Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers.
Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth.
This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread.
Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem.
If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.
So, six. That was the number.
I’d figured out that six was the exact amount of books I could fit into a bag without making it look… deliberate. Like I was trying.
I’m standing in my garage, staring at these stacks of my own books on a folding table, and I’m doing this high-stakes social math. Because, you see, three books is silly. It’s not substantial. It says, 'I have a hobby.' But ten? Ten is a manifesto. Ten is a guy you don't want to get stuck talking to at a party. And how would I even get ten books from my Subaru to the front door without people staring at me?
This is how my brain works. I’m worried about the physics of carrying my own success.
So, six. Six feels right. I can set them down quietly. I can be the guy who just happens to have some books. And—if the event goes south, I can sneak out with all six under one arm. No harm, no foul, you know?
I felt like I was going in to sell encyclopedias, just handing out samples. But not a history of the aztec temples, but more of my own soul.
The event was an APA critique. APA stands for American Photographic Artists—which, if you aren't in the industry, is the big, official trade association for the people who shoot the billboards you see on the freeway and the spreads in magazines. It’s the home for the advertising guys, the commercial pros, the high-end editorial types. Basically, a room full of people who know exactly what a licensing agreement is.
It was a typical beautiful sunny an clear Wednesday night in San Diego. A room full of these 'serious' photographers I’d never met, gathered to do something I had, truthfully, never actually seen: show their work in book form. Real books. Personal projects. It was this bizarre, quiet world I didn't recognize—a world without deadlines, or clients, or anyone asking about usage rights.
I got the six books inside. I was quiet. Nobody noticed. I tucked them onto a shelf against the front wall, right next to all the other books. My book stood out, though. It had this butter-yellow spine. Three-hundred and thirty pages of words about why this craft matters, what it costs, and whether any of it is actually worth it.
I went and sat in the back. And I just… stared at them.
And in that moment, I got this strange sense that my books were suddenly very vulnerable. Unsafe. It was like I’d dropped my kids off at a playground and realized I’d forgotten to give them lunch money. I wanted to go rescue them.
I watched other people walk up. They’d set their books down, and then my yellow spine would catch their eye. There’d be this slight confusion. A little intrigue. But they didn't linger. They just set their thinner, glossier books next to mine and went back to grab a beer.
Bringing them felt… presumptuous. Like showing up to a potluck with a cookbook no one asked for, and no actual casserole to share.
I sat there taking it all in, and my insecurity started doing that thing where it shifts into something else. The dickish part of my brain took over.
'Oh, cute,' I thought. 'These guys are going to show their little photo book projects.'
I know. I’m owning it.
I was the second-to-last person to present. I’d procrastinated signing up, so I was an add-on. I’d emailed the director at the last minute like a kid asking for an extension on a paper. And being second-to-last meant I had to sit there with my own assumptions while the people who came before me proceeded to… well, they took me completely apart.
I sat off to the side, front row, against the wall. It was a small studio. Low ceilings. I always judge photo studios by the height of the ceilings. I’m not sure what that says about me, but I do it.
I watched them fumble with the Apple TV. It happens every time. AirPlay is the natural enemy of the creative professional. I had this impulse to help, but I didn't want to be that guy. So I just sat there sipping my Starbucks. I didn't even want the coffee. I just needed something to hold. A comfort object. If you know, you know.
Finally, they get it to work. And before the first slide comes up, I see her screen. She has maybe thirty slides in the deck. I sit back. I roll my eyes. I do the math.
'Great,' I think. 'Here we go.'
And then… the title page disappeared.
The first image was a little Irish girl standing against a vibrant blue wall. Bright red hair. Freckles so thick you could feel the texture of her skin. She was holding this corgi-mix dog, and she was staring into the lens with these intense, blue eyes.
I could see my own daughter in her.
And suddenly, I’m sitting there, bathed in the blue light of this TV, and everyone in the room is just… locked in.
And I thought: 'Oh fuck. I read this whole thing wrong.'
I lowered the cup from my face. I leaned forward. This was something… more complicated.
I had no idea that by the end of the night, I was going to be the least accomplished photographer in the room. Or that it would feel like the best thing that had happened to me in years.
My name is Patrick Fore and this is The Terrible Creative. Honest conversations about creativity, identity, and finding your voice. Today is Episode 61 and I'm calling it "Obsessed."
Today we're talking about three things: Substance. Cost. and Voice.
This episode lives somewhere between the question you ask about other people's work and the question you're afraid to ask about your own. And look, I don't have a clean answer. But I've been sitting with it long enough that it's worth saying out loud.
If this is your first episode, feel free to jump around. They're in no particular order. Email is always open. Questions, thoughts, hate mail. I respond to everything. Link's in the show notes.
Her name is Michele Zousmer.
She's a documentary photographer based in California. And what she presented that night wasn't a project in the way most photographers use that word. A project, in the photography world, usually means a personal shoot. Something you did for yourself between client jobs. A weekend in the desert. A series of portraits of your neighbors.
What Michele brought was different. ≈
The Irish Travellers are a nomadic ethnic group, mostly in Ireland and the UK. Marginalized. Misunderstood. The kind of community that doesn't exactly roll out the welcome mat for photographers showing up with cameras and good intentions.
Michele didn't just show up and shoot. She went back. Again and again. She sat in their spaces. Drank their tea. Waited. She spent years earning the right to be in the room before she ever raised the camera. Years of nothing postable. Nothing that would perform well on a Tuesday morning. Just the slow, unglamorous work of being present long enough that people stopped performing for you and started just living.
The result was that little girl against the blue wall. Holding her dog. Staring straight into the lens with those eyes.
Not posing. Trusting.
You can't manufacture that. You can't replicate it with better gear or a faster turnaround. It exists because Michele was willing to do the boring part. The part the algorithm hates. The years before the image.
I sat there in the back of that room thinking about my own workflow. Book the job. Scout the location. Show up. Shoot. Deliver. Move on.
Michele didn't move on. That was the whole point.
So, a guy named Andrew was next.
Clean cut guy. Looks like he works in finance.
He spent a full 30 seconds apologizing for the color accuracy of the screen. How the whites weren't the right white.
Respect.
His work? Simple winter landscapes. Lot of negative space, contrasted by bare trees against gray skies. Clean, calming. Opposite of Michele. The kind of work that needed a Sigur Rós soundtrack behind it.
Weirdly personal. His voice coming through completely. He mentioned he has OCD, almost as an afterthought. Which when I look at his work, is like medicine for his brain.
One of his last images was one of the best images I remember from that night. A fox, sitting in the snow. A scene bathed in shades of white. Staring at a bare tree at the edge of the frame. Perfectly composed. Stunning.
A truly perfect image.
Which is something I haven't said about very many images in my life.
And it was from a guy who looked like he worked at a bank, shooting landscapes, a genre I don't care very much about.
I sat there in the bright glow of that studio TV, staring at that fox and his tree in this perfect winter landscape and I wasn't just looking at a great photo. I was looking at a symptom. A visible mark left behind by a very specific kind of fever.
Michele didn't stumble onto the Irish Travellers. She got pulled in and couldn't stop. She went back. Stayed with them. Earned her way into their lives before she ever raised the camera. Years of work that couldn't be posted, couldn't be monetized, couldn't be explained in a caption.
Andrew has OCD. His brain won't let him not make that work. The stillness, the negative space, the single element against the silence. That fox in the snow wasn't a lucky frame. It was inevitable. It was always going to look exactly like that.
Two photographers. Two completely different kinds of work. Same thing underneath.
They found something they couldn't put down and followed it past the point of convenience. Past the point where a reasonable person would have moved on to the next thing.
Most of the work I see every day doesn't have that. Not because the photographers aren't talented. Because they haven't done the uncomfortable interior work of figuring out what to be obsessed with. So they borrow someone else's obsession instead. Replicate the output without the thing that produced it.
It's spray painting aluminum and calling it rare.
I'm in this too.
My own portfolio is a mix. I know which of my images are gold and I know which ones I just painted to look that way. Even if nobody else notices, the difference is glaring to me. The painted ones are clean. Technically accomplished. They get the likes.
The real ones came from a place I can't quite explain.
That's the real gap. The difference between feeding off someone else's fire and doing the miserable, rewarding work of starting your own.
Watching Michele and Andrew's work on that screen, the question wasn't whether I admired what they'd done.
I did.
It was whether I was actually willing to pay the same price.
The work I see most days is technically competent. Decent even. But when I look at it I always end up in the same place.
What is this for?
Not out loud. Not usually. Because the few times I've said it, I sound like an asshole. Which, maybe. But it's still a legitimate question. And the fact that it's uncomfortable doesn't make it less so.
The algorithm doesn't help. The work that surfaces, the work that gets rewarded, the work I scroll past every morning on my phone over coffee, is mostly borrowed obsession. Someone else's years of uncomfortable interior work, replicated and posted and performing adequately.
That's the water. And I've been swimming in it long enough that I stopped noticing what it was doing to my eye. And I think this matters here, because, most of photography in 2026 is just photographers copying other photographers. It’s gear forward, designed for the scroll, cheap knockoffs of work that most of the time the photographers don’t even know they are knocking off. Carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies of other photographers' obsessions.
So me, sitting in that metal chair, staring at these portraits of and images just documenting the life of thse ≈Irish Travelers, I was pulled in, immediately. This is what obsession does. Which is why, I walked into that studio expecting more of the same, spray painted aluminum cans that people wanted me to be impressed by, but I walked out having learned something. Not just about the Irish Travelers or Japanese winters. But that photography isn’t dead, that it’s more than a utility of headshots and product photos. That this work, that we do can mean something. If we allow ourselves to be obsessed with something.
So this was at the height of the pandemic, where everyone had a whole lot of nothing to do. It’s a Monday night, a little past midnight. I’m in my backyard, sitting at my patio table. It’s a perfect San Diego night, full moon, making the giant palm tree above me glow in a greyish blue light. I’ve got a second gin and tonic in my hand and my iphone pressed against my ear..
On the other end is Alex. He’s a photographer out of New York, a guy I’ve talked to enough to call a friend-ish. But during this time, we had this... fundamental disagreement. See, Alex saw photography as an art form, first and foremost. Everything else is secondary. And at the time, I disagreed with that. Loudly.
I’m sitting there, scrolling through my work on a laptop, basically trying to show off. I’m showing him these big campaigns. High-end portraits. Work that’s clean. Controlled. The kind of work that doesn't just get you a check—it gets you hired again.
And there’s this long pause. And finally, Alex says: 'Patrick. You’re not really an artist. You’re more like a technician.'
And of course, I get defensive. I spend the next thirty minutes building a case for myself. I’m listing clients. I’m talking about magazine covers and Grammy-winning artists. I’m laying out my resume like it’s a shield.
And Alex? He’s not impressed.
He just lets me finish, and then he says: 'Would ten people look at these and say... that’s a Patrick Fore? Or would they just say... that’s good commercial photography?'
I told him where to go. I hung up.
But that’s the thing about a question like that. It doesn't go away just because you stop talking. I leaned back in that cold chair and looked up at the San Diego sky, and I spent a long time trying to convince myself he was wrong.
And for a while? I did."
The thing is, I knew.
Sitting at that table, gin going warm. I knew exactly how every image in that portfolio got made. I'd studied the best commercial photographers in the world. Not their vision, not what drove them, not what they were trying to say. What they did. How they lit it. How they composed it. And then I did that.
Voice wasn't a concept I'd rejected. It was a concept that seemed like what people said when the work couldn't compete technically. The artistic evolution speech. The pretentious eyeroll dressed up as depth.
Quality was the standard. My quality was high. Case closed.
Except Alex's question didn't ask about quality. It asked about identity. And I didn't have an answer because I'd never needed one.
Before that shoot, good had a definition. Apple had it. Nike had it. The top commercial photographers in the world had it. My job was to meet that standard. Match it. Get close enough.
My own opinion of what was good was beside the point.
I didn't answer Alex's question that night. I closed the call and stared at the sky.
But a few weeks later I drove to the library. Sat in the art section. Pulled books off the shelf. Not technique books. Not lighting manuals. Just work.
Somewhere between Helmut Newton and a monograph I couldn't pronounce, I fell into post-Soviet Eastern European fashion photography. Women on iron balconies. Barefoot. Defiant. Not posing for anyone. Daring you to look and not giving a shit if you didn't.
It felt like power without permission.
I booked a shoot with no client, no brief, no pitch deck. A vintage San Diego apartment. A bathroom that looked like a 1957 French film.
In that bathroom, for the first time, I was the only person in the room whose opinion counted. Not Apple. Not a creative director. Not the algorithm.
I pressed the shutter. Thought it was good. That was enough.
Most people didn't care about those images.
But I did.
And then, slowly, without noticing, I drifted back into the water.
The water is comfortable you know. That’s the problem. In the water, you know exactly what a 'good' photo looks like. It looks like the mood board the agency sent over. It looks like the lighting setup you’ve used a thousand times because it always works. The water is the 'safety' of a high-production value. When you’re a technician, you can hide behind the gear. You can hide behind the latest Canon or Sony and the Profoto lights. If the image is sharp and the color is right, you’ve done your job. But the water also washes away your fingerprints. It smooths everything out until it’s perfectly sellable and completely anonymous.
"I was the second to last to present.
Which meant I had the whole night to sit with six copies of my book stacked against that wall. Butter yellow spine. 330 pages.
That’s about eighty-thousand words. Most of them were written between 4:00 AM and 6:00 AM while my family was asleep and the house felt like a tomb. There were months where I hated that book. Where the sight of that yellow spine made me nauseous because it felt like a monument to my own pretension.
(Beat) > Who was I to write this? > That’s the 'terrible' part of the creative process people skip over in the montage. It’s not a spark; it’s a slow, agonizing crawl through a tunnel you aren't even sure has an exit. You don't write eighty-thousand words because you're inspired. You do it because the obsession won't let you sleep until the words are out.
And this book—this thing about finding your voice, building a career, trying to leave a legacy—it was the book nobody asked me to write. I rewrote it twelve times. I killed seven chapters and two-hundred pages just to keep it from collapsing under its own weight.
(Beat)
I watched people walk past it. Glance at it. Move on.
I sat there thinking about Alex. About Apple and Nike. About that bathroom in San Diego. I thought about how long it took me to write just one sentence that was actually mine.
And then I thought about the question I keep asking about other people's work. The one that makes me sound like an asshole. The one I wrote a whole book to answer.
Who is this for? > I realized... I hadn't asked it about the book. Not really. Not until that night."
When it was my turn I stood up.
I talked about why I wrote it. That I looked everywhere for a book about the hard parts of photography. The failures. The fuckups. The slow erosion of your own voice under the weight of other people's definitions of good. I couldn't find it. So I wrote it.
Then I pointed at the images spread across the table.
Michele's Irish Travellers. Andrew's fox in the snow.
I said their work gave me hope. That as a commercial photographer who spends most of his time watching people make money with a camera, seeing work made simply because someone believed it should exist, that was something. That photography wasn't dying. That the craft was fine. That rooms like this one were proof.
I'm sure people thought I was nuts.
I said it anyway.
At the end of the night people started picking up the books. A few asked what they owed me.
I said nothing. That it was my gift.
I drove home empty handed.
Not because I'd figured anything out.
Because for one night, I knew what the gold looked like.
Tomorrow the water would start rising again. It always does.
But tonight I knew the difference.