Everyone Wants to Be an Influencer: Creative Direction for Photographers

A cliché, pejorative and over saturated title. I stopped trying to be an influencer and started creative directing instead.

A few weeks ago Kate Bartlett said something on TikTok I haven't been able to put down: luxury brands care more about the aesthetic than the impressions, and mass market brands care more about the impressions than the aesthetic.

It sounds like taste. It is actually arithmetic. A luxury house will run a campaign most people scroll past without understanding, because it was never addressed to them, and being misunderstood by the majority is a cost already priced in. Mass market cannot price that in. It needs volume to function at all, so the look follows whatever is working this month.

What the two metrics measure

Impressions and aesthetic are not two settings on the same dial. Impressions count how many people the work reached. Aesthetic determines whether anyone could have identified the work as yours before your name appeared on it. An account can score extremely well on the first and score nothing on the second, and most of them do.

Almost every default in the creator playbook optimises for the first: the trending sound, the hook that outperformed last week, the format lifted from a larger account. None of it is illegitimate and I use all of it. But a set of tools built to maximise reach will, once it has authority over the work itself, produce a mass market brand regardless of what the brand says about itself in its bio.

The bottom line

Distribution is a numbers problem, and the aesthetic is not. I will test a hook ten ways before I will test whether my photos are warm or cool; one of those is the packaging and the other is the thing in the box.

Getting it wrong in the other direction is its own failure. Refusing reach on principle does not make work premium, it makes it unseen. The argument here is not that testing is the problem, but that test results should never be allowed to reach the aesthetic.

Saturation

The market is saturated and you already know it. A hundred people are doing the same thing, and you have been told that YOU are what makes it different, YOU are the brand. That is true and it is not much to work with. Post another cinematic video with the same filmic LUT from the same mountainside in the Dolomites this year (I'm so jealous, it looks incredible) and you will get likes, probably follows. The problem is not that the video is derivative. The problem is that it is reproducible: the location, the LUT and the edit are all available to anyone with the same afternoon and the same preset, which is why a hundred versions exist and none of them accrue to anybody.

What cannot be generated

I wrote a paper this summer arguing that film's value is not nostalgia but indexicality: a negative cannot be generated from an AI prompt, because light physically struck a surface at a particular moment and left a record of it. The digital industry is now spending heavily to retrofit that property through cryptographic provenance signing. Film never lost it.

The same test applies to a body of work. Content assembled from whatever is performing is generatable by definition, because the inputs are public and the output is an average of them. A body of work produced under fixed decisions is indexical to the person who made those decisions. It could not have come from anyone else, since nobody else was holding to that particular set of rules. That is the only part of a creator brand a model cannot reproduce, and it is why the aesthetic is worth defending against your own analytics.

What creative direction actually is

Creative director is a title people hand themselves to feel better about slow growth, so let me make it boring. It is a small set of decisions made in advance that do not move when a post underperforms.

Mine: I shoot in warm light and I don't fake it afterwards, my colour is built in camera through a locked set of recipes, if it's edited in post the colour story matches what comes out of my Fujifilms as best as possible, I photograph people predominantly backlit, and I don't post anything I couldn't hand to a client the next morning. Four decisions. Between them, they disqualify an enormous amount of content that would do numbers.

The audit

The test for whether you have this is not a mood board. Open your grid, look at the last thirty posts the way a stranger would, and see whether the rules are legible. Not what you post about: how it consistently looks. If a stranger would have to guess, what you have is a feed.

What changed here

This is the shift I have been making, and it is why a few things around here look different. The guides are not going anywhere. What has changed is where they sit: aperture and shutter speed were never the subject, they are the instruments that get a specific look out of my head and onto a screen, and the look is the part that belongs to me. The aesthetic comes first now and the settings follow it.

Find your camera and dive in: Start Here

Where to start

Write down four rules covering colour, light, subject, and one thing you refuse to shoot. Put them somewhere you will see them in a week when a post flops. Then audit backwards: thirty posts against four rules, paying attention to how much of your best-performing work breaks them, because that is the work quietly costing you. After that, optimise distribution as hard as you like. Hooks, sounds, posting times, ads, all of it. The rules never enter the test.

The Final Roll

Influencing lets the audience decide what gets made. Creative direction decides first, then goes looking for the people it was made for. The first accumulates impressions. The second accumulates evidence that you were the one who made it.

xo Steph