To teach or not to teach – is that the question?
Getting down and dirty in a London photography workshop. The people who take the best pictures are usually the ones who're prepared to do whatever it takes!
It’s not the easiest of times right now. The Walker household income needs to be considerably bigger (we’re running at a loss each month) and I’m not contributing much at all to it – cue feelings of guilt, worry, and shame. I should be pushing forward with expanding my photography classes but I find myself strangely reluctant to do it. And the other day I began to wonder if trying to make money out of teaching photography is a good idea.
I love to teach. I like the interaction with people I haven’t met before, many of them interesting and fun. I like the look on their faces when they suddenly understand something they’ve struggled with up to now. I like the thank you emails I often get afterwards. I enjoy the process of constructing a course and the creativity needed to come up with interesting ways of getting something across that’s basically very dull. I love to learn new information, distil it, simplify it, and pass it on to others. I like to help. I like all of this.
What I don’t like is that, towards the end of last year I was doing so much teaching that I didn’t have time to think about my own photography and wasn’t taking many photos at all. I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I do make work for myself that isn’t strictly necessary. I research everyone’s cameras before I do a class, because trying to figure out how eight different cameras do the same thing is both time-consuming and sometimes quite alarmingly worrying. I regularly tweak or re-write handouts because I think of a better way of doing them. I spend time looking for new materials that will better illustrate what I want to teach. And then there’s the printing out of booklets and handouts for everyone and the organising of folders and materials. And the admin, let’s not forget the admin. All this takes time, energy and effort but if I’m going to do it at all then I want to do it well.
I also don’t like the fact that I’m struggling to earn an income that will do more than feed the cats. It’s true that money’s never been much of a motivating factor for me, but the less you have of it the more important it becomes, and at the moment I’m pretty well stony broke.
Last year I did a lot of work for a friend who runs a photographic tour company in London. I devised a workshop, wrote a 24-page booklet to give to students who came on it, helped recruit new tutors and talked through the structure and format of the workshop with them, wrote another 12-page booklet for a different course and re-typed and reformatted a booklet that was written by someone else but needed to look better when printed out. I gave photographic advice, brainstormed ways of moving forward, spent time answering emails from students asking for advice, devised another course – which never ran – and taught a large number of workshops. What did I earn for all of this? Just over £1600. Not only is it nowhere near enough in terms of the hours I contributed, I then had to watch new tutors coming in and earning money using my course and my materials. I’m not usually a grudging sort of person, but I feel that stinging just a bit. I love to help out, my friend was extremely appreciative and I don’t regret doing all this as it’s been good experience, but there comes a time when you have to start looking after your own interests.
I thought the answer would be to expand my own workshops in my local area and it’s clear that there’s a much better return for effort if I do this. However, to earn anything like the amount I need I’d have to do huge amounts of marketing and promotion and I’m really not very good at that and, even worse, I don’t enjoy it at all. For me, the advantage of working with my London friend was that she would take care of the promotion side of things and I could get on with what I do best.
So I find myself procrastinating. There are many other workshops and courses I could put together, and I have more ideas than you can shake a stick at, but I have a deep feeling of reluctance inside to get moving on these. At the beginning of this year, after a spell when I was often working both days of each weekend in London, I contracted one virus after another. I’d no sooner get over one bout of flu or cold than I’d go down with the next. And when spring came and the threat of viruses diminished, I developed problems with my back and my knees. Illness, for me, is often a message that I’m not living my life in a way that’s good for me and this endless run of ill-health seems to be telling me that I’m off-track somewhere.
I’ve had a lot of time to think, and realised that when I do large amounts of teaching it takes my attention away from what I really want to do – work on my own personal photographic projects, study towards a photography degree, and write about photography. I do love to teach, but not at the expense of everything else. So recently I’ve been wondering if I should do something entirely different to earn money – a part-time job (assuming I can find one) that I don’t bring home with me and that leaves me time to play, to experiment, and to think. I’m wondering if trying to make your passion into a living is maybe a bad idea and that it’s better to separate the two. I’ve always thought you should follow your heart and your passion and earn money doing what you love to do, but did I get that wrong? Or is it that I simply need to find a new way of doing things?
I’m still undecided.
June 20, 2011 @ 1:05 pm
Maybe we can suffer outrageous fortune someday – perchance to dream
Love Geoff x
June 21, 2011 @ 4:31 pm
It would be great if you could find someone who could do the marketing etc for you, maybe with a commission on the profits or something like that. There’s obviously a gap in the market here for that kind of service. I wonder if there are any stuck at homes mums who are looking for something creative to put a toe in the work pond, or even, maybe, do some bartering with you – some lessons in exchange for the promo work for example. Come to think of it, that kind of work could cater for doing promotion for more than one person (in different fields of course). Sorry, I’m leaping ahead here.
The other aspect that struck me was Geoff’s comments about dreams. I get the impression you’re on the cusp of something and your dreams might have some interesting messages for you.
Catherinex
June 23, 2011 @ 10:13 am
It sounds like taking a step back to revisit all you are doing, get back in touch with your true heart’s desire and restart are what you need. If a “non-photography” part time job is what can help with that, then that would be a good place to start, but I hesitate to encourage you to spend your time on things you know you don’t love when so many people are trying to get out of that situation. Have you considered working with a coach to help you sort out some of this stuff?
June 23, 2011 @ 11:11 am
Well!! reading your post was like looking in a mirror! everything you said is an exact mirror image of my life and reading it has been a light bulb moment for me!
I too am broke despite nearly three years of following my creative dream, spending hours imputting effort,expense on advertising and bucket loads of hope expecting to earn money from it in return but failing to do so despite praise and sales. I too am feeling the guilt and shame of sitting at home having ground to a halt, grudgingly thinking i also ought to be pushing forward too. I need get out there and try to boost the household income but am lacking the enthusiasm as the ‘trying’ utterly took over my life, at the expense of the children, the housework, my relationship and then just as you, the illness started. As you said about ‘struggling to earn an income that will do more than feed the cats’ i still wasn’t meeting my bills and the endless phonecalls and letters from utility/credit card companies is horrible. My problem is that i was selling well but for small amounts that didn’t cover my outgoings so i got a job in the gallery cafe and i’ve put the prices up but its beyond the local market and with no sales now I still dont have any money left for advertising/leaflets etc that the bigger galleries expect. URGH!
your statement that ‘moneys never been much of a motivating factor for me’ i think holds the key. I feel the same, I don’t like money and I don’t like trying to earn it! As you said you love to teach and the effort and hours you put into it clearly make you proud of your achievements and of the ‘you’ inside. ask yourself the question, if you won the lottery and money was no longer an issue, would you still have the want to construct your courses or teach? if your answers is yes then its the money part thats the problem and it could be that your resentment comes from the fact that the two are linked. I would still paint/photograph/create and I hate the fact that its now become about money!
if your answer is no, then your reluctance to go back to teaching IS that it takes up too much of the time that you’d rather spend on your own photography. answer- get a part time job doing something completely unrelated just to earn the dollar and keep photography as a purley enjoyable thing to do.
You sound a wonderful photography teacher, mine didn’t know how anyones camera worked! my feeling is that you know the high value of what you give and you haven’t been paid enough for it.you say you make work that isn’t strickly necessary but it IS necessary as then in your heart you know you’ve done your best work. if someone was paying you an hourly rate for the time you put in there would be no problem. you would also have the money to pay someone else to whom you could delegate the mundane parts (marketing and promotion) therefore freeing up some time for yourself to take your own pictures!! Its a catch 22 but put your thinking cap on, there has to be a way of targeting the people who will pay more so you can earn more and have it all!
June 23, 2011 @ 11:57 am
Thank you all so much for your comments and support – it means a lot to me. Rather than reply to you here, I’m going to email you all individually, because each of these deserves a personal reply.