I stopped chasing the trend a long time ago.
In high school, I thought fitting in was the assignment. Find the group, match the look, adopt the language. I tried. It never took. My personality did not slot neatly into any of it, and forcing it only made the disconnect louder. For a while I read that as a problem to fix. Eventually I understood it was information.
What I learned since has shaped how I work and who I work with. Connection has to be genuine and mutual, or it is not connection at all. It is association. And association is not the same thing as trust.
Sameness Is Built Into the System
The pull toward looking like everyone else is not just a feeling. It is engineered into the platforms most creative professionals rely on to be seen.
Social platforms optimize for engagement, and engagement rewards what has already worked. The mechanism is simple: content that resembles what performed well gets shown to more people, which incentivizes creators to reproduce it. Over time, that feedback loop pushes an entire field toward a narrow band of what the algorithm favors. This is not a conspiracy. It is just how the systems are designed to function.
In photography, the result is visible everywhere. The same presets. The same color grading. The same poses, the same compositions, the same edits, repeated across thousands of feeds until they blur together. The tools that made this possible are genuinely useful. But when the preset does the deciding, the intention behind the image gets outsourced to whatever happened to be trending that season.
That is the real cost. Not that trend-driven images are ugly. Many of them are technically clean. The cost is that they stop communicating. A portrait is supposed to say something specific about a specific person. When it is filtered through the same aesthetic as everyone else's, the specific thing it was meant to say gets flattened into a look you have already seen a hundred times.
Affiliation Is Not the Same as Belonging
The same logic that drives visual sameness drives the social version of it.
Groups that organize primarily around affiliation tend to define themselves by who is kept outside. The boundary is the point. Belonging is granted based on association rather than anything genuine, and the moment your association changes, so does your standing. I watched that dynamic in high school, and I have watched versions of it in professional circles since. It does not get more sophisticated with age. It just wears better clothes.
I am not arguing against community. Real community is one of the most valuable things a professional can build. But there is a difference between a community organized around shared values and a clique organized around exclusion. The first one makes room. The second one guards the door. One builds something durable. The other builds something that dissolves the moment it is inconvenient.
Why This Matters for the Work
This is not only a philosophical position. It has direct consequences for the quality of what gets made.
When a photographer chases trends, the client receives a version of themselves translated into someone else's aesthetic. When a photographer builds relationships on affiliation rather than genuine interest, the work carries that hollowness into the frame. People can feel it, even when they cannot name it. An image made with real attention looks different from an image made to match a trend, because the intention behind it was different.
After 28 years of doing this work, I am most certain that intention is not optional. It is the entire difference between documentation that means something and content that fills space. The market is crowded with the second category. That crowding is exactly why the first category still stands out.
Build Real, Build Slow
I would rather build slower and build real. Genuine work. Genuine relationships. People and images that carry actual intention instead of borrowed aesthetics.
Trends fade. That's what a trend does. Cliques dissolve, because exclusion is not a foundation. What holds is what was true to begin with, made with care, and meant for the specific person or moment in front of the lens.
That is the work I am interested in. It is the only work worth putting my name on.