You create something your own way. You bring a team together, share an idea, and put time, energy and emotion into it. A story takes shape, and you want to show it to the world. Then another kind of work begins: finding someone who wants to publish it.
We don’t always know who to contact or how to get our work seen. We send messages, wait, follow up. Sometimes an acceptance arrives. We’re excited. We tell the team. Then everything goes quiet. Weeks and months pass. We don’t know whether the work will be published, when, or whether we can show it somewhere else yet.
I know this from my own experience. Once, I sent around fifteen emails trying to find out what had happened to an accepted shoot. Years later, while searching for my name online, I discovered that the photographs had been published. One had even been a digital cover. Nobody had told me.
Since we hadn’t agreed on exclusivity, and I still wanted our work to be seen, I had found another place to publish it in the meantime. The photographs ended up appearing in two magazines. For years, I knew nothing about one of those publications.
I’m writing about this because I know many of you have stories like these. And I know that behind every piece of work there is more than one person. There’s a whole team who contributed something and is waiting to see the outcome of their work.
In our industry, so many relationships end without explanation. Conversations lead nowhere. Promises are followed by silence. I’d like us to be able to talk openly about this, including what these experiences do to us.
That is one of the reasons STAGED is coming into being.
I want to speak with people working in fashion, music, film and other creative fields. People who are just starting out, and people with years of experience. I also want to invite mental health professionals to help us understand the responses these situations trigger and how we can take care of ourselves.
Because behind the images, performances, collections and brands are people. And creative life can be psychologically very difficult, especially when you’re trying to move forward on your own, without an agent, support, or someone to help you find your way.
For me, creating has never been something I could simply switch off. Many times, I tried to live differently, to be that “ordinary person”. Every time, I felt something inside me fading.
But the need to create doesn’t protect us from exhaustion, loneliness or difficult times. I’ve been through them myself. And I received help: someone paid for my therapy for several years.
Today, I’d like to give some of that support back. Through publishing, listening and conversations. By creating a place where we can share our work and talk about what life is really like for the person who creates it.
To begin, I’d like to introduce LOST IN COLORS.
This shoot was created two years ago, during a time when I was struggling with my mental health. It was a story about shapes and colours, but for me it was also about getting lost in them. About what I felt while creating it.
The work was accepted for publication, but afterwards I received no information about what would happen next. Today, I’m sharing it here.
Two years later, LOST IN COLORS finds its place. And I’m opening a space I wish I had found back then.
