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The Terrible Photographer is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative humans trying to stay honest in a world that rewards pretending
Insider/Outsider
The Truth About This Industry, and Why I’m Still Here
The uncomfortable truth about being a photographer trying to make money in 2025, the resistance I'm building, and why you might need this conversation too.
This week wrecked me.
No metaphor. No poetic detour. Just truth.
It was, without question, the worst week I’ve had since becoming a full-time freelancer.
And look, one of the values I’m trying to establish here—if this thing’s going to be anything at all—is radical honesty. Not the kind you post on LinkedIn with a perfectly cropped headshot and a lesson at the end. I mean real, uncomfortable, kitchen-floor-at-midnight honesty.
Because the truth is, photography isn’t just a job. It’s woven into the fabric of who I am. And when it starts to unravel—even a little—it feels like I’m the one coming apart.
Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting in my garage. Not doing a shoot. Not editing a gallery. Just… sitting. After six straight hours of sending cold messages on LinkedIn to people with polished headshots and inflated job titles, hoping someone—anyone—needed photos. The kind of digital begging that makes your soul feel like it’s been scraped out with a dull spoon.
And I just hit a wall. Not the kind you power through with another cup of coffee. The kind where you sit completely still and feel the silence pushing in from all sides.
My garage used to feel like a studio. Clean. Efficient. Professional.
Now? It’s a mausoleum of momentum.
C-stands in the corner like forgotten soldiers.
Tables stacked with dusty gear—$15,000 worth of lenses and lights just sitting there like museum artifacts of a life that made more sense six months ago.
Even the air felt heavy. Like the whole room was sagging under the weight of unfulfilled potential.
Twenty feet away, behind a garage door that may as well have been a mile thick, my wife and daughter were watching Netflix. Laughing. Living. Being normal. And I sat there in the dark wondering if I was quietly torching our future because I’m too proud—or too stubborn—to admit that maybe this thing just isn’t working anymore.
I’ve never asked myself that question before.
Not once in ten years of doing this professionally.
But on Tuesday, I did:
“What if I can’t do this anymore?”
Not because I don’t love it.
Not because I’m burned out, though God knows I’ve been there too.
But because something in the air feels different now.
The calls don’t come.
The budgets are thinner.
The expectations are bigger.
Everyone wants more for less, faster.
I don’t know if it’s the economy, or AI, or just the inevitable entropy of a creative career stretching into its second decade. But I know this:
That moment in the garage felt like a reckoning.
Something has to give. Either I change. Or the market changes. Or something breaks.
My name is Patrick Fore. This is The Terrible Photographer podcast.
And this is Episode 15: Insider / Outsider — A personal reflection on photography, survival, and the struggle to make meaning.
Because sometimes the most important conversations don’t happen on stages or inside Zoom workshops.
Sometimes, they happen in the dark, surrounded by the wreckage of what you thought your life was supposed to look like.
[BEAT - slight pause]
I want to start this week in a different place. With a different intention. A place where I think needs to be established before we move forward with this whole Terrible Photographer thing.
I want to tell you exactly who I am, what this thing is that I'm building, and why I think it matters. Not because I have it all figured out—Hell, you can tell by the opening, I clearly don't—but maybe you have had the same thoughts, the same worries about your future sitting along staring at gear resting dominate like sword from a soldier without a battle to fight.
And maybe, together, we can figure out how to exist as photographers in 2025 without losing ourselves completely or giving up or giving in.
[MAIN CONTENT]
Let me start with a confession. Actually, several confessions. Cue 2004 Usher.
If you've signed up for my Field Notes—my newsletter—you got put into an email sequence. If you don't know what an email sequence is, it's basically a series of automatic emails triggered by an action. In this case, triggered when you signed up.
And look, I will have a funnel. I will track open rates like a day trader watching stock tickers—refreshing dashboards at 11 PM, wondering if that subject line about creative burnout hit the right note of manufactured vulnerability. I'm already in the process of trying to sell you a book called "Lessons From a Terrible Photographer," and someday I might sell you a course or a workshop or even a retreat.
I am, by every definition, part of the machine I often find myself questioning. I recognize my own hypocrisy here. But that doesn't mean I'm comfortable with the whole thing.
I'm actually deeply uncomfortable with how performative this has all become. The constant content creation—and Jesus, there is a LOT of content creation. I spend my mornings writing newsletters about authentic creativity, then spend my afternoons strategizing how to turn that newsletter into Instagram carousel posts, which I'll then repurpose into LinkedIn think-pieces about the death of authentic creativity. The irony tastes like stale coffee and desperation.
There's this seemingly manufactured authenticity everywhere. The way we've turned every moment of creative struggle into a LinkedIn post about perseverance.
And I know what it looks like from the outside. Another photographer with a platform, building an audience, monetizing their experience. And I know exactly what I don't want to become.
I’m building Terrible Photographer for people who still believe this craft matters—but who are tired of pretending everything is fine.
Because I was too goddamn tired to send another cold email into the void. So instead, I did what I’ve been doing a lot lately—I made things. Polished words. Built carousels. Designed something beautiful for Terrible Photographer. Told myself it was progress, even if it felt more like decorating a lifeboat. That’s where most of my energy goes these days—into dressing up despair in Futura Bold and hoping it passes for strategy.
And that’s exactly what I was doing when the ping hit—Threads. A comment on a post I wrote about how much of photography education feels like a con. It wasn’t some deeply planned thought, just a gut-level swipe at all the fluff being sold as wisdom. But the reply hit like cold water in the face.
@OccasionalNothing wrote:
“Most photographers are con men.”
[BEAT]
See, I think there are two ways to be in this industry right now. You can be an insider—fully bought into the game, playing by the rules, chasing the algorithm, selling the dream. Or you can be an outsider—rejecting it all, staying pure, probably staying broke.
We all know the insiders—the ones who don't just play the game, they show others how it's done. These are the guys that if they do have an insecurity or financial anxiety, you wouldn't be able to tell. Every day it's another post, from another shoot. They livestream from conferences they attend or teach at. Their feeds are curated and scheduled and locked down—every post timed to catch the algorithm's morning coffee rush, every caption crafted to sound effortlessly authentic while being anything but. Their emails are A/B tested and they have virtual assistants whom they've never met sending out proposals that sound like their voice, if their voice was trained by a conversion optimization course.
The outsiders fall into two camps: the ones who have reached such a level of success they don't need to participate in the game, the hustle. Or the ones that are doing their own thing, on their own time, on their own terms. I have no idea who they are, because I don't see their work. I respect them. The quiet artists in the back of the room making work just because art is still valuable whether it's on Instagram or in a gallery or just lives in some binder of slides on a shelf.
But I'm neither. Or maybe I'm both.
I'm an insider because I'm here, in it, trying to survive. I have a family in one of the most expensive cities in America. I have to pay rent with pictures, which means I have to play the game at least enough to stay in it. I understand that we live in a capitalist society, and if I have to work—and I do have to work—then I'm going to work as a photographer. Because photography is, honestly, the job I hate the least.
But I'm also an outsider because I refuse to participate in so much of what this industry has become. I won't turn every portrait session into content for my feed. I won't objectify women for engagement. I won't pretend that buying new gear will fix uninspired work. I won't sell you a formula for creativity because creativity doesn't work that way. I have no interest in partnering with gear companies to sell you anything—I truly don't give a shit about unboxing the latest camera while pretending it's going to change my life.
[PAUSE - more intimate tone]
Here's the thing about photography—for me, anyway. I didn't choose it. It chose me. I talked about that in a previous episode, and I truly believe it. And look, I know that sounds a little …. precious, but it's true. There was never a moment where I sat down and decided, "Yes, this seems like a practical career path." It just... happened. One day I was holding a camera, and suddenly I couldn't imagine not holding one.
And now, twenty years later, I'm watching this thing I love get commodified in ways that make my stomach turn. Photography used to be about something. It was about bearing witness. About stopping time. About finding beauty or truth or at least something interesting in the chaos.
Now it's content. It's creative for ads. It's personal branding. It's... hollow.
But here's the tension: I get it, we all have to eat. We all have to pay rent and take care of our families and contribute to society. If you wrap yourself in the title "Professional Photographer," you have to take the good with the bad. You have to walk this impossible tightrope between art and commodity.
I don't know how to do this perfectly.. I'm still figuring it out. But I think it's worth the struggle.
[SHIFT - slightly more energy]
Which brings me to why Terrible Photographer exists.
I'm not building this because I'm a guru who's figured it all out. I'm building it because I need it. Me—as a photographer, as an artist, as a human being trying to make sense of this weird creative life—I created this space because, deep down, I need this conversation.
I need a place where we can talk about the real stuff.
The 2 AM existential spirals. The client who wants you to shoot like someone else. The slow erosion of confidence that comes from comparing yourself to a never-ending scroll of other people's highlight reels. The pressure to perform your own identity like a brand campaign. Show too much and it's "unprofessional." Show too little and you're "inauthentic."
But every now and then, there's magic.
The client who trusts you. The project that pulls something out of you you forgot was there. The shoot where everything clicks—the light, the timing, the moment when the camera becomes an extension of your eye, when you're not thinking about settings or composition—you're just seeing, and somehow the image appears exactly as you felt it should.
That's Flow.
Flow is a mental state where you're fully immersed in what you're doing—so focused, so locked in, that time disappears and the work almost does itself. The term comes from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studied artists, athletes, and creators and found that this state wasn't just about performance—it was about meaning. Flow isn't hype. It's the place where skill meets surrender, and where we actually feel alive doing the thing we were built to do.
And you can't reach that state if you're just chasing likes, scrambling for rent, or scrolling through Instagram at midnight, wondering why your portrait work doesn't look like that travel photographer's landscape feed, then realizing you're comparing apples to algorithmic oranges.
That's why Terrible Photographer exists. It's my act of resistance.
Resistance to the commodification of creativity. Resistance to the idea that what we do is just disposable content. Resistance to the shallow hustle of brand-building that leaves no room for soul.
If Terrible Photographer has a mission statement, it's this:
Resist the commodification of the craft. Build a life that's profitable, sustainable, and true—where you can turn down the client who wants you to copy someone else's style without wondering if you'll make rent. So you can stay in Flow.
Because that's where the best work comes from. And more importantly, that's where the best parts of us live.
[MORE INTIMATE AGAIN]
I want to have a different kind of conversation. One where we look inside instead of just looking at market trends. Where we talk about finding your voice, not finding your niche. Where we acknowledge that making money from your art isn't selling out—it's survival—but that survival doesn't have to mean abandoning everything that made your art worth doing in the first place.
Yes, I'm going to sell you things. But I'm not going to sell you the HOW or the WHAT. Those are easy. Aperture settings are easy. Posing guides are easy. Business templates are easy. (Hard as hell to execute, but easy to sell)
But, I want to help you—help us—figure out the WHY. Why do you pick up a camera? What are you trying to say? What story are only you qualified to tell?
Because here's what I believe: Every photograph you create has your unique, invisible signature on it. Doesn't matter if it's an ad campaign or a family portrait or a wedding or a personal project. It all comes from the same place. It all carries your vision, your voice, your particular way of seeing the world.
That's not a small thing. That's everything.
[BUILDING TO CLOSE]
So if you're tired of the performance, if you're questioning whether this career still makes sense, if you're lying awake wondering what comes next—you're not alone.
I don't have answers. I don't have a system or a formula or a five-step plan to creative fulfillment. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm resisting.
But I have questions. Good questions about what it means to stay in Flow in a world designed to pull you out of it. Questions about how to build a sustainable creative life without selling your soul to the algorithm. Questions about whether we can resist the commodification of our craft while still paying rent.
I have this stubborn belief that photography can still be more than content. That those moments of Flow, when time disappears and the work does itself—that's not just feel-good psychology. That's where real art happens. That's where we remember why we picked up a camera in the first place.
Maybe that's naive. Maybe I'm fighting a battle that's already been lost to scroll-stopping content and gear affiliate links.
But maybe not.
And if not.
Maybe there are enough of us who still believe that the struggle is worth it. That the tightrope between art and commerce is worth walking if it means we can stay true to what drew us to this craft. That this thing we do—this weird, difficult, occasionally magical thing—is worth preserving.
Not just as a way to make money, but as a way to stay human in an increasingly algorithmic world.
[SOFT CLOSE]
If that sounds like something you need too—if you want to find your way back to Flow, if you want to resist the commodification without going broke—then welcome. This is what I'm building. This is the conversation I want to have.
Not because I've figured it out, but because figuring it out together sounds a lot less lonely than figuring it out in that garage, surrounded by unused gear, wondering what comes next.
Thanks for being here. Thanks for believing this might still be worth it.
Stay courageous. Stay curious. Stay Terrible.