We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christopher Bull a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Christopher, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
As a travel and portrait photographer who started very late at age 30 (I’m now 33), I felt the pressure of having to learn and implement a large amount of information in a short period of time. My main interest with photography is travel portraiture, and to me that means showing up in a foreign country (frequently not speaking the same language) and meeting people on the street, in restaurants, outside of their homes, etc. and getting to know them. Once I have a sense of who they are, I will ask for their permission and try to photograph them in the way that best represents who I believe they are. Because photography is essentially understanding the behavior of light, my background helped significantly to propel me from square one: I spent nine years in school studying science, and am now working as a pharmacist, but in particular I would say my physics degree has helped to give me a head start on understanding the technical aspects of photography much better. With this foundation, my journey as a photographer started at the implementation phase rather than at the phase of learning the foundation. One could say that I indirectly learned the technical side of photography before the concept of photography had entered my brain. From there, learning was with the repeated cycle of observation, practice, and analysis. As with any art medium, theory never integrates itself into practice seamlessly. What is understand in theory frequently falls flat, or appears different than expected. This is both the beauty and the frustration of the path I took: building expectations of my photography from inclusion of information rather than exclusion via experimentation. In other words, I had to learn why theory didn’t translate as I thought it should rather than discovering from scratch what does and doesn’t work in order to build my understanding of theory. The bright side is that when I experience a failure, and boyyyy do I experience those, it’s often small tweaks and adjustments to my approach, or at the very least I can understand *why* something isn’t working the way it should, or *why* I’m not communicating effectively through my art.
At the risk of sounding cliché, I could have sped-up my learning 10-fold by simply doing more photography. I’ve been known to pick up a camera only a few weeks out of the year – typically when traveling abroad to photograph unique people and their cultures – and spend little time in-between with a camera in-hand. The cycle I touched on earlier consists of observation, practice, and analysis; this is a closed loop that requires effort in all stages in order to grow. If any one of those stages are lacking, it quickly falls apart. I have experienced that time and time again, that I’ll rely too heavily on observation and analysis, perhaps of my old work or others’ work that I see, and not spend enough time actually putting the observation to practice, or not making enough work to effectively analyze. Another big thing to help the learning process would have been a mentor, or a community of photographers who work similar to myself. I have always said that it felt like I was alone on an island, responsible for learning this new craft solely by myself. There were times when that was rewarding and perhaps beneficial, but as a generality I believe I suffered because of this. Artists are terribly blind to their own work relative to viewing others’, so having someone to critique and guide me would have proven invaluable.
Knowing the technical foundation of photography was probably the most important skill in doing what I do today. There’s an unfounded romanticism in not understanding what makes art effective, or understanding but not using that knowledge, but I believe that’s a doing a huge disservice to one’s potential as an artist. Understanding theory is a head start, and also a toolbox to help you communicate more effectively. I’m as emotional as the next person, but psychological studies have proven time after time that our intuition is wrong more than it is correct, unless of course it’s guided: “guided” meaning there are concrete principles to direct your intuition that can’t succumb to the deceit of the human brain, and our brains are so good at deception that we don’t even recognize it’s happening, hence the popular romanticization of knowing less. Beethoven made some of the most emotional music the planet has heard and was a master of music theory. Picasso’s works can be distinctly defined by their emotional period, and he had a brilliant teaching of art theory. Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the most famous and talked-about photographers ever and had a tack-sharp understanding of psychology and photography. The list could go on and on, but you get the point.
Not having sufficient time was and still is one of the biggest obstacles in my journey. I work full-time as a pharmacist, and that entails 12-hour days and sometimes well over 40-hour work weeks. It’s a weekly occurrence that I feel motivated, inspired and excited to try something new in photography or have a new idea I want to actualize, and by the time the work days pass and I have free time, the inspiration is lost and that cycle repeats. Also, as previously stated, the lack of a community and/or mentor was another obstacle. Theory is one thing, but the dissonance between my theoretical understanding and lack of a refined eye was an obstacle in of itself and I would have loved if I had someone to help me see better earlier in my photographic journey. Also, I believe perspective is important. Again, art is communication, and not having feedback along my journey meant that I was not being informed of how my work was received; that can be reduced to not knowing if I’m effectively communicating or not. As an early artist that’s still discovering who they are as an artist, it’s important to receive feedback to better align your “intuitive feeling” with the reality of what and how your work communicates with others. It’s like communicating with a friend where you have a conversation in your head and believe it’ll be the perfect way to present it, but that also may prove to be false once reality sets in; with enough of these situations, you become a better communicator. To a large degree, that’s what art is to me – language – and I wish I had gotten more feedback to develop and gauge my communication skills via photography.
Christopher, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My name is Chris Bull and as of recent I consider myself a portrait and travel photographer. It was a long journey, but I’ve finally landed here in the arts, a place I feel completes me. Long before photography, and a bit before school, I raced BMX professionally which took me all over the world. I did this as a profession for nine years while also balancing higher education in the latter half of my athletic career. While competing in BMX, school was also a big interest for me; I received degrees in chemistry and physics in my hometown of Akron, Ohio, then went on to Denver, Colorado to receive my doctorate in pharmacy while also working as an organic chemist. This was well and great until 2015 when my health plummeted and injuries amounted to the point of being unable to ever race again. On the surface, this doesn’t seem so serious, however for me the reality was that I completely lost myself and had to relearn who I was, how to find who I was, and essentially relearn life. Though I wasn’t traveling for BMX anymore, I continued to exercise my travel bug and spent all of my free time visiting various countries. I graduated with my doctorate in 2016 and after a continued three years traveling and being infatuated with the people of every country I visited, a friend gifted me a camera. I took it with me to Pakistan in December of 2019 before I understood what cameras do and realized that this is exactly what I needed in my life. Since that point, it has been my mission to find people to photograph who have a unique story, an interesting perspective, or maybe just don’t have a voice.
I would say that if I have to define my work, I am a portrait photographer. Even when standing at the most scenic locations in the world, I am so drawn to photograph the people nearby, or looking for someone to photograph. With that said, the majority of my work that you see publicly is unpaid work because I am the one searching and finding people who give me the honor to photograph them, though I do have a small studio space where I do portrait sessions for actors, bands, or anyone who will allow me some creative direction to photograph them.
I can’t sit here and pretend that experience sets me apart from anyone as that would be blatantly dishonest. In fact, let me just say that I’m one of the least experienced photographers around. Though I will say that the emotion and intent behind my work sets me apart from the pack. Each person that sits or stands in front of my camera is treated with the utmost respect no matter the life they live or the decisions they have made. When you’re in front of my lens, it is a safe space where you will not be judged. In fact, it’s the place where I want to get to know you better so I can dignify you through imagery. That, coupled with my eagerness to learn, is where you will see a difference with me.
To date, my proudest moment in photography is my recent trip to Iran. I had always wanted to visited Iran for its ancient culture, beautiful landscapes, famous cooking, and of course its hospitable people, but it is no easy task for an American to get there. It was a year-long process that took a lot of work, time, patience, more work, jumping through hoops, late night and early morning phone calls to Iran, interviews, etc. but my visa was ultimately approved. Timely, however, because my visa got approved at the height of the protests caused by the extreme violation of women’s rights. Needless to say, it was a very tense time to be there, especially for an American with a camera. Skipping over the many close calls and interrogations, I realized that I wanted to photograph the women of Iran, especially during this time, though it would be a near-impossible task. With patience and persistence, rejection after rejection, I found myself connecting more and more with the people there and many women opened themselves up to me and allowed me to have conversations about what was going on in Iran and even allowed me to photograph them. I am proud of myself for being persistent and accomplishing that, but even more proud of the fearless women in Iran who are standing up for what they believe is right. Not every adventure or every portrait is going to be of such depth, but I want this story to be indicative of the amount of emotion and intention I put into my work.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I think as an artist, it’s hard to feel reward, and in the glimpses when we do feel that, it’s short-lived or downplayed from the recognition that we are in fact feeling rewarded. In a deluded and twisted sense, I feel like that’s exactly what the reward is, though: the inability to mitigate the passion that drives artists to continue doing what they do. The fact that we identify so strongly with something, or have such a desire to communicate, or the fact that we have something we so dearly need to say through our work, is in of itself an indicator of a sense of self; a sense of belonging (to self). I always go back to saying that art is communication, and a lot of the satisfaction of communication for me isn’t necessarily the result or the effect, but the desire to communicate, or the knowing that I have something I feel strong enough about to want to communicate it. Of course we want to get better at communicating, and of course getting better can influence the effect of our communication, but I think the constant journey in having something to express is, in a dark and backwards sense, where I remain satisfied. I think about the times when I felt the most rewarded as an artist, and very rarely are those the times when I felt accomplished. Going one step further, I also believe that satisfaction can come from the fact that I know I will never be content. It’s a double-edged sword, but somewhere at the end of that sword is satisfaction along with the other elements that would suggest otherwise.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
One lesson I had to unlearn was that only perfection is acceptable; that a step backwards is always a step backwards. I’ve had to learn that a step backwards is only a step backwards if you allow it to be. In a more practical sense, the lesson is that there is room for mistakes, and making mistakes doesn’t always dictate your ability or your potential. Many people understand this already – some never having to unlearn this – but it wasn’t until later in life that I realized I had to make significant changes. As a former professional athlete and scientist, I got to where I was through the cutthroat mentality that mistakes are never acceptable and that you should punish yourself when they occur. For better or for worse, that is the mentality that made way for success in those fields and therefore it was programmed into my mind. In the beginning of photography, before I knew what my approach to the craft would be, there was more room for mistakes as they would be chalked up to “just starting” or “experimentation”. Once I got a handle on how things worked, I quickly went down the route of perfectionism and expected much greater things out of myself. The problem is that when you’re new to something, especially something of creative and artistic nature, expecting more of yourself doesn’t work if you don’t have the tools to figure out how. I didn’t realize how this was destroying me until I traveled to Romania in 2021. I was ecstatic to be traveling again (remember, early pandemic times) and I had a million visuals of how I just KNEW the trip was going to go. Well, it didn’t pan out like that. It was difficult for me to connect with people in the amount of time that I had and I produced no work that I had envisioned producing. This made me frustrated, sad, lonely, among other things that completely derailed me emotionally. My solution was to force things to work out the way that I wanted. Long story short, I was able to get the “shots” that I wanted. Upon returning home, I looked back through all of my work and realized that the photos I took before forcing anything, albeit different, were honest and full of emotion. The shots that I forced and manipulated myself into getting looked as chaotic and dishonest as they felt at the time of producing them. This realization derailed me further and sent me into a spiral of confusion until I contemplated putting down the camera for good. I’ll save time here because the story is similar, but it happened again one year later in Colombia. The moral of the story is that there is a lot of variance for the quality of work we produce. As artists, there are hundreds of factors at play that can work for or against us at any moment. We can choose to accept that we as people vary as wildly as the factors we’re swimming in, or we can beat ourselves up over the errors that we’ve made until we can’t produce good, meaningful work. To say that I have perfected this is a lie, but I’ve at least progressed to step 1: admission.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.chrisbullphoto.com
- Instagram: @chrisbullphoto
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chris.bull.3557/
Image Credits
Photo credit: Chris Bull