I'm a street photographer based in Taipei, Taiwan who has gone viral on Reddit, Unsplash, YouTube, and more.
I've shot for 10+ years and despite my work being everywhere I have failed to gain a solid fan base or make money from my work. I've thought long and hard about this and I think there are a few main reasons as to why. Let these reasons be a lesson to you...
1) I was never really interested in using my work and abilities to promote other people's stuff. For me photography is a meditative process that produces something beautiful in the end. Engaging in photography for commercial purposes gave me a bad attitude which translated into subpar work.
2) I had no mentors or connections to people in the industry to show me the way. I had to learn everything by myself and have always been unaware of traditional avenues to success in this field. This led to me growing much slower and making many more mistakes than I should have.
3) The commercial value of photography is on a sharp downward trend in general. Instead of adapting to the trends, I stubbornly continued shooting even though the value of what I produced was diminishing every day.
4) I failed to be consistent and was not interested in cultivating a community on social media, since I am generally against social media and think it creates more harm than good.
5) I had the false impression that hard work, love, and dedication should translate to tangible rewards and recognition. I think this came from my insistence that the world should be fair. It's not. What you reap is not always what you sow. There are no guarantees in life.
6) I thought that I could use photography and success as a way to avoid dealing with deep personal issues and character flaws that I didn't want to face. So in some ways I'm actually quite grateful for my failure because had I succeeded I wouldn't have been forced to reflect or take a toll on the things I need to work on to become a better person.
I hope this is useful and that you enjoy looking at my work....
