s that the creative life is not a solo expedition. It’s a pilgrimage you take alongside people who are just as lost, just as hungry, just as willing to lay their bleeding hearts on a table and ask to be seen.

And if you’re reading this and thinking, I want that, then I need you to know: you don’t have to go to Montana to find it. You just have to be willing to show up, unfinished, and trust that the room will meet you where you are.

That’s what Chico did for me. And that’s what I’m trying to build in the spaces I create too. I hope you can join me in those spaces.

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

(If you want to experience the full week, both parts of the podcast are live now - see links below. And if you want to be part of a community that holds space for this kind of work and this kind of conversation, I’d love to have you - link also below)

watch part one

watch part two

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There were 43 prints spread across a bed that wasn’t mine. 6 years of work, maybe more, laid out in rows like some kind of offering I hadn’t yet learned how to give. I’d numbered each one on the back in pencil, which felt like such a small, fragile act of control over something I couldn’t actually control at all. I kept moving them around. Pairing 2 images, then splitting them. Trying to hear whether the silence between photographs could carry the same weight as the photographs themselves. I did this for hours. It felt like tuning a frequency I could hear but couldn’t name, and if I’m honest, I think part of me already knew that what I was really doing was rehearsing a version of myself I hoped would hold up under scrutiny.

3 days later, I was standing in a parking lot in Montana, 14 hours off my body clock, staring at mountains that looked nothing like anything in my life, wondering if I’d made a beautiful, expensive, terrifying mistake.

watch part one

I should probably tell you what Chico Review actually is, because even now, having lived through it, I’m not sure the description does justice to the experience.

Every March, photographers from around the world gather at Chico Hot Springs, this quietly stunning resort tucked into the foothills south of Livingston, Montana. For 1 week, you sit across a table from editors, curators, publishers, and some of the most respected photographers alive, and you show them what you’ve been making. 20 minutes per review. 10 to 15 of these across the week. That’s the formal structure. But the formal structure, as I would come to learn, is maybe 20% of what actually happens here.

This was the 10th year. 80 attendees. 25 reviewers and speakers. The biggest the event has ever been. And I had travelled from Bali with a suitcase full of prints, a wife who would prove to be the emotional scaffolding of my entire week, and a body of work I genuinely believed was close to finished.

I want to sit with that sentence for a second, because it matters for everything that follows. I believed it was close to finished. I’d spent years on this project. I’d edited, re-edited, printed, sequenced, agonised. I had a narrative I could articulate. I had images I was proud of. I walked into that first day with something that felt, to me, like a cohesive body of work.

It wasn’t. And learning that, in the way I learned it, is really what this story is about.

watch part two

The first morning is a blur of lanyards and nerves. You meet everyone at once. You scan faces, trying to match them to Instagram handles or book covers you’ve studied. The reviewers drift through the room with a different energy to the attendees. Some of them have been doing this for 6, 7 years. They know each other, they’re already laughing, already comfortable in the rhythms of this place. And you’re standing there with your coffee, smiling too much, trying to appear relaxed while your nervous system hums at a frequency usually reserved for job interviews and turbulence.

Then you get your review schedule. A printed sheet. Time slots and names. And suddenly the names you’ve followed for years, whose books sit on your shelf, whose work you’ve studied late at night when you should have been sleeping, those names are no longer abstract. They’re appointments. They’re 20-minute windows in which you will sit across from these people and try to explain, out loud, with your actual voice, what you’ve been doing with your life.

I looked at my schedule and felt my stomach fold in half.

Here’s the thing nobody prepares you for. The 20 minutes are not about photography. I mean, technically they are. You lay out your prints, you talk about your project, the reviewer responds. But what’s actually happening is something much more confronting than a conversation about images. You’re compressing everything you believe about yourself as an artist into a space so small it either holds together or it doesn’t. You hear yourself speaking and you think, that’s not what I meant. The reviewer picks up a print, puts it down, picks up another. Asks a question that sounds casual but lands like a depth charge. And before you know it, you’re not presenting work anymore. You’re defending a version of yourself that might not even exist yet.

My first afternoon, I had 3 reviews back to back. Tim Carpenter, Carl Wooley, Janet Delaney. 3 completely different sensibilities. 3 completely different responses to the same 43 prints. And underneath the surface variation, the same quiet, disquieting signal running through all of them like a bassline I hadn’t wanted to hear: your work is not yet saying what you think it’s saying.

Tim was generous in a way that made the honesty easier to receive. He didn’t talk about good pictures or bad pictures. He wanted to know what was in my head and my heart that had to get out, and then he gently asked whether the photographs were actually serving that. It sounds like such a simple reframe, but it cut me because I realised I’d been thinking about the images as things rather than as instruments. As proof rather than as passage.

By that evening, I was in my room pulling prints out of the sequence. Cutting images I’d been emotionally attached to for years. And I want to be honest about how that felt, because I think it matters. It felt like failure. Not the productive, growth-mindset, “fail forward” kind of failure that sounds good on podcasts. It felt like I’d walked into the most important room of my creative life and been told, gently but unmistakably, that I wasn’t ready.

And here’s where the week could have gone one of 2 ways.

There’s a version of this story where I spiral. Where the ego death of day one compounds through day two, where every new review feels like another confirmation that I’m out of my depth, and where by the rest day on Wednesday I’m sitting in the hot springs wondering why I spent thousands of dollars to feel this way. I’ve heard that version from other attendees. Some people arrive with work they’ve poured years into and leave genuinely unsure whether to continue. That’s real. That happens. And I don’t think we talk about it enough.

Because there is a shadow side to a week like this. You notice it forming almost immediately, the way you notice weather shifting before anyone says anything. The micro-hierarchies. The gravitational pull toward certain attendees whose work is clearly further along, or whose confidence fills more space. The reviewers who give you the full 20 minutes and the ones who glance at the clock at 12. The small, almost imperceptible current of elitism that runs beneath the warmth. Not from malice, never from malice, but from the simple mathematics of attention when 100 people are competing for it.

I felt it. I’d be dishonest if I said I didn’t. There were moments in those first 2 days where I genuinely questioned whether I belonged in that room. Halfway through Janet Delaney’s keynote, which was brilliant, the thought arrived uninvited and sat down next to me like an old friend I’d been avoiding: what the fuck am I doing here?

I wasn’t the only one. Bobbi, one of the attendees, told me later she’d felt the same thing. She described the oscillation perfectly: you sit with a reviewer who sees potential in your work, who makes you feel like you’re onto something real, and you walk out floating. Then you sit with another who looks at the same images and says, essentially, I don’t really care about this. And you fall through the floor. She’d come to Chico with work about healing from dissociative disorder through nature, and when I asked her about the reviews, she laughed and said the hardest part was the blind spots. The things about her work that she knew were there, deep down, but had been hoping nobody would notice.

“They see your blind spots,” Bobbi said. “The thing that you know is still there but you’re just hoping they won’t see it.”

That landed on me like a stone. Because that was exactly my experience from day one. Every piece of feedback I’d received was something I’d already half-known, half-feared, half-buried. The reviewers weren’t telling me anything new. They were holding up a mirror I’d been avoiding.

But this is where things take a little turn. Because somewhere around the second evening, after the formal reviews had ended and people had started loosening up over dinner and drinks, something began to shift in the texture of the week. And I think it has to do with proximity.

You see, at Chico, you can’t leave. I mean, you can drive 30 minutes to Livingston for lunch, but essentially you’re all there, together, in this gorgeous enclosed world of hot springs and old wooden buildings and mountain air, and there’s nowhere to hide and no reason to perform anymore because everyone has already been stripped back by the reviews. The pretense falls away faster than it would anywhere else, because the shared vulnerability creates a kind of accelerated intimacy that I’ve never experienced in any other professional or creative context.

And it was in those spaces, the lawn, the library, the walk from the upper lodge to the conference room, the beer at midnight, that the real Chico started to reveal itself to me.

Caitie Moore, the event coordinator, called herself “the blood in the heart of Chico,” and I understood exactly what she meant. She’d spent years connecting others without feeling connected herself, and this event had become the place where that pattern finally broke. When I asked her what she cared about most, she didn’t talk about logistics or scheduling. She talked about making a space where artists could be exposed without being destroyed.

“Being vulnerable is being an artist,” she said. “And being able to have a place where people can be vulnerable but also feel safe and supported is my main goal here.”

I believed her. More importantly, I felt the evidence of it everywhere I looked. In Esther, who’d photographed a closed Soviet nuclear city and then invited the Russian embassy to her exhibition, and told the story laughing. In Meryl, who’d spent 5 years photographing the Washington shoreline because she wanted her son to grow up seeing images of peace. In Tony, who’d spent 7 years documenting cockfighting in Colombia, not the violence, but the tenderness before it. The samurai ironing his kimono before battle. In Matt Cosby, my next-door room neighbour, who’d been an editorial photographer for 15 years and came to Chico because his personal work had only ever been seen by his wife, his mother, and Instagram. He said that so casually, and I realised that sentence contains the entire quiet crisis of our medium.

These were not networking conversations. These were people telling each other the truth about their lives through the proxy of their photographs, and being met with care and curiosity rather than judgement. And slowly, conversation by conversation, meal by meal, the self-doubt that had been sitting on my chest since day one started to lift. Not because anyone told me my work was great. But because I started to understand that the point of this week was never to be told your work is great. The point was to be in a room full of people who understand what it costs to make it.

Marshall To, whose book Blank Notes I’d featured on the podcast a few months earlier, was there as an alumnus. He’d been through this whole process. He’d had the ego death, survived it, made the book, come out the other side. When I asked him what he looks for in other people’s work now, he paused in a way that made me put my pen down.

“We’re all here because we’re all open bleeding hearts,” he said. “And we’re hoping that our hearts don’t get broken, but that’s exactly what needs to happen.”

I wrote that down in my notebook. I’ve read it back to myself quite a few times since I left Montana. Because that is the contract. That is what you are signing when you number 43 prints on the back in pencil, fly 24 hours across the world, and lay them in front of strangers whose opinion you care about more than you’d like to admit. You are asking to be broken in precisely the right way. And the courage isn’t in showing the work. The courage is in trusting that the breaking is the point.

Daniel Arnold, who has been reviewing at Chico for 3 years and who approaches photography with a kind of radical, almost reckless honesty I found deeply compelling, put it differently. He talked about the myth of arrival. About how every door that opens just reveals more doors, and how the social media model has tricked us into believing that at some point the world slows down and lets you luxuriate in having made it. It doesn’t. It never does. And the only thing of real value, after all the pats on the back and the book deals and the gallery shows, is this:

“No trophy means anything except for the life that you get to live by committing to paying attention to your life.”

That sentence has been living in my chest since he said it, because it reframes everything. It reframes why we make work, why we come to places like this, and what we’re actually hoping to find when we lay our prints on a table and ask someone to look.

On the Thursday afternoon (day 4), I had a review with Brad Zeller.

Brad and I had already a head start, because he was a guest on The MOOD Podcast a few months back, so we didn’t have to spend too much time getting to know each other. And I’m not going to tell you everything that happened in my review conversation with him on that day, because some things don’t belong in an article. They belong in the space where they occurred, between 2 people and a table of prints and 20 minutes that felt like both an eternity and a breath. But I will tell you this: he understood what I was trying to do almost immediately. Not the images. Me. The searching. The displacement. The thing I’d been circling for years, through cameras and countries and sleepless editing sessions, without quite being able to name it or hold it still long enough to examine. He saw the me in the work, not just the work itself, and when someone does that, when someone who has spent decades in this world reflects back not what’s wrong with your photographs but what’s true in them, something cracks open that you didn’t know was sealed.

I cried. Right there at the table. I’m not embarrassed about that. I think it might have been the most important thing that happened all week, because it wasn’t about validation. It was about being seen. And those are not the same thing, even though we confuse them constantly.

That review changed the axis of my entire week. Everything after it felt different. Not easier, not simpler, certainly not more resolved. But more honest. Like a performance I hadn’t even realised I was giving had finally ended, and something real could begin in its place.

I’m sitting on a flight somewhere between Montana and the rest of my life as I try to write this article, this review, this silly mess of notes about my week, and I keep returning to something that happened on the last morning. I woke up at 0630, walked down to the parking lot in the cold, and just stood there looking at the mountains. The resort was quiet. Everyone was sleeping off the final night. And I had this overwhelming feeling that I was leaving a place I hadn’t yet arrived at. That the week had been a doorway, not a destination, and I’d only just stepped through it.

I still have more to say about what this week meant. About what the reviewers revealed in Part 2 of the podcast that reframed everything I thought I knew about making books, making art, and making a life from either. About the people I haven’t mentioned yet whose words I keep turning over like stones. About the enormous, terrifying, beautiful irony of bringing a project about displacement and fragmentation to a place where, for the first time in a very long time, I felt like I belonged.

But that’s for next week.

For now, I just want to sit with the fact that 43 prints on a hotel bed in Vancouver became something I didn’t expect. Not a finished body of work. Not a book deal. Not clarity, exactly. Something harder to name and much more valuable.

A beginning I didn’t know I needed, in a room I almost didn’t enter.

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

Both parts of the Chico Review podcast episode are live now. If you want to experience the full week, the conversations, the reviews, the people, they’re waiting for you below. And if this kind of depth matters to you, if you want to be part of a community where artists hold space for each other’s searching, I’d love to have you.

🎧 Part 1:
Spotify →

Apple → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1677004555
YouTube →

____

🎧 Part 2:
Spotify →

Apple → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1677004555
YouTube →

But I’m home now. And I have a lot to talk about. New projects, new expeditions and a few perspective-changing experiences…

Starting with this.

I just got back from the Chico Review 2026.

For those unfamiliar, Chico is one of the most respected portfolio review events in the photography world. 80 photographers, selected by a jury from around 400 applicants. 10 formal reviews each. Reviewers - photographers, curators, publishers - from Magnum, The New Yorker, SFMOMA, Trespasser, Blow Up Press, L’Artiere, and more. A full week of sitting across from people who have shaped the industry - and letting them pull your work apart.

I went with my long-form project ‘To the Quiet Ends’ (definitely changing this title FYI). And I came home different.

I’m not going to give you the full breakdown here. That’s coming next week - a more detailed article paired with a new podcast episode that captures the entire experience, including interviews with attendees and reviewers throughout the week. What I want to do today is give you the emotional centre of what happened, because it’s still settling into me and I think there’s something in it worth sharing now.

The first day broke me open

I’ll be honest. The first day hit harder than I expected.

The reviews were fast, mixed, and intense. You think you’re ready, and then someone is sitting across from you, pulling your work apart in ways you hadn’t considered. By the end of day one, one thing was painfully clear: my work wasn’t cohesive enough. Not in narrative. Not in feeling. So by that evening, I’d already cut a lot out.

Confronting? Yes. But that’s exactly why you come to something like this.

The real Chico happened outside the reviews

Here’s what surprised me most. The formal 20-minute review slots were valuable - but the conversations around them were where the real shifts happened. At dinner. On the lawn. At the bar. These are people from the highest levels of photography, publishing, and curation, and they’re just... there. Accessible. Open. Willing to talk.

I made a conscious decision early on: go deep, not wide. I didn’t try to meet all 80 people. I wanted real conversations, real connections. Not 80 different bits of small talk. And I think that was the right call.

Something cracked open

The thing that’s still sitting with me - really sitting with me - is a conflict I didn’t fully see until I was forced to articulate it ten different times to ten different people.

To the Quiet Ends is about the struggle of breaking away from old identities. The psychological experience of existing between places. Of not quite being one thing anymore but not yet being the other.

And the irony? I’m living it. Right now. I’m inside the exact experience this work is about. I don’t think I fully understood that until Chico made it impossible to ignore.

What I’m taking home

My vision for the project has shifted. I have a much clearer sense of what works within the theme, what doesn’t, and what kind of grounding the work needs. I also have a completely new appreciation for what happens after you press the shutter - the editing, the sequencing, the book-making. I knew it intellectually before. This week, I felt it.

One reviewer - Jonathan Levitt - talked about my work as a piece of music. He asked me what I’d want to listen to, why, and what I’d want it to make me feel. That question hasn’t left me. And I don’t think it will for a long time.

Next week

The full story is coming. A proper article walking through the reviews, the people, the lessons, and what’s next for To the Quiet Ends. Alongside it, a podcast episode that brings you inside the week itself - conversations with attendees and reviewers, the energy of the place, and the moments that mattered most.

For now, I’ll leave you with this.

The journey of an artist is a constant struggle, and often a lonely one. You live in a world full of questions and doubt. You have moments of inspiration that keep you going, but the ebbs and flows can be debilitating. What I found at Chico - the creative energy, the support, the honesty - is settling into me in a way I don’t think will ever fade.

Photography is an existentially solitary pursuit. But the work we make doesn’t have to exist in isolation. It lives in the spaces between us. In the conversations, the glances, the energy, even the silence.

Chico changed the way I see mine.

I’ll see you next week with the full story.

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

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I’m writing this while sitting in silence. Two days, no talking, no devices, just space and time unfolding without interruption. I’m writing on paper, as I do most days, because it’s one of the ways I stay connected to my own mind, a way of thinking that feels slower, more honest, and far less performative than typing ever does. Silence is like a drug for me - you’ll see this is a paradox in itself when one considers the point of this entire article - so the quiet here wasn’t unsettling when it arrived. It was euphoric, almost immediately so, like a pressure being released. And then, as the hours passed, the silence revealed its texture. Birds moving through the trees, insects humming steadily in the background, rain arriving and leaving again, a farmer somewhere nearby beginning his work. The quiet wasn’t empty at all. It was full, and it was precise.

The main reason I’m an early riser is so I have at least a few hours each day in peace and quiet, before the rest of the island (and my household) wakes up. As of writing, I’m just an hour’s drive away from my home in Bali, in the middle of rice fields and nature, without a machine in sight, and this is far removed from what now dominates much of the island. A lot of it is traffic, construction, noise, and movement, a place in constant negotiation with itself - ironic given the history and heritage of why Bali is, well, Bali. Yet habituating myself within this culture and lifestyle has made the paradox difficult to ignore. It reminded me how easily we confuse what is closest to us with what is true. We identify with our immediate environment, our routines, our feeds, our obligations, and slowly that narrow band of experience becomes our entire reality. Everything else still exists, but it no longer registers, not because it has vanished, but because our attention has moved elsewhere.

I didn’t come here to fix anything. I’m fortunate to have lived through harder seasons before, and I’m grateful that this chapter feels steady and generative rather than about recovery. I feel I’ve had my midlife crisis, but I guess time will tell, and that story is certainly for another day…

I’m also not trying to perform some version of retreat culture either. Here in Bali, I’ve seen how quickly ‘healing’ can drift into something aesthetic, transactional, and quietly performative. Silence and solitude, for me, has never been about escape or renunciation. It’s about facilitating a quickly accessible conduit to connect and be mindful. It allows me to notice that I’m thinking while I’m thinking, to feel what my body is doing as it does it, and to experience emotion without immediately analysing or improving it. It’s a permission slip to meditate, write, daydream and rest. A way of meeting myself before the noise of daily life rushes back in and begins to speak louder than everything else.

The beauty of meditation is that you can do it anywhere. I have done for so many years. If you practice, you can do it when in meetings, while walking, exercising or in conversation. Meditation is not some kind of esoteric, out of this world, woo-woo methodology that requires dreadlocks and baggy clothes. Yes, sitting down in a comfortable position allows for often the best experiences, but the whole point of meditation is to practice being mindful - like exercise for your mind - and downstream of that is being present, being focused, relief of suffering, understanding energies in your mind and body, and being, well, happy.

When devices, responsibilities, and endless task lists become the dominant forces in daily life, something subtle begins to erode. It isn’t what everyone bangs on about on every podcast out there, like focus or motivation, it’s traction. We stay busy, often convincingly so, yet feel strangely unmoored from ourselves, as though all the movement isn’t quite taking us anywhere meaningful. Much of what we label as progress can quietly pull us off course, especially when it disguises itself as work, learning, or self-improvement. These forms of distraction are the hardest to see, because they look sensible, productive, even virtuous.

In silence, those disguises tend not to hold up for very long. Without anything external to react against, attention turns inward on its own. Thoughts surface that have been running quietly in the background. Sensations in the body become more legible. Patterns repeat themselves, sometimes gently, sometimes uncomfortably. This isn’t about chasing calm or transcendence. It’s about clarity, because awareness doesn’t flatter or reassure, it simply reveals what is already present.

I’ve come to think that this is where self-awareness actually begins. Not in insight, theory, or the accumulation of ideas, but in the willingness to notice what the mind keeps reaching for, what it avoids, and what it clings to when given the space to do so. The irony is that the harder we try to disguise these tendencies in daily life, the more clearly they surface elsewhere.

You know the biggest problem with a disguise? However hard you try, it always becomes a self-portrait.

Sitting here, listening to the sound of rain, incessant upon my roof, and the orchestra of birds, chirping everywhere, and frogs still grunting their way through the night into the sunrise mist, it becomes obvious how rarely we might allow ourselves this kind of contact. And it leaves me with a quieter, more uncomfortable question lingering underneath it all: How much of what we call growth or self-development happens without pausing to ask whether it is actually aligned with who we are and what we care about?

One thing I’ve noticed during our book club meet-ups, particularly in the sessions where we spend time with someone’s photographs, is how quickly the conversation moves away from technique, sequencing, or context and toward something far less tangible. We might begin by talking about framing or intention, but before long we’re circling a deeper question, often without naming it directly. What is it about these images that feels charged for the person who made them? What keeps returning in their work, even when they’re trying to photograph something else entirely? Again and again, the images begin to speak less about subject matter and more about the inner landscape of the artist themselves.

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What’s interesting is that this usually isn’t deliberate. Most photographers don’t set out to reveal their fears, longings, aversions, or obsessions, and yet they do, inevitably. Photography has an uncanny way of functioning as a mirror long before we are ready to recognise ourselves in it. Patterns repeat, themes persist, and certain visual decisions keep resurfacing, not because they are fashionable or clever, but because they are resonant. Often the artist can sense that something is there without being able to articulate it yet, and that gap between intuition and understanding is where both discomfort and growth tend to live.

This is where the idea of knowing oneself stops being abstract and starts becoming practical. You can read endlessly about vision, style, or creativity, but without awareness of what actually governs your attention, those ideas rarely land where you think they will. Attention is not neutral. It is shaped by what we care about, what we fear, what we desire, and what we have learned to avoid. If those forces remain unconscious, they don’t disappear. They simply subsume the work quietly, guiding decisions from behind the scenes while we tell ourselves we are choosing freely.

In that sense, mindfulness isn’t a spiritual add-on or a lifestyle accessory. It’s a way of learning to see clearly what is already operating. We are living through a moment in the Zeitgeist where distraction has become ambient, where agitation, comparison, and constant stimulation feel normal, even expected. Much of the digital world is engineered to fragment attention, and over time that fragmentation starts to feel like a personal failing rather than an environmental condition. We try to compensate by consuming more information, refining our methods, or castigating ourselves for not being disciplined enough, when the deeper issue is that we are rarely still long enough to notice what is actually driving us.

This is why the distinction between distraction and traction matters so much. A lot of confusion enters the picture because we misunderstand these words. Distraction is the opposite of traction, coming from the Latin root ‘trahere’, meaning ‘to pull’. To be distracted is literally to be pulled away from momentum, direction, or progress. Traction is any action that draws us toward what we say we are going to do, the choices that move us closer to our values and shape us into the person we want to become. Distraction is any action, no matter how productive it appears, that quietly pulls us away from that path. This distinction matters, because many of the most dangerous distractions wear the costume of growth. They look like learning, planning, refining, researching, or staying busy in the right ways.

As such, in creative work, and in life more broadly, this is where things often become misaligned. We chase progress, recognition, or certainty with a kind of avarice that isn’t about money so much as reassurance, wanting proof that we are on the right path. But without awareness, that chase becomes self-referential and exhausting, and the work begins to reflect that tension whether we intend it to or not. Awareness doesn’t reassure or flatter, it reveals what is already there, and once something is seen clearly, it starts to lose its grip.

The quieter truth underneath all of this is that learning, growth, and even self-development are not primarily about adding more. They are about noticing what is already present and understanding how it shapes us. When that happens, what we care about becomes clearer, more intrinsic, and less performative, and both our lives and our work begin to move with a direction that feels earned rather than forced.

This is where meditation enters the picture, not as a spiritual belief system, but as a practical tool for seeing clearly. Meditation trains the capacity to observe thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and impulses as they arise, without immediately identifying with them. Over time, this changes the relationship you have with your own mind. You begin to notice what actually governs your attention, rather than what you tell yourself should matter. That noticing is what makes self-awareness possible, and self-awareness is what allows care to become intrinsic rather than borrowed or performative.

When you know what you care about, truly and not conceptually, your art starts to organise itself differently. Choices feel less forced. Direction feels earned rather than imposed. The work may not become easier, but it becomes more authentic and coherent, and that is something no amount of technique can substitute for.

I hesitate to frame this as advice, because what I’m describing isn’t a strategy so much as a shift in how I relate to my own experience, and there’s few things worse than someone preaching or virtue signalling, so I will tread carefully...

The beauty of meditation is that it is not confined to a cushion or a quiet room. The longer I practice, the more it becomes something that can, and should be, carried into everything - into as many parts of your day as possible. Meditation is not an esoteric or mystical pursuit, and it does not require adopting a new identity or aesthetic. Sitting down in stillness can be a powerful way to train the skill, but the point is not the posture. The point is mindfulness, and this can be practiced anywhere, anytime. And downstream of mindfulness come things that matter far more in daily life: presence, sustained attention, emotional regulation, relief from unnecessary suffering, a clearer understanding of what is happening in the mind and body, and, at times, if you’re lucky, a quiet, unforced sense of happiness. Over time, this capacity to notice without immediately reacting has changed how I see, how I listen, and how I make decisions, both in life and in my work.

Meditation, or the form of ‘rational meditation’ that I picked up, where one practices it as an empirical tool that can be applied to actual daily life, didn’t make me a better photographer by giving me ideas, aesthetics, or confidence. I believe it made me better by helping me understand myself more clearly. By sitting regularly with my own mind, I began to recognise patterns that had been shaping my creative outputs all along - those patterns of attraction, avoidance, restlessness, and control that I hadn’t fully seen before.

Through meditation, I learned to stay with discomfort rather than immediately trying to resolve it, and that skill translated directly into my photography. I became more present with what was in front of me, less eager to impose meaning, and more willing to let images emerge from sustained attention rather than urgency. I started to notice what I kept returning to photograph, not because I thought I should, but because something in me was quietly pulled there. That recognition clarified what I actually cared about, and once that was clear, the work began to deepen almost on its own.

This didn’t require withdrawing from life or abandoning ambition. My life is still full of projects, responsibilities, goals, and pressures, and I’m not interested in renouncing those things. Done consciously, these pursuits can be sources of meaning, growth, and genuine joy. What changed was the way I relate to them. Meditation gave me a way to notice when ambition tipped into rapacity, and when the desire to progress became a hunger for reassurance, certainty, or validation. Seeing that clearly softened its grip. The work stopped being about proving something and started becoming a way of exploring what genuinely mattered to me.

That clarity has had a subtle but indelible effect on my photography. The images feel less anxious, less performative, and less concerned with keeping up. They feel more patient, more grounded in the present moment, and more reflective of an inner coherence rather than an external benchmark. Meditation didn’t give me answers about what to photograph. It gave me the ability to recognise which questions were actually mine, and which ones I had inherited without noticing.

This is the practical value of meditation for creative work. It sharpens self-awareness, and self-awareness reveals care. When you know what you care about, deeply and honestly, the work becomes increasingly inimitable, not because you are trying to be original, but because you are no longer distracted from yourself.

At some point, this inevitably turns back toward you. Self-awareness doesn’t remain abstract for long, because it shows up in repetition. In what you keep returning to. In what you avoid. In what quietly occupies your attention even when you try to move on. If you create in any form, you’ve likely seen this already - certain themes, moods, or questions appearing again and again, sometimes despite your best efforts to outgrow them.

It’s tempting to treat those repetitions as flaws, to assume they signal stagnation or limitation, when in reality they are often invitations. They point toward something unresolved, something asking to be understood rather than escaped. What we don’t want to see about ourselves doesn’t disappear. It simply finds another route of expression. This is why disguises fail so reliably. However carefully constructed, they always become self-portraits.

Much of what we call growth is simply movement. More information, more effort, more activity layered on top of itself. None of that is inherently wrong, but without self-awareness it can quietly pull us further away from what we care about most. We become busy without traction, productive without direction, and eventually disconnected from the very reasons we started creating in the first place.

Meditation offers no shortcuts here, and it doesn’t promise certainty or permanent calm. What it offers is the ability to stay present long enough to recognise yourself in your own patterns, and to respond with healthy intention rather than mindless habit. From that recognition, both life and work begin to align more naturally. The work reflects something intrinsic rather than reactive, and the person making it feels less fragmented in the process.

There is nothing to grasp here, no destination, no final state to reach, no point at which the self is fully known and the work is finished. And there is so much beauty and freedom in that. There is only the ongoing practice of paying attention. All we ever truly have is this moment, and our willingness to meet it without distraction or disguise. If there is a commitment worth making, as a human and as an artist, it is learning to read yourself with the same care you bring to everything else, because without that, no amount of learning will ever quite land where it should.

Happy Shooting,

Matt
x

Footnotes

If you want more conversations around topics like this please consider joining my book club; it’s completely free but of immense value to all of us that participate. Authentic, communal and open, join us using the link below:

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During my recent conversation with Pie Aerts, there was a moment that lingered long after we stopped talking about books, expeditions, or Patagonia. Almost casually, he said something that cut through everything else: “self-doubt is the one thing you need to embrace as an artist.” Not manage, not eliminate, not overcome, but embrace.

It wasn’t framed as vulnerability theatre or a confessional. It came from years of staying with a single body of work, from sitting with people whose lives carry real consequence, and from repeatedly questioning whether he even has the right to continue. That doubt that has permeated his photography for so long wasn’t dramatic, but it was quiet, persistent, and deeply intertwined with the work itself. And it seemed the doubt wasn’t slowing the work down. It was shaping it.

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A revealing moment was when Pie realised that his long-term project in Chile wasn’t only about the subject matter itself; isolation, aging, or disappearance, but also about his own unresolved relationship with solitude and anxiety. The subject wasn’t separate from the artist, it found it’s way to mirror him.

That is where self-doubt enters as a productive force. When the work starts touching something personal, something unfinished within you, certainty disappears. You no longer stand safely outside the story. You are implicated in it. Doubt shows up not because you are weak, but because you are close.

This is why so many meaningful projects feel uncomfortable to make. They ask more of the artist than technical skill or consistency. They ask for self-awareness.

We often treat self-doubt as something to fix, when in reality it is often evidence that the work matters. Artists without doubt tend to repeat themselves, and artists with too much doubt collapse inward. But artists who learn to sit with doubt use it as a compass.

Because self-doubt slows you down, and forces you to question your motives, your ethics, and your assumptions. It prevents you from turning people into symbols or stories into commodities. In Pie’s case, it is precisely this doubt that keeps the work honest, and keeps him from simplifying lives that are anything but simple.

Crucially, the doubt isn’t abstract. It’s tied to knowing yourself. You cannot make meaningful work without understanding what you care deeply about, and you cannot access that without introspection. This is where reflection, stillness, and awareness do the real work long before the camera comes out.

If your work feels uncertain, unfinished, or uncomfortable, that may not be a sign you’re doing anything wrong. It may be a sign you’re finally doing it honestly.

The question is not how to eliminate self-doubt, but whether you are willing to listen to what it’s pointing toward. Because more often than not, the subject you keep returning to is revealing something about you that still needs attention.

And that is usually where the real work begins.

Happy Shooting,

Matt
x

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My discussion with Pie was reflective for photographers who are thinking long-term, questioning their motives, and trying to balance meaning with sustainability.

Topics we also talked about:

• Pie’s background in documentary and wildlife photography

• Ethical responsibility, power, and care in long-form photography

• Why deep, meaningful photography rarely pays on its own

• Building expeditions and community as a funding engine

• Authenticity, AI, and the future of photography.

All images courtesy of Pie Aerts.

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I ended up immobilised far more than I anticipated. Not dramatically or seriously injured – a bruised shoulder where I landed and a good amount of skin torn from my arm, hip and foot – but slowed enough that the usual scaffolding of my days collapsed. No movement. No training. No photography. No podcasts. No visible progress. Just long stretches of stillness, interrupted by discomfort and time.

What surprised me was not the pain, but the unease that arrived underneath it. I was on my way to the studio to record a podcast when the crash happened, and one of my first thoughts was, I can still make it if I sort this quickly. That was probably adrenaline and shock doing their thing, but it stayed with me.

Later, once hospital visits and initial care were done, a quieter feeling lingered beneath the relief and gratitude that I was mostly fine. A sense that something was missing. That I hadn’t quite earned the day. Worse still, the day, and now likely weeks, had been stripped of any familiar markers of progress and replaced with the singular task of returning to normality. I struggle with being set back. Lying on a gurney in A&E, I noticed how quickly my sense of worth reached for motion, output, evidence. How instinctively I wanted to point to something I had done that day, not just something that had happened to me.

With a pilot’s brain and a lifetime spent inside systems that reward precision, metrics and outcomes, this is familiar territory. I tend to measure everything. Creativity. Productivity. Recovery. Did I improve. Did I progress. And while that mindset serves me in many areas of life, it often clashes with the creative part of me that needs space, ambiguity and time. Even pain, I noticed, feels easier to tolerate when it can be logged, tracked, and folded into a story of forward motion.

What unsettled me most wasn’t the injury itself, but how uncomfortable it was to sit with a day, and now a stretch of days, that left no evidence of progression behind.

I’ve come to realise that photography carries the same addiction, just in a quieter form.

We ask similar questions, only translated into creative language. Did I make something today? Did it get published? Did it get seen? Did it register anywhere outside of me? And if it didn’t, doubt arrives almost immediately. Was it real work at all? Did it even count? A photograph that never leaves the hard drive can start to feel unfinished, almost illegitimate, as though its value depends on being witnessed rather than made.

We live in a culture that trains this reflex relentlessly. Wear a sleep ring and rest only feels real when the numbers confirm it. Miss a nap and it’s as if it never happened. The body knows otherwise, but the mind increasingly trusts data more than experience. Photography now seems to operate within the same psychological economy. If an image is not published, tracked or validated, we quietly question whether it matters. Whether it was worth the effort. Whether it exists at all.

There is a difference between putting work into the world to complete the cycle of creation, and putting it out there to seek validation or reassurance. The difference is subtle, but the intent behind it shapes the meaning and depth of the work itself.

This is where the need for proof begins to hollow photography out from the inside.

When proof becomes the measure, photography turns into a destination. Destinations demand milestones, evidence, arrival points. Something visible to point at and say, this is what I achieved. But photography, at least the kind that endures, does not behave this way. It behaves more like a pilgrimage. There is movement, but no finish line. The value lies not in arriving somewhere publicly visible, but in what changes internally as you keep walking. The attention you develop. The patience. The growing clarity around what you actually care about.

A pilgrimage offers no daily confirmation that you are doing it correctly. Some days leave nothing behind. No images worth sharing, no proof of progress, and yet something is still happening. Your eye is being trained, and your tolerance for ambiguity grows. Your relationship with the world shifts quietly, yet none of this shows up in numbers, but all of it is foundational.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an advocate of always trying to share your work and your process, but over the years several photographers I deeply respect have advised me not to share certain images while working on longer projects. To let them sit. To protect them from premature exposure. Initially, I assumed this was about strategy, restraint or even gatekeeping. What I actually experienced felt closer to withdrawal.

When I’m editing, sequencing and living with images, the urge to share them is instinctive, almost physical. Not because I want attention, but because sharing feels like confirmation. A way of saying, this is real, this is happening, this counts. When that outlet disappears, the work feels heavier and more ambiguous. And that ambiguity is uncomfortable.

That discomfort is the point.

There is an intrinsic beauty in leaving questions unanswered. We are so eager to have everything resolved that we forget the value of leaving space for uncertainty, risk and not-knowing. This is one of the reasons I’m drawn to photobooks. The most compelling ones don’t explain themselves. They suggest, hint, and allow ambiguity to flourish so the viewer can bring their own experiences and meanings to the work.

We can’t make photobooks every day, but we can practise the same tolerance for uncertainty. Sit alone in a quiet room without devices or distractions. Let boredom, restlessness and unease arise without demanding anything from them. This is where mindfulness and meditation have become central to my own life. Not as something mystical, but as training in staying present without needing a result. To sit with what is, without labeling, judging or turning it into a story. No analytics. No proof.

It just is.

If you notice anxiety when work remains unseen, and when it arises, it’s worth asking what role sharing is playing. Are you sharing to communicate, or to reassure yourself that the time wasn’t wasted? Are you offering something, or are you asking for proof in return?

Most photographers say they dislike social media, yet feel uneasy when they’re not posting. That contradiction reveals something important. The issue isn’t the platform, it’s the dependence. When visibility becomes the measure of progress, the camera stops being a tool for inquiry and becomes a tool for validation.

This is why the need for proof quietly kills photography. It pulls you toward destinations instead of pilgrimages. Toward milestones instead of attention, and toward showing instead of seeing. And when proof becomes the goal, the work flattens, because it’s no longer listening deeply enough to itself.

The practical challenge is simple, though not easy. Delay proof, and maybe let images exist without witnesses. Allow work to remain unresolved, and stay with the discomfort long enough for something internal to shift before asking the world to respond.

Sit in that chair. Meditate. Let things be. Write things down.

I’m not immune to any of this. I still feel the urge to share work before it’s ready or before I think it might be of any use. I still reach for metrics when uncertainty creeps in. I still want reassurance that the time, attention and effort meant something. But I’ve learned to recognise that urge for what it is.

Noise. Not truth.

The impulse to seek proof is often just fear in a more respectable outfit. Fear that nothing is happening. Fear that we’re falling behind. Fear that if we’re not seen, we don’t exist.

Some of the most meaningful shifts in your art will happen long before there’s anything to show for them. In your taste, your patience, and in what you choose not to photograph anymore. None of that is visible, but all of it matters.

Discomfort is often a sign you’re still inside the work, not finished with it yet. Sit with those unanswered questions. Embrace them. No-one has the answers. No-one is you.

Nothing has gone wrong. You’re not behind. You may simply be in the part of the process that cannot be proven.

And that’s exactly where it needs to be.

Happy Shooting,

Matt
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Footnotes

If you want more conversations around topics like this please consider joining my book club; it’s completely free but of immense value to all of us that participate. Authentic, communal and open, join us using the link below:

Join the Book Club

And unsurprisingly, we ended up talking about process.

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Not process as a checklist or a workflow, but process as a way of being in the work. A way of paying attention and a way of staying close enough to what you’re doing that meaning has time to surface. As the conversation unfolded, it became clear that this idea quietly underpins everything Wesley does. His photography, his writing, his teaching, and even the way he thinks about sharing work at all.

One of the most grounding ideas he shared is that process isn’t something you design in advance to get better results – it’s something you live inside while the work is happening.

That philosophy runs directly through his Substack, ‘Process’. Week after week, he doesn’t present polished conclusions or definitive advice. He shares what he’s making, how he’s approaching it, and what he’s learning in real time. The unspoken message is consistent, it’s not inaccessible, and isn’t reserved for professionals. This is something everyone can step into, providing a warm and open invitation to learn, and to learn better.

That’s where process connects to another idea from our conversation that’s stayed with me. The difference between starting and beginning.

‘Starting’ often looks productive and exciting; researching, planning, waiting until conditions feel right. ‘Beginning’ is quieter and far less impressive. It’s taking the first step with whatever you already have and letting clarity arrive through motion. Process, in that sense, isn’t something you figure out beforehand I don’t think - instead it reveals itself once you’re already moving.

You can see this clearly in Wesley’s books. ‘Notice’ didn’t begin as a photobook, or the idea of one. It emerged from a daily ritual during the pandemic. The same walk in the same neighbourhood. The same type of light, day after day. Over time, repetition sharpened attention and ordinary details started to speak, and as such, a body of work slowly announced itself.

Later, ‘Notice Journal Vol. 1’ took this even further. Shot entirely on half-frame, every diptych was created in-camera, removing the safety net of rearranging things later. A deliberate constraint that forced instinct, presence, and trust. Again, process wasn’t about controlling outcomes, but was more about creating conditions where something honest could happen.

Throughout my chat with Wesley, I felt a pattern that kept resurfacing which I will take to heart with my own journey: when you show process, you remove intimidation. You strip away the myth that meaningful work appears fully formed or belongs only to those who already “know what they’re doing.” And so you make the work human again.

Shit, none of us really know what we’re doing.

If process isn’t a system to optimise then, the most useful question surely isn’t “What’s the best way to do this?” It’s “What can I begin today with what I already have?”

That might mean giving yourself a self-assignment instead of waiting for permission, or sharing one image with a trusted group instead of broadcasting to everyone. Maybe it’s writing about what you’re learning as you’re learning, rather than what you’ve mastered, or letting repetition do the work instead of chasing novelty.

Beginning doesn’t require confidence. Confidence shows up because you began.

Wesley is a wonderful inspiration within the beautiful journey we all uniquely take through these expressions we call photography, creativity and art. He is a bright reminder that meaningful work rarely comes from chasing outcomes. It comes from staying close and from paying attention long enough for patterns to emerge.

If you’ve been stuck planning, researching, or waiting to feel ready, this first episode of 2026 offers a fresh yet quieter invitation. Start where you are. Begin before it makes sense. Let process teach you what thinking alone never will.

Just begin.

The full episode with Wesley Verhoeve is now live on YouTube and all podcast audio platforms.

Watch the full conversation here

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

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I’ve never really believed in New Year’s resolutions. Not because reflection doesn’t matter, or because intention isn’t useful, but because I don’t love the idea of collapsing into December just to suddenly declare a reset in January. Life doesn’t really work like that for me - not anymore at least. This past year hasn’t felt like an ending or a beginning so much as a continuation, a slow layering of decisions, conversations, experiments, and revisions that have gradually started to feel like foundations rather than loose threads.

Most of my energy this year has gone into building and refining rather than chasing. Really trying to evolve my photographic voice; thinking more carefully about what I want to say, and how I want to say it. Growing a community around the podcast and the writing that feels considered and sustainable, not rushed or performative. Moving into the new year, I love that I don’t feel the need to start again. I feel momentum, and I’m deeply grateful for that.

Still, there’s something about the turn of the year that naturally invites reflection, whether we like it or not. Even if we resist the clean-slate mentality, questions have a way of resurfacing around this time.

One question in particular kept returning for me this year. It came up in podcast conversations, in messages from listeners, and in quieter moments when I wasn’t trying to produce or optimise anything, such as moments in the shower when we are guaranteed to have a break from external distractions…

And that question was: What kind of life does the work you care about actually require?

Not the art you admire from a distance, or the version of creative life you imagine when things are going well, but the work you genuinely care about. The work that keeps calling you back even when no one’s watching, even when the metrics are quiet, even when it would be easier to do something else.

I’ve noticed that when people speak honestly about the photography and art that matters to them, they rarely start by talking about outcomes. They talk about how it makes them feel to live alongside it. About energy levels, about pace, about what they’ve had to protect or let go of in order to keep showing up. It made me wonder how often disappointment doesn’t come from a lack of talent or opportunity, but from a mismatch between the life we want and the lifestyle the work quietly asks for.

What do you think about in the shower?

It’s surely one of the few moments in the day where we’re not distracted, not consuming, not responding. Whatever our mind returns to in those moments probably matters more than we realise. And I’ve found that to be quite true, yet I’ve also noticed that those thoughts don’t usually arrive as neat answers, but instead they arrive as questions that repeat themselves, gently but persistently.

Every kind of work seems to carry its own gravity. Some asks for solitude, some for visibility, some for patience and repetition, and some for risk and exposure. None of those are inherently better or worse, but they are specific. And I think a lot of frustration creeps in when we shrivel towards vagueness, you know, when we say we want meaningful work without really sitting with what that might shape in our days, our relationships, or our sense of time. Because it’s difficult, because it’s honest. And honesty sometimes is just, well, shit.

Crack on.

I’m not sure about you, but looking ahead, I know what I want more of in my own life. I want to keep working on longer-term photographic projects and allow them the time and space they need. I want to grow the podcast thoughtfully, not just bigger but deeper. I want to return to retreat into silence and mindfulness to stay connected to myself and my intentions, and to keep developing my writing and poetry without rushing them into something they’re not ready to be. There’s also the book club community and the mentorship group training, both of which I’m genuinely excited to build (hopefully alongside you).

Join my free book club

None of this feels like starting over. It feels like continuing something that finally has roots.

If there’s anything I’m learning, it’s that happiness doesn’t come from having everything resolved. It comes from feeling aligned enough to keep going, even while some questions remain open. From being able to live with uncertainty without needing to immediately turn it into a problem to solve.

As you move into a new year, maybe the question isn’t what you want to achieve, or even what you want to make. Maybe it’s quieter than that…

What kind of life does the work you care about seem to be asking for right now? And are you willing to listen to that, even if the answer isn’t especially neat or comfortable yet?

I don’t have the answers, I’m not sure if there even should be one, but how compelling is it to try and explore the unanswered?

I’m grateful for 2025. For the conversations, the doubts, the clarity, and for the chance to speak with so many thoughtful artists around the world. And I’m grateful to you for being here, and being part of that very journey.

I forgot to even plug this week’s podcast episode. Well, it’s a bit of a cheat really, it’s a compilation episode. I’m not usually a fan of compilations (maybe another article topic for another day) but I couldn’t resist, having had some of the best conversations I’ve had yet on the show. I also thought for those that haven’t found the podcast yet, this might be a good introduction to it.

So there you go, plug done.

Watch the 2025 'best bits'

Thank you again for being here with me,

I wish you a very happy new year (do I use capital letters for that?), and see you in 2026!

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

That line comes early in my latest conversation with Jesse Lenz on The MOOD Podcast, and it quietly sets the tone for everything that follows. This episode marks the final guest conversation of 2025 on The MOOD Podcast, and it felt fitting that it ended on such a fundamental idea about why people make photographs, and indeed art, at all.

I’ve followed Jesse’s work for a long time (hence why I wanted him on the show) - not just his photography, but the way he moves through the world as a publisher, curator, and mentor. Sitting with him, what struck me most wasn’t a single project or achievement, but how clearly his values show up in the people he chooses to work with.

He spoke about how he spots artists he wants to publish or commit years of his life to/with. Not by momentum, not by awards and not by how well they can explain their concept. But by something much simpler and harder to fake.

Jesse made a distinction that’s been sitting with me since the conversation: Some people are obsessed with photography and try to fit an interesting life or story into it. Others are obsessed with life, and they happen to have a camera to record it, and express their view of it.

He said the artists he’s most drawn to are the latter. People who are deeply consumed by their lives, their environments, their relationships, their inner questions. The camera isn’t the obsession, it’s the outlet.

This runs directly against how most of us are taught to think about photography. We’re encouraged to master the medium first, to refine technique, to build projects intentionally. But Jesse’s point was that when photography itself becomes the obsession, the work often ends up hollow. It’s polished, but disconnected.

What Jesse kept coming back to was obsession and addiction, not as romantic ideas, or pejorative, but as practical ones. He talked about artists who reorganise their lives around the desperate need to keep making work, not around career optimisation or social validation. People who don’t wait to be paid, revered, approved, or understood, but people who make work because they can’t not make it.

That reframed something for me; it made me think about how often we conflate seriousness with sincerity. About how easy it is to become obsessed with photography as an identity, while losing touch with the deeper obsessions that actually give the work weight. Jesse’s belief is that the strongest art doesn’t come from trying to be an artist, it comes from paying attention to the life you’re already living and having no choice but to respond to it.

My conversation with him was less about photography and more about why anyone picks up a camera in the first place. If you’ve ever felt torn between loving the work and trying to make it make sense as a career, I hope that this episode will resonate, especially at the turn of the tide, from 2025 into 2026. May this conversation fill you with inspiration, hope, positivity and meaning!

Watch The Full Episode Here

This is the last guest episode of 2025! Next week, I’ll be sharing a montage of the most meaningful moments from across the year, pulling together the ideas that kept resurfacing again and again, and utilising this edit process to reflect on some of the most important conversations of my year. So I hope it can serve a similar reflective purpose for you too. Stay tuned for that.

Then in the New Year, we will be kicking off our 2026 guest episodes with Wesley Verhoeve and another deep and meaningful conversation, all about Process…

Lastly, thank you for reading, listening, and thinking alongside me this year. I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I can’t wait to have you along for the ride in 2026.

Happy Shooting,

Matt x

I don’t mean that as an insult, and I don’t mean it as a verdict. I mean it as a description of the conditions we’re all working inside.

Watch My Rant Here

A few nights ago I was sitting at home late, reading Steal Like an Artist (Austin Kleon). It’s one of those books that feels almost too simple, and you wonder what you’re missing, until you realise the problem wasn’t the book the last time you read it, it was you. You just weren’t ready for it yet.

That sentence - nobody cares about your photography - had already been circling my head for days because it keeps coming up in conversations with photographers I mentor, and if I’m honest, it’s come up plenty of times in conversations with myself too. That quiet question underneath everything else.

Why doesn’t anyone seem to care about my work?

Why does this feel so lonely sometimes?

Why bother, if it just disappears the moment I share it?

At some point I put the book down, picked up my phone without thinking, and scrolled. Image after image passed by. Some genuinely good. Some carefully made. Some beautiful. And then they were gone. Not rejected. Not criticised. Just absorbed and replaced.

That’s when the sentence finally landed.

Nobody cares about your photography — at least not in that moment.

Before going any further, it’s worth being clear about what we even mean by ‘care’, because this is where most frustration starts; Most photographs are glanced at. Very few are received. Most are seen, but very few are held.

What we often call care is usually just visibility in disguise. Likes, comments, fleeting approval that feels reassuring for a second and then evaporates. Real care is something else entirely. It’s when a photograph, or more often a body of work, stays with someone after they’ve looked away. When it returns to them later, uninvited.

The context most photographers forget to account for is simple. Everyone is already busy inside their own head. People are carrying worries they don’t talk about, unfinished conversations, anxieties about money, health, relationships, purpose. Attention is fragmented, and emotional bandwidth is limited.

So when your photograph appears, often it doesn’t arrive in a calm, open space. It lands in the middle of someone else’s internal noise.

That doesn’t mean people don’t care about anything. They care deeply about many things, but they’re just not waiting to care about your work. Indifference isn’t personal, it’s structural. It’s the default.

From the photographer’s side, though, that indifference feels like rejection of course, almost like proof that the work isn’t good enough. I hear this constantly now, especially from photographers who are past technical questions and into something more existential.

How do I find my audience? How do I get people to care?

Even the language reveals the problem. Finding an audience sounds like hunting, like chasing something that keeps moving away from you.

The world isn’t short on images. It’s oversupplied. Louder work isn’t the answer. More work isn’t the answer.

Meaning is.

If you look at the work that has stayed in culture, in photography and beyond, it’s rarely the work that shouted the loudest in the moment. It’s the work that accumulated meaning over time. It carried something forward. It helped people feel or name something about being human that they didn’t yet have language for.

Meaning, in this sense, isn’t abstract, it’s practical. A war photograph isn’t just pixels, it’s evidence. A tender portrait isn’t just light and composition, it’s a way of saying, “this person existed and was loved like this.” A long-term project in a small community isn’t just aesthetics, it’s an archive, a memory, a quiet record that says, “this way of life was here.”

When that work is gathered into something like a photobook, things change again. Images stop standing alone and start speaking to each other. Sequencing suggests rather than explains. Silence starts to matter. A book allows an artist to express their view of the world, their questions, and their internal struggles without ever needing to spell them out.

That’s where care begins to form. Not through performance, but through coherence and time.

When people hear “nobody cares about your photography,” the wrong conclusion is despair, but the right conclusion is freedom. Indifference is the starting point, yet care has to be earned.

And that’s not depressing, it’s incredibly exciting, no?

If caring is really about meaning, then your job shifts. Instead of desperately trying to find an audience, the work becomes about building something worth caring about, and allowing the right audience to find you over time.

That audience might be small at first. Ten followers, a few readers. A handful of people who buy your book. A few photographers who genuinely engage with your work. That still counts. That’s still care.

There’s a quiet paradox here. When you stop needing everyone to care, when meaning becomes the reward rather than validation, the work often becomes stronger, clearer, and more alive. And ironically, that’s usually when the right people begin to show up.

This is something I explore much more deeply in the video version of this piece, where I unpack the five conditions that make people genuinely care about photography, and how to apply them to your own work.

Watch The Video Here

Nobody cares about your photography — at least not yet — and that isn’t a reason to quit. It’s the invitation.

Happy Shooting,

Matt x