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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. There's this painting.
Well — it's not a painting, exactly. It's more of an impression of a painting. Which is kind of the whole point, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
So it’s Paris, 1874 - A group of painters—Degas (day-GAH), Renoir(ren-WHAH), Pissarro(pih-SAHR-oh), and this guy named Claude Monet—had finally had enough. They’d been rejected by the 'Salon' [sah-LAWN] for years. Now, the Salon was the official French art establishment; it was the gatekeeper of what was 'good.' And to the Salon, these guys were hacks. Their work was too messy. Too fast.
So, they did the 19th-century version of an indie pop-up. They rented a photographer's old studio, nailed their canvases to the walls, and opened the doors themselves.
And then, the critics arrived.
Among them was a man named Louis Leroy [LOO-ee luh-RWAH]. He was a traditionalist, and he was offended. He walked through the gallery like he was smelling something rotten. Eventually, he stopped in front of a painting by Monet.
It was a harbor scene—this hazy, blue-gray sunrise at Le Havre. It wasn’t a 'proper' painting. The masts of the ships were just thin, black scratches. The sun was a smear of orange that looked like it had been applied in thirty seconds.
The painting’s actual title was Impression, Soleil Levant. (Solay Levon)
Leroy stood there, probably adjusted his spectacles, and he meant to end Monet’s career right then and there. He wrote a review later that was dripping with sarcasm. He grabbed that word from the title—Impression—and weaponized it.
He called them 'The Impressionists.'
To Leroy, that word was an insult. It meant: 'This isn't a finished work. This is just a sketch. This is a feeling pretending to be art.' He was telling the world these men were lazy. That they were... well, terrible.
But the painters? They looked at each other. They looked at the word 'Impressionist'—this brand-new slur—and they didn't flinch.
They kept it."
My name is Patrick Fore. This is The Terrible Photographer.
For now.
I'll explain that in a minute. This is a bonus episode — I’m kind of working something out in public, which, if you've listened before, you know is basically the entire premise of the show. I'm calling it "Widening The Frame."
And before I go any further — the book is done. Lessons From a Terrible Photographer. Actual book. Physical object. There's a stack of them on my desk right now and every time I look at it I feel this weird mix of pride and low-grade nausea that I'm told is normal. You can buy it on my website today. We're getting it onto Amazon later this week. Things are moving.
I mention that now because it's relevant to the story I'm about to tell you. Also because I've been saying "I'm working on a book" for so many years that it feels irresponsible not to announce immediately that it's done.
If this is your first episode — your timing is genuinely strange, and welcome. Jump around in the archive, nothing's in order. Email me whenever. Questions, thoughts, what's going on in your life. I respond to everything. Address is in the show notes.
Okay. So.
The podcast started as a way to sell the book.
That's the real version. I know that sounds mercenary, or at least un-poetic, and I've told a better version of this story before, but the honest version is: I was writing a book, and somewhere along the way I found out that publishers want you to already have an audience before they'll look at you. Which is like a restaurant telling you they only serve people who've already eaten there.
So I started a podcast.
And then a very strange thing happened, which is that the podcast became its own thing entirely and sort of ate the book, and then I finished the book anyway, and now here we are — launching the book and changing the name of the show in the same breath, which even I will admit is not ideal sequencing.
But here's what I want to say about that. And I want to say it because I think some of you will recognize yourself in it.
I don't do things backwards. I do them sideways. And that sounds like something you'd cross-stitch on a pillow, but I mean it practically. Backwards means you lost where you were going. Sideways means you found a better angle and you're going to take it even if it looks, from the outside, like you have no idea what you're doing.
Which — sometimes I don't. But that's different.
The whole "Terrible Photographer" thing, the name, the whole energy of it — that started with a twenty-two-year-old kid in Los Angeles who told me, in front of a room full of other photographers, that my work was terrible.
It was the pandemic. We were in a virtual room, a dozen of us, the kind of people who'd collectively photographed heads of state and global campaigns — or at least that's how we were all presenting ourselves, which, pandemic energy — and I made the mistake of mentioning Jeff Lipsky as an example of a photographer whose work covers a huge range of subjects but still has a consistent visual identity. I wasn't saying I was Jeff Lipsky. I was making a point about visual DNA.
The kid did not care about my point.
"The fact that you would compare your terrible work to Jeff Lipsky is a joke."
The room did that thing where everyone goes very quiet and you can somehow hear people trying to decide whether to laugh.
And I just... started laughing. Not a gracious laugh. The other kind. The kind that comes out of you when something is so absurd your body doesn't know what else to do with it.
But here's the thing I couldn't shake afterward — and I've thought about this more times than I should admit — he wasn't entirely wrong. Not about Jeff Lipsky. But about me, at that moment.
At that point I was working a corporate photography job. Benefits, 401k, the whole thing. Shooting the same product every week in the same setup under the same brand guidelines. I'd gotten very good at making work that looked exactly like whoever's work I'd been handed as a reference. My fingerprints were all over it. None of my DNA.
So I did the petty thing, which turned out to accidentally be the right thing. I started a group and called it Terrible Photographers. Meant as a joke. Meant as a middle finger. Became something else.
Became this.
Which is now becoming something else again.
The show found people. Slowly. The way things find people when they're not trying to go viral — sideways, through forwarded links, through someone texting an episode to a friend at two in the morning with no message attached.
Photographers, mostly. People who recognized the specific texture of the thing I was describing — the gap between the work you see in your head and what comes out the other side. The successful shoot that leaves you feeling like a deflated version of yourself for reasons you can't quite explain to your partner.
And then the other emails started.
A copywriter in Portland. A graphic designer in Edinburgh — no camera, not interested in getting one. A high school art teacher in Ohio who'd been three weeks from quitting and didn't. A musician in São Paulo [SOW pah-oo-lo] who has never in his life taken a photograph and listens to every episode twice.
And for a while, I just — I kept saying "the themes are universal" and leaving it at that. Kept the name. Kept the frame tight.
Because some part of me thought if the show stopped being specifically for photographers, it would stop being mine. Which is a fear I understand better now than I did then. But I let it sit there for longer than I should have.
About 4 months ago I got a letter.
An actual letter. Handwritten, on notepaper, in an envelope, mailed to the P.O. box I list in the show notes and check approximately never. From a woman named Mara. A ceramicist — she makes pots — in Nova Scocia.
I've been carrying this around. It's actually in my bag. Hold on.
[PAPER SOUNDS — bag opening, envelope, unfolding]
She said I could read this, by the way. I asked.
She wrote — I'm just going to read it directly because I kept trying to paraphrase it and it kept getting worse:
"I found the show during a hard time in my life, i only can describe it as a collapse. I was burned out, really tired, alone and unappreciated. I walked out of my studio one afternoon in August. and I couldn't make myself go back. Weeks passed. Then months. I kept listening to your show, which felt silly — I don't own a camera besides my phone, I make pots, I sell them at local garden shops — but I kept listening anyway because it sounded like someone describing something that I had a hard time putting words to. I don’t know why, but your podcast made me feel seen."
[PAUSE — 3 SECONDS]
She went on a bit more, saying kind things. But the line that has stayed with me and has shaped every episode from then on was the last line:
Right here.
I don’t know why, but your podcast made me feel seen.
I didn't know what to do with that, honestly.
I still don't, fully. I wrote back. We've emailed a few times. She's back in the studio. I don't want to make that into more than it is.
But I kept thinking about the sentence. This is a photography podcast. She wasn't wrong. It was. The stories I told were from the photography world — the clients, the sets, the equipment, the particular madness of caring deeply about light in a way that most people find boring at best and suspicious at worst.
But the thing underneath the stories — the actual subject, every time, without exception — was the fear of being seen. The question of whether what you make is worth the cost of making it. The survival of some stubborn, inconvenient part of yourself that refuses to just produce content and call it a life.
Mara felt that. She makes pots.
The fear is identical.
Let me tell you something about camera lenses — I'll make it quick, I promise. The tighter the focal length, the more you isolate. The world outside your frame disappears. That's useful. It's also a choice. You are actively deciding who gets in and who doesn't.
Last spring, I was on a big lifestyle shoot in Laguna Beach. Good job, good budget, solid creative fee.
We actually finished early. But I knew the 405 was going to be a nightmare heading back down to San Diego, so I decided to wait out the traffic. I grabbed my camera—just the 50mm lens—and walked down to the cliffs.
The light was... it was ridiculous. That low, heavy, Pacific gold.
I saw this surfer trekking across the rocks, headed for the wooden stairs. He was exhausted, just hauling his board, completely oblivious to me. I took the shot. Just a few frames.
And look, I’ve spent weeks of my life doing research, planning shoots, and overthinking every pixel. But this image just... found me. It had nothing to do with the client. No photo editor would ever run it. It’s an image that has been dismissed by the people who get paid to decide what’s 'good.'
But for me? It was a reminder.
Because in that moment, it wasn’t about the paycheck or the 'establishment.' It was about reclaiming agency. It was about manifesting something that wasn’t there yesterday, simply because I thought it should exist.
That—ironically—is the only real antidote to the 'collapse' Mara described.
I told Mara about that shot. And she told me that, for the first time in years, she’s back at the kiln. She isn't making what the galleries asked for. She’s firing pieces she hasn't thought about since college.
She found the joy again. Not because she got better at making pots, but because she widened her frame."
Yeah…. The lens was too small.
That's what I kept coming back to. It wasn’t wrong maybe, it wasn’t broken, just — too small for what the show had actually turned into.
Because the struggle we kept circling — episode after episode, through all the bad clients and the recoveries and the long unresolved middle of a career where nothing ever fully resolves — it was never really about cameras.
It was about the fear of being seen. The weight of expectation. What it costs to keep making things that mean something in a world that's getting very good at simulating meaning without the cost.
That belongs to everyone making things now. Not just photographers.
So the name is changing.
The Terrible Photographer is becoming The Terrible Creative.
Everything else stays.
Same voice. Same I-don't-have-the-answer posture, which — and I want to be honest about this — is not a posture. I genuinely don't have the answer. I'm still in it. Anyone who tells you they've come out the other side of creative doubt has either stopped making anything risky or is selling something, and often both.
But the door is wider now.
If you're a photographer, you're still home. Nothing's been taken. I'm still shooting. Still getting it wrong in interesting ways. Still sitting in the truck on the way home from a shoot, doing the thing where you replay the day and find all the places where the gap between what you imagined and what you actually made is wider than you'd like.
But if you've been listening and doing the translation work — finding yourself in photography stories that weren't quite written for you — you don't have to translate anymore.
The designer. The writer who's never held a camera but knows exactly what it feels like to make something and then look at it and feel nothing and then make another one anyway. The musician in São Paulo [SOW pah-oo-lo]. The ceramicist in Vermont.
Come in.
Terrible is still the word. That never changed. Terrible is the condition of anyone attempting something hard enough to fail at publicly. It's what you are at the beginning. It's what you stay, if you're doing it right — because work that comes from somewhere real tends to stay a little unresolved, a little impure. Polished things have been polished because someone removed the rough edges. Some of those rough edges were the whole point.
The terrible creative is not the one who gives up.
The terrible creative is the one who keeps showing up while still not being entirely sure they should be there.
That was always the club. The door's just wider now.
[MUSIC BUILDING]
The Impressionists kept the name.
I keep coming back to that. They had options. Could have fought for something more dignified. Instead they took the word that was thrown at them — impression, just a feeling, not finished yet — and wore it forward. Kept meeting. Kept painting. Kept making work that didn't behave the way official painting was supposed to behave.
Monet [moh-NAY] spent the last decades of his life nearly blind. Painting water lilies on canvases so large they had to be cut into panels to move them. Feeling his way across the surface. Working in colors he could barely distinguish anymore. The work didn't get easier. He didn't arrive anywhere. The frame just got wide enough to hold what he was trying to say.
That's the project.
Not to argue for the value of making things — that's a fight you can't win because the people you'd need to convince have already made up their minds. The project is just to stay honest, stay in it, keep making things that cost something to make.
The question of whether the human in the work still matters — whether the fear, the doubt, the specific irreplaceable mess of a person trying to say something true is worth anything in a world that can generate a reasonable facsimile of it in four seconds — that's not a photographer's question anymore.
It's everyone's question.
And we're going to sit with it.
Whatever you make — photographs, pots, sentences, songs, code, something I haven't thought of — you've been doing something that isn't automated yet, regardless of what the demos want you to believe. You've been deciding what matters. Carrying the weight of that in your body, in the forty minutes you spent on something no one will ever see because you needed to make it.
The frame you've been working inside probably doesn't fit anymore.
That's not a problem.
That's the show.
Stay curious. Stay courageous. And yeah — stay terrible.