WHEN ARTISTS BECOME CONTENT CREATORS

What happens to artistic freedom when attention becomes measurable?

Something is happening to art. Slowly, and perhaps so gradually that we hardly notice it anymore.

I use Instagram as my example because it is the platform I know. I have around 59,000 followers there, and for years I genuinely enjoyed it. People told me that my photographs inspired them. I received encouragement, criticism, suggestions and ideas. Collectors and galleries discovered my work through the platform, and some followers even became friends in real life.

It was something extraordinary. For the first time, artists could communicate directly with people around the world without asking a gallery, museum, publisher or critic for permission. I felt that Instagram was serving both me and the people who followed my work.

But something has changed.

I increasingly struggle to recognize the social in social media. What once felt like a community now more and more feels like an enormous competition for attention. Everyone is trying to become visible, establish a brand, gain followers, increase engagement and remain relevant. And the strange thing is that we have become so accustomed to this competition that we barely question it anymore.

This isn’t simply a criticism of Instagram. I am trying to understand what years of living inside an attention economy may be doing to artists. Including me.

Because something came with this extraordinary access to an audience. We can now measure the immediate reaction to almost everything we make.

Likes, views, shares, comments, followers, reach, engagement.

Numbers.

And numbers are seductive because they look like truth.

We have a tendency to count what matters to us. But eventually we can begin believing that only what can be counted matters.

Sometimes one of my carefully arranged still-life photographs, which may have taken days to prepare, reaches barely 1,400 people. Then I post a silly meme or a photograph of a cheesecake I just baked, and suddenly it reaches more than 20,000.

I have nothing against cheesecake. I actually love it. But what exactly am I supposed to learn from those numbers? That I should spend less time making photographs and more time baking cakes?

Of course I notice the difference. And slowly, whether I want it or not, I begin learning what people seem to like and what they don’t.

I found myself increasingly affected by these numbers. And eventually I began asking a simple question: What exactly is working?

Because the algorithm doesn’t give a damn about our art.

It doesn’t know whether a photograph took three seconds or three weeks to make. Whether I risked something, discovered something, copied myself or somebody else. Whether the work is honest, whether it changed me or might change someone else.

It knows whether somebody stopped scrolling, watched, clicked, commented or shared. Not more.

The goal is engagement. To capture attention and keep people on the platform, because human attention can be monetized. That is the business.

The system can measure reactions. It cannot determine whether those reactions represent artistic understanding.

And somehow, somewhere along the way, we artists began mistaking the reward system of an advertising platform for a judgment about our art.

I find that absurd.

A post performs well, and we feel validated. Another performs badly, and we wonder what we did wrong. But the algorithm never judged the photograph. It measured its ability to produce behavior.

Those are not the same thing.

And yet we are allowing one to influence the other.

THE ALGORITHM ENTERS THE STUDIO

We complain about the algorithm while simultaneously spending enormous amounts of time trying to understand it. When should I post? How often? Should I make a Reel or a carousel? How long should the video be? What makes people stop scrolling?

There are courses, consultants and endless tutorials teaching artists how to understand the algorithm better.

I even paid for an online course myself. What a waste.

But perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking how we can understand the algorithm better, we should ask what understanding the algorithm is doing to us.

Because once we know what works, we cannot unknow it. And that knowledge eventually follows us into the studio.

Nobody stands beside us telling us what to make. Something much more effective happens. We are rewarded. One kind of work receives attention, another disappears. Repeat this hundreds of times, and we learn.

Eventually the algorithm doesn’t need to tell us what to make. We have learned to tell ourselves.

And control doesn’t feel like control. It feels like strategy, professionalism, understanding your audience or building a career.

Until one day you reject an idea because you already know it won’t work online. Nobody censored you. You censored yourself.

You repeat something because it worked before. You avoid something because you believe people won’t respond. Slowly, you begin changing your work toward what receives attention.

Nobody took away your artistic freedom. You traded some of it for visibility. And perhaps you didn’t even notice when it happened.

And perhaps there is something even more dangerous. After years of learning what people like, how do we know whether we are still following our own ideas? What if we have become so accustomed to anticipating the reaction of an audience that we can no longer distinguish between what we genuinely want to create and what we have learned to want? We might believe we are making completely independent decisions, while the expectations of an audience have quietly become our own.

I think this also helps explain something else I see happening. Artists increasingly study what works for other artists. A particular image, a particular Reel, a certain way of showing the studio or presenting the creative process. Someone imitates it, then somebody imitates the imitation, and eventually thousands of people are producing variations of what has already been proven to work.

The same videos, the same cuts, the same music, the same studio shots. Sometimes even the same language about authenticity and vulnerability.

Everyone is trying desperately to be unique, and everyone begins looking the same.

The result is often not terrible. It is actually worse than terrible. It is good. Technically excellent, beautifully photographed, professionally edited and immediately understandable.

But completely interchangeable.

A giant soup of mediocrity.

Because optimization naturally moves toward what has already been proven to work. And art cannot live only there. Art needs the possibility of failure. Originality requires the possibility of failure.

There is another consequence of personal branding that concerns me even more. An artist needs to change, to contradict himself, to abandon ideas that once seemed important and discover something entirely new. But a brand depends on recognition. People follow us because they know what to expect, and once something becomes successful, we feel pressure to give them more of it.

We begin protecting the identity we have created. What began as an expression of individuality can become a prison built from our own success.

I know quite well what I would need to post on Instagram to get a lot of views. But I don’t want to play that game. I want to remain truthful to my own ideas, to experiment, to fail and to make something new and meaningful. Something that only I can create.

I often think about Vincent van Gogh. He desperately wanted his work to be recognized, but during his lifetime he found very little commercial success. Nevertheless, he continued painting in a way that was unmistakably his own. He believed in what he was doing, even when the world around him showed little interest.

And today? When I want to see his paintings and understand something of his life, I travel to Amsterdam and have to reserve a ticket in advance to enter the Van Gogh Museum and still need to stand in a long line waiting. Thousands of people visit it every day.

I find that extraordinary.

An artist whose work attracted so little attention during his lifetime now draws people from all over the world, people willing to travel, pay and spend hours looking at his paintings.

Of course, that doesn’t mean every misunderstood artist will eventually become a Van Gogh. But it reminds me how little immediate popularity tells us about the lasting value of art.

And then there is another transformation I see happening in the art world.

It begins innocently.

Look at my work.

Then: Look at me making my work.

And eventually: Look at me.

The artist becomes the content.

There is a simple reason why this works. An artwork may take months or years to make. A personality can produce content every day.

At first we make art. Then we make content about the art. Then we make content about ourselves making the art. And eventually we begin making art in order to have content.

That is the moment something has reversed.

The studio becomes a stage, the process becomes a performance, and even authenticity becomes something we learn to perform.

Perhaps the most disturbing part isn’t that any of this is fake. It may all be completely true. But I wonder whether we begin experiencing our lives differently when we are already imagining how we might show them to an audience.

I catch myself doing it. And this year I had an experience that made me question it more seriously than ever before.

FOUR NIGHTS IN BORNEO

This year I began a new photographic series called Paradise Lost. The idea had been growing in my mind for almost two years. I wanted to explore the extraordinary abundance of life on Earth, our relationship with the natural world and what we are in danger of losing.

I shared the idea with Ellen Willas of Willas Contemporary in Stockholm. Ellen is an extraordinary curator and a close friend whose judgment I deeply respect.

She gave me advice that immediately felt right. Don’t share the development of this series on social media. Keep it private. Write a journal, document the process for yourself and allow the work to develop without an audience watching.

When Ellen speaks, I listen.

My first photograph for Paradise Lost took me to the rainforest of Borneo. And suddenly I discovered how difficult her advice was to follow.

I was surrounded by extraordinary things. Everywhere I looked, something was happening, and several times I felt the temptation to take out my phone and share it with my Instagram followers. What I was experiencing would have made extraordinary content. I could already imagine the Stories, the videos, the reactions.

But I didn’t do it.

Instead, I stayed close to my photographic setup and watched.

Thousands of tiny insects, bats, owls, a leopard, snakes. The forest was alive.

For four consecutive nights, from sunset until dawn, I remained there, watching, listening and waiting. I became so absorbed in the environment that I almost felt I was becoming part of it.

I wasn’t thinking about an audience or whether somebody would find it interesting. I was simply there, and it was beautiful.

Those four nights became one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. Not because I shared them, but precisely because I didn’t.

An experience doesn’t need an audience to become meaningful. And an artist doesn’t need to be visible to be creating something important.

Of course I could have used those nights to grow my Instagram account. But something else happened instead. All the energy, excitement, wonder and intensity of what I experienced went into the photographs.

Even now, while writing these words, I can remember the smell of the forest, the sounds of the insects, the darkness and the extraordinary feeling of being surrounded by a world so full of life that I could hardly turn my eyes away.

And when I look at one of the two photographs I made there, all of it returns. I see much more than the insects in the picture. I see those nights. I feel what I felt. I remember what it meant to be there.

Perhaps that is what art can do. Something deeply personal, an experience that belonged only to me, can become something another person encounters through the photograph.

Art is when something personal becomes common.

During the days in Borneo, I also had something I rarely allow myself. Time.

Time to think about my life, my photography, Paradise Lost, the wonders of the natural world, love, beauty, friendship and the future. All sorts of thoughts that are too easily interrupted in ordinary life.

I wasn’t constantly reaching for my phone or looking for something to share. I was present.

And I wrote.

Just as Ellen had suggested, I kept a journal. I was genuinely surprised by what appeared on those pages. Thoughts and observations I might never have discovered if I had been busy turning the experience into content.

I hope those writings will eventually be published alongside the photographs of Paradise Lost. Those days taught me something important.

Visibility is not the same as presence.

You can be visible to 100,000 people and hardly present in your own experience. And you can be completely invisible to the world while being more attentive, more curious and more creatively alive than you have been in years.

I began to understand that the constant desire to share can quietly change the way we experience our lives. Something happens while we are working or traveling, and suddenly we think: This would make an interesting post.

Immediately part of us steps outside the experience and begins watching ourselves experience it.

The audience has entered the moment.

That concerns me, because I believe an artist needs experiences nobody sees. Failures nobody knows about. Thoughts that aren’t immediately published. Experiments that never become Stories. Work that develops without a camera watching.

Art needs something the attention economy cannot measure.

An interior life.

The danger isn’t only that we show too much. The danger is that eventually we begin living in a way that anticipates being shown.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING SEEN AND BEING EXPERIENCED

Recently I realized something else. I am no longer sure that I want my photographs to be seen by as many people as possible. At least not like this.

Not as another image appearing for two seconds between a Reel of cats wearing hats, an advertisement for running shoes, somebody’s dinner in a fancy restaurant and the next photograph.

Because what does seen actually mean?

The viewer didn’t necessarily decide to see my photograph. They didn’t search for it or walk into a room to encounter it. The algorithm put it in front of them, then their thumb moved.

And we call that a view.

Perhaps we have confused exposure with attention, and attention with encounter.

I think about my own experiences with art. When I wanted to see Irving Penn’s work, I traveled to see it. I bought a ticket, gave it my time and stood in front of the actual photographs. I went closer, stepped back and returned to certain prints.

I traveled to see Penn’s work in different exhibitions, cities and countries. I saw his Centennial exhibition in Berlin, Paris and Spain.

Those encounters changed my photography.

I didn’t simply admire his photographs and move on. I carried them with me. They entered my thinking, changed how I understood photography and eventually influenced how I made my own work.

I began studying Penn’s life. I wanted to understand who he was, what he believed, what drove him and what led him to make such extraordinary photographs.

No engagement statistic could have measured that.

And perhaps this is one of the greatest misunderstandings of our time. We have confused engagement with impact.

The algorithm rewards immediate reactions. Art doesn’t necessarily demand a reaction at all. Sometimes art wants silence. Sometimes it wants to disturb us without offering an explanation. Sometimes it needs us to walk away, think, return and discover that something inside us has changed.

Art is not always supposed to give us what we already want. Sometimes it confronts us with something unfamiliar, something we didn’t ask for or don’t immediately understand.

At its best, art doesn’t only confirm who we are. It can enlarge who we are.

But we have placed art inside a system that rewards immediate reactions and replaces one image with the next before we have even begun to understand what we have seen.

There is something else that troubles me.

I spend enormous amounts of time making some of my photographs. Then I spend more time making the print.

For me, the print is the photograph.

Paper matters. Scale matters. Surface matters. Black matters. Light matters.

And then I reduce all of that to a tiny illuminated rectangle and insert it into an endless stream specifically designed to keep moving.

Sometimes I have an uncomfortable thought.

There is an old expression: casting pearls before swine.

I hesitate to use it because it sounds arrogant. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that the viewer isn’t the problem.

The environment is.

The same person who scrolls past one of my photographs in two seconds might stand in front of the physical print for ten minutes in a museum.

So perhaps I shouldn’t complain that people scroll past my work.

I put the photograph into the scroll.

And perhaps that is something I need to change. Not necessarily what I share, but where and how I share it.

I want my photographs to reach people who are genuinely interested in them. People who are curious enough to spend time looking, who want to understand the ideas behind the pictures, the experiences that led to them, and the sometimes complicated process of making them.

That is why I created a Private Viewing Room on my website.

It is a place where I can share my work when I am ready, in my own time and in my own way, without worrying about algorithms, engagement or whether a photograph will perform well. You are welcome to join it for free.

I regularly share new photographs, ongoing projects, experiments, and stories from behind the scenes. Often in much greater depth than I ever could on Instagram. Sometimes I share things there that I wouldn't necessarily share publicly. Not because they are secret, but because I want to have a more personal conversation with people who are genuinely interested in my work.

The Private Viewing Room is completely free. Anyone interested in my photography can register and become part of it.

I don't need another 100,000 people scrolling past my photographs. I would much rather have a smaller group of people who are curious, who take their time, and who genuinely want to discover what I am creating.

Perhaps that is what I have been missing on social media. Not more followers, but a deeper connection with the people who are already interested.

And perhaps I am teaching people how to experience my work: Don’t stop. There will be another one tomorrow.

That is almost exactly the opposite of what I want from someone standing in front of one of my prints. I want them to stop, to look, to become curious, to discover something they didn’t notice at first and to stay long enough for the photograph to begin speaking to them.

There is another contradiction I find particularly disturbing.

An artist may spend three months developing the most important work of their life. Three months of experimentation, failure, discovery and progress. But if nothing appears on Instagram during those months, the artist may feel that they are falling behind.

From an artistic perspective, those months might have been extraordinarily productive. From the platform’s perspective, the account has been inactive.

The artist is working. The account is not.

And increasingly we confuse the two.

We have accepted the idea that artists must now have two professions. One is making art. The other is continuously proving to the world that they are making art.

But art and content live according to different clocks. Content demands continuity. Art sometimes demands disappearance.

Sometimes an artist needs to withdraw, experiment, fail, think and work without anybody watching. Not because the audience is unimportant, but because the work needs time to become something worth showing.

CLOSE THE DOOR

I don’t want to leave social media.

I value the people who have followed my work over the years. I value the conversations, friendships, encouragement and extraordinary opportunities that came from being able to share my photography with people around the world.

And I don’t believe that popularity makes art less valuable, any more than obscurity makes it great. There is no virtue in being unseen, and there is no shame in being successful.

But the question is not simply how many people see the work. It is what the work gives them when they truly encounter it.

And whether we have allowed the pursuit of attention to influence what we create.

I am not outside this system. I know when a post performs well. I know when something important to me reaches almost nobody. I notice, and sometimes it frustrates me. I would be dishonest if I pretended otherwise.

I cannot ask these questions of other artists without asking them of myself.

Have I ever chosen what to show because I knew it would perform better? Have I repeated something because people responded to it before? Have I experienced something while already thinking about how I would post it?

I don’t necessarily like all the answers.

Perhaps that is why the questions matter.

There is also a strange irony in the relationship between artists and these platforms. We provide the photographs, films, music, thoughts and stories that make people want to visit them. The platforms turn the attention around that content into a business.

That was the exchange. We gave them content, and they gave us access to an audience. Fair enough.

But gradually the relationship has changed. The platform controls distribution, artists study its rules to improve their chances, and increasingly we can pay for additional visibility.

At some point it is reasonable to ask who is working for whom.

But even that isn’t the real price.

The real price isn’t the money spent on advertising or the countless hours spent creating content. It is paid when the desire for reach begins changing what we make. When we stop following an idea because we believe nobody will respond. When we repeat something because it worked before. When we begin valuing our own work according to numbers that were never designed to measure artistic value.

And perhaps most seriously, when we become so accustomed to being watched that we begin losing the ability to be alone with our own thoughts.

I increasingly believe there has to be a door.

Instagram can stay outside while I work.

When the work exists, I can open the door. Then people can like it, ignore it, share it, criticize it or scroll past it.

That is their freedom.

But while I am making it, I need mine.

Freedom from the audience and its expectations. Freedom from what worked yesterday and the fear of becoming invisible. Freedom to fail, to change direction, to make something nobody asked for and to experience something extraordinary without immediately sharing it.

Freedom to live a life that remains meaningful even when nobody is watching.

I think back to those four nights in Borneo. The darkness, the insects, the sounds of the forest and the extraordinary feeling of being completely absorbed in something I was trying to understand. All of that is now found in the pictures I made.

Nobody knew what I was doing. Nobody was watching or applauding.

And I didn’t miss any of it.

I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to do.

Perhaps the most important task for an artist today isn’t learning how to master the algorithm. It is making sure the algorithm never masters the artist.

The audience is welcome when the doors open. But until then, there are moments when the artist needs to be alone with curiosity, uncertainty, failure and the work itself.

And free enough to ask the one question no algorithm, audience, metric or engagement statistic can answer:

Is this true?