Commitment Issues: Why I Can’t Stick to One Subject

Spend any time online and you’ll soon hear the advice: find your niche. It’s everywhere. From YouTube channels to photography blogs, they all echo the same mantra: specialise, focus, narrow down. They’ll tell you that the path to success is to pick one subject, one style, one aesthetic: and stick with it! That’s how you build an audience. That’s how people recognise your work.

And maybe, maybe for some, that’s true.

But for many of us, the idea of staying neatly in one lane feels less like focus and more like confinement.

Photography, at its heart, is about curiosity, the urge to see differently, to explore, to wander without a map. To demand that this curiosity be confined to a single subject or style feels a bit like asking a musician to play only one chord, or a chef to cook only with potatoes. Sure, you might get good at it. But you’ll miss out on a world of sound, flavours, textures, and ideas.

The Myth of Consistency

The pressure to have a niche often comes from social media, where algorithms reward predictability. If you post the same type of image, same subject, same tones, same composition, you become “recognisable.” You build a brand. But at what cost?

The problem is, art doesn’t thrive on repetition, it thrives on discovery. When your creative energy becomes tethered to audience expectation, you risk turning your photography into a production line rather than a process of exploration. The work becomes predictable, even to you.

Sure, consistency has its place. A body of work needs cohesion. A project like Obscura or Linea benefits from thematic focus. But that doesn’t mean your entire practice should be reduced to a single recurring motif. You can work in series, explore subjects deeply, and still remain open to other impulses: to the surprise of a fleeting shadow, a shifting landscape, a torn poster that stops you in your tracks.

Curiosity Over Category

Some of the greatest photographers resisted neat classification. Look at Harry Callahan; his work moved between street scenes, nature studies, multiple exposures, and even intimate portraits of his wife Eleanor. Aaron Siskind drifted from documentary work to pure abstraction.

Saul Leiter, celebrated for his painterly street photography, was also a prolific painter and fashion photographer. None of them fit tidily into a “niche.” They followed curiosity wherever it led.

And that’s the point: great work often comes from not knowing where you’re going. It’s in the wandering, the mistakes, the experiments that fail but teach you something, that your voice emerges.

A niche might help you build a following but exploration helps you build a vision.

The Fear of Confusion

One of the arguments for finding a niche is clarity. If your portfolio jumps between architecture, portraits, abstracts, and landscapes, how will anyone know what kind of photographer you are? But perhaps the better question is: why does that matter?

If you’re an artist rather than just a content creator, your identity isn’t defined by category, but by sensibility. Your way of seeing, the light you chase, the shapes you notice, the rhythms you find, is the thread that ties your work together, no matter what the subject is.

It’s the how of your seeing, not the what, that defines your voice.

Freedom Over Formula

There’s also the danger of burnout. If you force yourself into a narrow groove, say, urban minimalism or seascapes or macro leaves, you risk boredom.

And boredom is the enemy of art. The spark fades when the process becomes mechanical. Variety, on the other hand, keeps the eye alive.

Shooting something unfamiliar resets your perspective, shakes off habits, and often leads to breakthroughs in unexpected places.

For me, moving between projects like Obscura (abstracts of decay), Luminara (monochrome light studies), and Linea (minimal architectural forms) isn’t a lack of focus - it’s more like a form of balance.

Each project feeds the others. The texture I notice in peeling posters makes me more sensitive to the patterns in buildings; the geometry of architecture sharpens my eye for abstraction. It’s all part of the same conversation.

In the End, It’s About Growth

The notion of a niche assumes you should arrive somewhere and stay put. But photography, like any art, is a journey. Your interests shift, your skills evolve, your questions deepen. What fascinated you five years ago might feel stale today. That’s not inconsistency - that’s growth.

So by all means, build series, explore themes, develop cohesive bodies of work. But resist the idea that you must pick one path and never stray. The world is far too interesting for that. Let your curiosity lead, not your “brand.”

Because in the long run, it’s not the niche that defines you.

It’s the eye behind the lens.