The Smaller Room

On free work, faceless machines, and the people who walk in anyway

I caught myself doing it again the other day. Opening the app, thumb already moving towards the stats before I’d even decided to look. Numbers I’d told myself I’d stopped checking. A little dip since last week. A post that landed flat when I was sure it would fly. And underneath it all, that low hum I’ve started to carry around: the quiet sense that no matter how much you give, the machine wants more.

I’ve written about social media here before, back when I was mapping out where to plant my flag and why. This is not that piece. This is the one underneath it. The one about what it actually feels like to make something you love and hand it over, freely, to a system that has quietly decided free things aren’t worth showing anyone.

Lets Talk About Social Media as a Photographer

The Two Sides of the Same Frame

Let me be fair before I’m anything else, because the truth of this is that it cuts both ways.

There is real joy here. I don’t want to lose sight of that. The endorphin hit when someone I’ve never met leaves a comment that shows they properly looked. The photographers I now count as friends, people I’d never have crossed paths with in a hundred years of ordinary life. The feeling, on a grey and flat sort of day, of a single kind message landing and reminding you why you bother. That is not nothing. That is, honestly, most of the reason I’m still here.

But it sits alongside a pressure that never quite switches off. The sense that you’re always slightly behind. That you should be posting more, engaging more, feeding the thing more. For some, photography is a slow process. Even when it isn’t, even when you work fast and on instinct the way I do, the picture still needs a moment before you know what it is. The platforms want fast. That mismatch is the ache, and I don’t think I’m alone in feeling it.

The Bit Where I’m Allowed to Be Honest

I’ll admit I’ve grown a little disillusioned with Substack lately.

The changes over the past while have clearly pulled eyeballs away from work like ours. Quieter, slower, less designed to make you stop your scroll and hand over a fiver. I’ve been lucky, genuinely lucky, to have so many loyal subscribers who turn up week after week. But it’s hard to ignore that what reaches people, and what doesn’t, is increasingly dictated by faceless machines and the corporate logic humming behind them.

Here’s the part I want to be careful about, though, because it would be easy to tip into a moan. I don’t begrudge them the money. Not for a second. I use this platform for nothing, not a penny, and I’d be a fool and a hypocrite to demand a free service and then complain it’s run like a business. Of course it wants revenue. Of course it points the spotlight where the till is.

And to be clear, I’m not against making a living from photography. I sell zines. I get paid to talk at camera clubs now, which still slightly astonishes me. That work has a price, and I’m glad of it. But even there, the choice sits with you. If you’d like to support me by buying a physical copy of a zine, then thank you, honestly. If you’d rather take the digital download for nothing, or drop a token amount in, that’s grand too. The door stays open either way.

The writing here is the same bargain, just without the price tag. I came to Substack because I wanted somewhere to write alongside my photographs. Somewhere the words and the pictures could sit together and mean something, the way I’ve always looked for a sense of humanity in the landscape, some trace of us that gives the scene a reason to exist. Putting a paywall across that would change its shape, turn a thing I do for love into a thing I do for a transaction, and I’m not ready for that. Maybe I never will be.

So yes, the door I’ve propped open here costs me reach. I’ve made my peace with it. I’d rather an open door and a smaller room than a paywall and a bigger one.

What the Numbers Can’t See

And this is where the whole thing turns over for me.

The dashboard tells me my free work isn’t worth promoting. Fine. But a while back a reader left a comment on one of my photographs. Nothing dramatic. They told me it reminded them of the town they grew up in. That was it. An ordinary scene I’d made on an ordinary walk, and somehow it had reached back through the years and set them down somewhere they knew.

I made that picture for no one in particular and gave it away for nothing. And it did the one thing I most want a photograph to do. It held a feeling long enough for a stranger to recognise it.

The dashboard didn’t log any of that. It can’t. It doesn’t measure the comment thread that runs on for three days between people who’ve never met. It can’t see the reader who says a piece landed on exactly the wrong week and made it a little more bearable. Those are measures of value too. One kind runs on revenue. The other runs on something older and harder to name, and I know with total certainty which of the two I trust.

The community I’ve found here is not a consolation prize for the reach I’ve given up. It is the entire point. It quietly proves that work made freely, for the love of it, has enormous worth. Just not the kind that shows up on a chart, and not the kind a faceless machine has ever known how to see.

So I’ll keep turning up. Words alongside pictures, given freely, for anyone who wants them. The machines can point their light wherever the money is. I’ll be over here, in the smaller room with the open door, making things for love and talking to the people who bothered to walk in.

That, it turns out, was always the reach that mattered.

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I’d love to know how this sits with you. Do you feel that same push and pull, the joy tangled up with the pressure? And where do you land on it? Do you make your work for love, for a living, or somewhere in the messy middle?