We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Caroline White a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Caroline with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
I’m pretty hard on myself, so I always think my work ethic could be much better.
I see many people around me who I admire and who inspire me to tap into being “divinely guided” which seems to be a real powerful driver, much more so than “being successful”
Ambition in and of itself is not enough. I don’t think ego is enough – I have hit certain milestones that were probably largely ego-driven, when I was younger, and that “high” is extremely temporary, though it brought me certain successes (which have afforded me a certain lifestyle, and I have my amazing clients to thank hugely for that).
I think I have a pretty healthy ego, but it is not big enough to be my main driver, at least not anymore. After many years of trying to impress The World, it is really myself I am trying to impress the most now I think, and in fact this is much easier to gauge really, as sometimes it’s hard to even know what the hell others truly think of something. But I know in my gut and my bones and my soul when something inspires ME, when it sings. It almost… vibrates, like a tuning fork. Like a motorcycle engine. You can feel it revving. It’s like being in love. Colors become more vibrant. The need for food and sleep dissipate. There’s a whole reservoir of energy being tapped into.
I think though that many of us need to take that ride, to go through a “comparison-itis” phase in our creative evolution, order to work through it and get it out of our system, and to then graduate to something deeper.
I would like to say that those on the other side are lucky – those that are seemingly tapped into divine guidance from the get-go, imbued with faith, intuition, a sort of purity, and perhaps less tethered to practical worries – but I’ve met people like that and they’ve sometimes told me they wished badly to have my more practical drivers in life as I do. Tenacity, focus, grind. So perhaps neither is good or bad. (Thank God we are all so wildly different from one another because life would be so boring if we were all the same!) Maybe a combination of these is the sweet spot. External/ Internal.
Art is so weird. They say you have to make it for yourself first. But if stranded on a desert island, which artists would continue creating (assuming there were unlimited amounts of fruits and fish and fresh water)?
I think I’ve always needed a certain amount of security, a “cushion” in life in order to be “okay”
so I have been a workhorse of sorts, a service provider, a marketing person, a sales person (for personal branding and headshot photography for entrepreneurs, coaches, creatives and business people),
and only in the last 2-3 years have I been stepping more and more into being a real artist in my own eyes, which is where the very escapist and mystical underwater fine art photography comes in.
My great aunt was a hugely world famous photojournalist. Margaret Bourke White. She photographed the first cover of LIFE Magazine in 1936, was the first photographer for FORTUNE Magazine, the first female war correspondent credentialed to work in combat zones during World War II. She captured Gandhi, FDR, the Holocaust, the Great Depression and the Dustbowl, often with a focus on racial injustice. So THAT and HER was definitely a driver for me, both negatively and positively. I will never fill those shoes. But I would like to attempt to make her proud in some way. I often wonder what she would think of me (and DSLRs and laptops and lightroom…)
Photography is a tough business today. Everyone has a camera. There is a LOT of competition. It is saturated. But I never get down about that fact for very long, when I just think back to my great aunt, lugging massive equipment around, being in war zones, being surrounded by men, having to be resourceful without any internet, working with all kinds of chemicals in the dark room. (She died well before I was born so I never met her.)
So, having certain perspectives helps motivate me, helps me appreciate “what is.”
That’s another reason I love underwater photography – it makes all my shoots on land by comparison suddenly feel like a cake-walk. For a while I was holding my breath for underwater shoots, before I discovered my “snuba” – a battery powered device that floats on the surface and pumps fresh air through a 20 ft. long tube & respirator. My first shoot on land after a long period of only underwater shoots was so funny, I was just so ecstatic I was able to BREATHE! I was like “this is amazing!!!”
I dabbled in stand-up comedy in my previous life as an actor. Stand-up can be excruciating, humiliating. But once you do it a bunch, almost everything else seems so easy by comparison.
Being a working actor also instilled certain work ethics in me. If you wait around for stuff to land in your lap, you may be waiting for a very long time. For 99.7% of people, you have to go out and make stuff happen, put yourself out there, be bold, get a lot of no’s, and just keep on going. Next. Next. Next. Not taking rejection personally (which now usually comes in the form of “you’re too expensive”). Sometimes you really need a nap or a glass of wine.
Yeah so I guess it’s a weird very inelegant balance between appreciation of where I’m at, while still going after big goals and dreams. I have definitely failed a lot. A ton really. If you’ve escaped all failure, my guess is you aren’t going for anything big. The only way to escape failure is by hiding, and honestly even hiding IS itself a failure usually. I’ve gotten the time I need to go “lick my wounds” shorter and shorter as I get older.
My Dad coached my grade school basketball team and I kept fouling out at games. He said “kid, if you’re never fouling out, you’re not playing hard enough.” We one only one game that season but that is one of my favorite pieces of wisdom of all time. Man were we abysmal that season!
I think burnout is also simply just unavoidable in this modern life. You will burnout. If you can try to recognize it coming at you, hear it knocking at your door, then you can navigate it better. And then there are days I am pretty much glued to the bed and couch, sometimes 2, 3, 4 days in a row. But I just became a dog mom, so the comfort of vegging in melancholy will have to be replaced with sleepy disheveled neighborhood walks.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’ve been a professional portrait photographer since 2005, full time since 2011. My clients have been both industry leaders and up-and-coming entrepreneurs, speakers, authors, and coaches, mostly in Los Angeles and NYC, as well as serving Chicago, Sarasota, San Diego. A few years ago I finally got a $2000 underwater housing for my DSLR camera, started taking freediving and swimming lessons – as an adult – and begin doing photography and video underwater, in the ocean, and mostly in private pools. While my branding photography work has been mostly very commercially appealing, bright, positive and real, my underwater work is all about escape from the everyday mundane, beauty, magic, fantasy, other-worldly, evocative of outerspace, or the idea of the “womb”. This style and medium lends itself often to photo or video shoots for maternity, couples, dancers, ocean-lovers and conservationists, divers, and entrepreneurs with a spiritual, mystical or metaphysical aspect to their work.
I may be the only underwater photographer who in both my youth and adulthood had traumatic near-drowning experiences, and I still get nervous in deep waters occasionally. For these reasons I am well suited for people with water nervousness or even fear that they want to transform through a creative experience, in a safe warm shallow private pool.
Most of the underwater photographers that I follow, started as “water babies” and are amazing swimmers, surfers, athletes, world class divers, who later picked up cameras. I’ve sort of done underwater photography quite backwards. These guys have often looked at me like an idiot with two heads but I don’t care!
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I think you have to be hungry. You have to really want it. There are just too many moments where it would be so easy to give up and quit. There has to be something driving you through those moments. And the driver can shift, but there needs to be a drive, or a few different drivers that change hands.
You have to develop a weird balance of dealing with failure, while striving and pushing yourself.
As an artist you have to develop an eye. This can really take a long time. I am so jealous of those who develop their “eye” early on. Their style. It took me a long time, but I loved trying different things, experimenting. I learn best by doing. I hate watching youtube tutorials. Just lemme figure it out. I’m terrible at giving directions but if I’m in the drivers seat, I will get us there. Don’t give up. You are also allowed to pivot. Pivoting is not quitting. And if you find something you love more, then by all means QUIT! I wish I had quit acting sooner. But I just needed to get it ALL out of my system. I don’t miss it. I really ran that hunger into the ground.
My younger self, I would say STOP WORRYING but I don’t think she would listen. Before I could even finish the sentence she’d be going “but but but…” and if she won’t stop worrying, how can I convince her to create for HERSELF first and not others?
My other advice is, to try to be clever, and don’t be afraid to piss just a few people off. If you please everyone you won’t like yourself.
Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
I loved Big Magic. That whole idea that ideas are like these entities that visit you like ghosts, and if you don’t pay attention to them, if you don’t feed them, if you don’t attempt to give life to that idea, it will leave you and someone else will do it and you’ll go “hey I thought of that” but it won’t matter because you didn’t do anything about it. I invented facebook.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.carolinewhitephotography.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/carolinewfineart
- Youtube: www.youtube.com/carolinegirl81
Image Credits
all photos (c) Caroline White Photography
