Art for Art's Sake: Letting the Act of Creating Be Enough

Late into 2024, I realized I hadn’t picked up my DSLR in quite some time. It may have been years. The camera sat on a shelf in my office, quietly gathering dust while I busied myself living a more “responsible” life—working, overcoming health challenges, keeping up with everything—except the thing that once felt like oxygen.

Around that time, the old phrase l’art pour l’art— “Art for Art’s sake”—came to mind. I didn’t hear it as a slogan from art history; I heard it as a gentle reminder that my photography does not need justification. It doesn’t need an audience, a project, a statement, or a goal. It can exist simply because I feel a need and a desire to make it. That thought loosened something that had been standing in my way.

New York City 2014

I still didn’t feel I had much time or space to pick up the camera and start shooting again, but I realized I could start somewhere smaller.

I opened my archives—old DSLR shots and a few newer iPhone photos I loved but had never curated or shared—and began building a gallery page on my website, purely “for art’s sake.” No plan. No strategy. Just collecting images that still made something in me light up.

As I curated that gallery, I recalled something else: photography has always been a kind of feedback loop for me. When I look at my images, I see my inner world “out there”—what I’m drawn to, what I want to explore and look deeper into, what I can’t stop returning to.

For much of the earlier years of my life, I had been living through other people’s lenses: the systems I was born into, the roles I was expected to play, the habits I was socialized into. Discovering photography created a doorway for me to begin seeing my life through my own lens. It has helped me live more honestly inside my own experience—to notice, to feel, to pay attention, and to consider the path I want to take, not the one I think is expected of me.

Christmas Eve 2015

I’m still finding my way back.

Some days, “art for art’s sake” looks like taking my camera on a short walk and capturing a few quiet frames. Other days, it looks like revisiting old photos and letting them remind me of the person who made them. What matters right now is not a project or a portfolio, but the act of creating itself—the simple habit of returning to my own way of seeing and letting that be enough.

As another part of finding my way back, I’ve created a blog page. I’ve spent much of my career using the skills I’ve developed as a writer, but I’ve rarely used that part of myself to talk about my photography or my inner world, beyond a private journal.

This space feels like a new doorway too—a place where I can pair images with language and, in doing so, drop into an even deeper experience of what the images mean to me. In its own way, the blog is also “art for art’s sake”: a quiet corner where I practice putting into words what I see and how I’m learning to see it again, with no audience I have to satisfy but myself.

Little Mulberry Park 2012