Twenty years I never photographed a single finished piece and now my phone makes me a content machine

My daughter set up this account for me last year. Before that I went twenty years without photographing a single finished piece. Client got what they paid for, that was the record. Now I've got eleven drafts of a thirty second clip showing me grinding a weld seam and I'm supposed to care which one gets more views.

Here's the thing that gets me. The one clip that did okay wasn't me explaining how I joint a stone or what kind of steel I use. It was just the camera sitting there while I marked a line on a block of granite with a piece of chalk. No talking. Forty thousand views. Forty thousand people watched me draw a straight line.

My best work, the commission piece I built last spring for a bank lobby, nine hundred hours in it start to finish. I posted three photos of it from different angles and wrote a decent paragraph about the structure. Twelve likes.

I'm not bitter about the likes. I honestly don't know what I'm doing here and I don't pretend otherwise. But I spent my whole career learning that the work is the work and the talk is the talk and never the two shall meet. Now the talk is the whole game and the work is just the backdrop. My hands know how to do this. My brain is still catching up on why a chalk mark matters more than the piece that took me a year.

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Niall Doherty·3d

The chalk thing. Of course it was the chalk. No talking, no explaining, just a hand that knows what it's doing. There's a power in that we've all forgot about, sure we're so busy telling people what we're making we never just let them watch the making.

I've been carving and printing twenty odd years and I'm the same as you, hadn't a photo of a single piece till the wife started pointing out I should have one for the market stall. Now I'm standing there trying to get a reel of me pulling a proof and the lino's slipping and the dog walks through the shot and I'm thinking, what am I at.

But the one thing that ever went a bit mad online was just me proofing a hare, no music, no voiceover, just the roller and the paper and the reveal. And people wrote in about the sound of it. The sound. I'd no idea that was the thing.

Forty thousand people watched you mark a line. That's not a bad sign about the content, that's a grand sign about the work. The stillness is the whole point. Keep the camera where you left it and let the hands do the talking.

Lukas Brandt·3d

The dog through the shot is the whole point, isn't it. You spent twenty years learning to pull a clean proof and the thing people will remember is the dog. I've been at this long enough to resent that and also to know the dog is right.

The chalk clip working, the weld seam clips not working. It's not mystery. The unedited thing is the one thing nobody can fake. Any kid with a phone can narrate their process. They can't borrow your hands. Forty thousand views isn't people liking chalk, it's people sensing a life's worth of repetition in one gesture. You can't script that.

I'd say keep the dog. Let the lino slip. Nobody needs to see a perfect pull, they need to see the thing that's actually happening in front of you. That's the part you've been doing without noticing your whole working life.

Roman PetrakOP·3d

The dog is earning his keep, is maybe the unfair part. He wandered in mid-shot and suddenly the comments are all about him, not the chalk line. But you're right, and I know you're right. That clip has something I can't manufacture. Nobody watches a weld seam and feels anything. They watch a dog and a hand and they get the whole thing without me saying a word.

I keep telling myself I should cut the dog out, get it clean. Then I remember the clean version is exactly the one nobody would look at twice.

Roman PetrakOP·3d

Twenty odd years carving and printing, you'd think the hands would be the easy part on camera. It's the rest of it that gets you. Dog through the shot, that's not a mistake, that's half the views probably. People don't want the clean version.

The wife pushing you to photograph work for the stall, that sounds familiar. My daughter had to argue with me for a month before I'd let her set this thing up. Said the work deserves to be seen. I said it's been seen fine for thirty years. She won.

What do you carve, if you don't mind my asking? Stone or wood, or are you printing off lino mostly these days.

Kasia Nowak·3d

The chalk thing makes complete sense to me, actually. There's something about watching someone who's so sure of their hands that they don't need to explain what they're doing. You were just marking a line, but to everyone watching it looked like you knew exactly what you were doing, and that confidence is rarer than any tutorial.

I get the eleven-drafts feeling though. I'll redo the same pastel portrait ten times chasing something and the version I almost didn't post is the one people love. It never lines up with what I think matters.

Forty thousand people watched you because you were good at something and didn't feel the need to prove it. Maybe the phone's not the content machine, it's just finally catching what was always there.

Roman PetrakOP·3d

You're not wrong about the confidence part. Thirty years and my hands still decide some things before my head does. That's not skill, that's just habit wearing deep enough you can't see the bottom of it anymore.

The version you almost didn't post, that's the one that works. Every time. I've got a theory about it. The ones you fuss over are the ones where you're trying to make it something it isn't. The throwaways are just you doing the thing. People can smell the difference.

Pastels though. That's a whole different patience than stone. I'd crack a block a dozen ways before I'd have your kind of nerve. Respect for chasing it.