Comparison is the Death of Art

A hobby I used to love was toy photography.

It’s pretty much as simple as it sounds. One takes photographs, using toys as models. The results can be mesmerizing, just google it and you’ll find some really cool photos.

When I discovered the hobby, I grabbed some of my collectibles and started shooting. It was a lot of fun to think of new settings to shoot toys in, or new “stories” to tell with the shots. I started looking around my daily life and thinking on a 1/12 scale how things would look.

The last time I did toy photography was May of last year.

I had spent too long comparing myself to other toy photographers on Instagram. I grew jealous of their high follower number and it seemed that no matter what I was doing, I wouldn’t achieve the quality or following that others were getting.

So I stopped.

I still haven’t picked up the camera again to shoot toys, but I recognize that it’s foolish of me to feel prohibited from it.

The art of others shouldn’t hinder our own. It’s fully possible that I might never get 1,000 likes on a single photo, but why should that matter? Do I want to do art to be congratulated and told how brilliant I am?

I guess I do.

What’s interesting here to me is that photography isn’t my passion, or my career. Taking photos of toys is just something I find fun. It’s not like my writing, or storytelling, where I dedicated years of my life to sharpening my craft and am building a career to continue it.

It’s just a hobby. Like playing board games or writing adventures for Dungeons and Dragons. It shouldn’t matter so much to me.

I suspect this kind of thing happens to every artist at one time or another, regardless of their medium.

A painter feels discouraged because they’ll never reach the skill or fame of da Vinci.

A writer feels discouraged because they’ll never be as haunting as Lovecraft, or as epic as Tolkien.

From my own experience, when we make comparisons of our art, we’re killing it. One should of course look to different artists to find inspiration or learn, but we must be careful not to regard our own work as trash in the meantime. All of the photographs in this post are my own, and I’m proud of them. They’re not the best things out there, but I had fun making them and I think they turned out nice.

I say all of this, and I mean it, but I’m still not sure if I’ll pick up the camera again. Maybe soon I’ll go out with a camera around my neck and a bag full of stormtroopers to take some pictures.

We’ll see.