I recently asked in my Instagram stories for your fears or worries concerning your creativity, your creative work or the artworks themselves and posted your answers. I have finally found some calm and time to write down my thoughts on this. My answers would be stagnation and the fear of repeating and boring myself.

I always notice how quickly things bore me when I don’t notice development and change. For me photography is like a journey without a specific destination, it’s often nice to stay in certain places for a while and enjoy everything, but I feel an urge to move on when it feels like standing still over time and repeating myself. Photography opens up so many possibilities for me to grow as a human being and an artist, to try new things, to discover new sides of myself and also of other people.

My biggest worry is staying in comfort zones too long and giving away those opportunities, looking at my pictures and getting bored because I don’t see any development anymore. I am repeatedly struggling with my images, looking for changes and signs of development, often these are rather small and subtle from my point of view, but enough to reduce my worries. From time to time, however, I reach points where they are no longer sufficient.

These moments on my journey are, in retrospect, the most important for me, doubts and struggles turned into important decisions to change course. To try something new. These changes of course were always a valuable stimulus to move on and the search for new ideas is a great trigger for new creativity. The occasional doubts and despair are unpleasant, but necessary to keep my worries in check and to continue to grow.