Tall stories told slowly
Finding a niche isn’t every photographer’s aim. Some of us are happy to shoot to a decent standard while mastering our kit and making a pleasant composition that maybe appeals to more than just ourselves. If you want your photography to stand out though, a niche is a useful thing. If no one else is working that way, shooting that type of subject or processing their images in the same way, your work will automatically look different.
The problem with a niche is that it won’t stay a niche very long. As soon as other photographers admire what you are doing they will be inspired by your work and begin doing it themselves. As more take it up the niche-value diminishes; and when others start doing it better, new faces take the spotlight.
The best way to ensure you remain unique is to move away from a former niche once it no longer qualifies as one – which isn’t easy. You then need to find another, or to combine two niches in one to make it much harder for anyone to take up doing the same thing.
‘I started off doing wet-plate portraits,’ says Dutch photographer Alex Timmermans, ‘but there was no challenge. Someone would come in with a good face, you’d take the picture everyone would say, “wow”, but eventually it stopped being a challenge and there were too many photographers doing the same thing. That’s when I started the story-telling series. I wanted to do something else with the process that other people were not, and still are not –
