Why 1x.com made me quit photography for years... — Chris Cauceglia Photography

- A quick disclaimer on this post, this is NOT a 1x.com hate article. I think Ralph and the staff at 1x.com do an amazing website and do a great job curating quality work. In fact I encourage you to check out the site! I am simply sharing my own personal frustrations with photography on social media as a whole and don’t want other people to fall into the same trap as I did. I think it happens to way too many photographers of this generation.

Photo sharing sites have always been a very popular forum for photographers on the web. It’s by far the best way to reach an audience for your work and follow artists you like. More importantly, It can be a great way to inspire your creative process, but it can have a nasty side effect I found.

Some of you may know of 1x.com, it's a photo sharing website like any other on the internet, where you upload photos so that you can share them with other peers on the site. The only difference with 1x.com is that it is curated by the staff of the site and they select which photos make it on the page or not. With this system in place, the result is truly an astounding quality of images. It’s not like flickr or 500px where the front page of your feed has some objectively bad snapshots, every photo on 1x is truly very good. I remember some statistics saying that the 1x staff only accepts about 5% of all submissions. This undoubtedly will create a lot of frustrations for people using the site.

I discovered 1x back when they were not around for that long. When I first saw the site, I was astounded by the quality of work and how many views and activity there was on each photo. I signed up for an account immediately dreaming that my photos would be on the site so everyone could see the quality of my images!

I uploaded my first batch of photographs that I thought were my best in my portfolio at the time. I sent them to curation and waited for them to be accepted or rejected.

I got the results back from my first photo…”rejected”. I thought “ok that’s not a big deal, maybe the next one!”

The second one came in…”rejected”, “Hmmmm third time’s the charm, right?”

And finally the third came in…”Rejected”

At first, I was very disappointed because I thought my work was totally worthy of the site. But after about only a little while I soon got over it, picked myself back up and went out to take better and more interesting shots. I kept uploading week after week trying to get a photo “accepted” into the amazing catalog of 1x.com. I studied every photo in every category and engaged in as many photo forums on the site as I could, I was determined to be a true member of 1x. After studying all of the photos for a couple of weeks I saw a style that I needed to emulate in order to be “accepted” into the circle of quality.

I set up this shot on a “why not, they like this stuff” kind of whim and sent it in thinking it was only going to be shot down, since that was the pattern. After only a day it was accepted! I was so excited to finally be a 1x.com photographer! I wore it like a badge of creative honor. I was on a high, thinking that I made a huge breakthrough in my photography and it was only going to get better!

After about a week, the high finally wore off, I was then reinspired to go out and make more images to be accepted into the 1x community. I went out and tried emulate the same kind of feel as the published images.

Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months of rejections. No matter how hard I tried I could not get another photo accepted. I got depressed and burnt out on photography because I thought my work was honestly garbage. I felt discouraged and creatively beaten because I was “rejected”. Slowly, I stopped making more and more photographs to the point where I didn’t pick my camera up for two years. It wasn't until 2015 I was really inspired to take photography seriously again.

Did you see my mistake here? I went out of my way to make photos that were not mine, I tried to copy everyone else and hated photography for years because of it. Looking back on that experience is strange, because it shows how much I have matured as an artist and an individual. Today, I make images that I like and want to look at. I could care less what people think of my images. If you like them, awesome, if not then “whatever” I say. In the end, I like my photos and that’s all that matters.

I think this is important to talk about because in a hyperlinked world where instant gratification rules supreme and mediocrity is worshipped, we as photographers get into this terrible mindset of needing “likes”, “comments” and “faves” is what makes us good artists. However, that could not be further from the truth. In the end, it’s superficial and does not mean anything

Just make art that uplifts you and makes you happy, it’s way better than a million people “faving” your photo that you don’t even like. I can tell you honestly that today I am the most confident I have ever been with my photography, and I’m not looking for validation from strangers on the internet. Try it, break free of the social media slave!!!