Working with mentors

“Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

When it comes to “mentorship”, it is common to conjure up this image of a sage elder passing their wisdom to a novice, which is rightly so as in different stages of our life we look for role models to follow and hopefully help propel us forward. During my years of practicing photography, I know I have benefited greatly from people with whom I seek advice and feedback on my work, and notably a couple of those people I personally consider as my mentors who have major influence in my growth path to where I am today.

Photography is a solitary pursuit, and I know for most photographers, they prefer to work alone as they perhaps have confident in their skills and know how to pursue a vision. I, however, don’t feel the same way. From my experience, creative breakthroughs rarely happen when an artist works in isolation. As much as I may wish all my ideas have come from within, I must be honest to admit that the photographs I produce have been a culmination of the work of others, blended with my own sensibility and interpretation, hopefully I am able to produce work that says who I am as a photographer.

I am lucky over the years I have the resources to pursue help from mentors whose skills and feedback I greatly value. They see something in my work that I don’t notice myself. I have just started this mentorship program with Laura Valenti with years of teaching and mentoring experience. With our first mentoring session during this past week, I presented to her two of the portfolios I had been working on. My concepts were not solidly formed just yet, but I was hoping to get some input from Laura, so I knew which areas I needed to improve on. We had a great session. I came away feeling Laura is the perfect mentor at this stage of my development. She is very experienced and is a great listener. She understands technically I have solid foundation, what I need is to build aesthetic and emotional cohesion to my work. I really appreciate Laura’s honesty when it comes to giving me feedback, telling me the things she sees in my work that I have not noticed myself. My experience tells me how important it is to show work to people who have distance from the work to help me see patterns and themes I have not recognized myself. I feel those insights will help me further develop my photography and to strengthen my vision.

I also feel by getting regular input from mentors, their objective reactions to certain images help separating my emotional connection to the photo from its reality. Sometimes my memory of the moment of taking the image is far stronger than the merit of the image itself. By describing my work to a mentor and answering questions about my intentions, I am forced to clarify my thinking. While I may not be creating a narrative with an audience in mind, I do want to communicate clearly what my vision is with regards to my work. My mentoring session with Laura led to some difficult decisions of discarding some of the images that didn’t fit the visual rhythm of a larger body of work. It is a very different way of working on my own when I struggle to let go of images that might be interesting on their own. While the time we spent pouring over images together can feel unsettling. I find being receptive to constructive feedback from someone who is more well versed in visual literacy than I am will benefit me in the long run.

I feel lucky to have learned from mentors whose advice, honest critique and encouragement have stayed with me. It takes time to build a trusting relationship with a mentor, I can speak from my experience it is something well worth pursuing.