Creativity? (Patreon)

How would you define creativity? If I may over exaggerate for the purposes of making a point; the birth of a creative thought is an awe-inspiring moment when you come up with a new idea, a new, project or a new way to look at something. Exactly what it looks like on the big screen. Creativity comes from within, it comes from the heart.

The market of art has become over saturated with people who are creating for the wrong reasons. Now you are going to ask "Who am I to judge what other people create and why?" Well, I feel very strongly about this and: artists create for the love of their medium, and entrepreneurs create to make a quick buck. Frankly, if you create for a quick buck: Fuck you. I will only ever support people who I know create for the love of what they do.

This next part is going to be somewhat hard to cover without using names, so bare with me.

Recently, someone has created a Patreon account and has seen great success in such a short amount of time. Then other people looked at that person and said "hey... they're making a shit ton of money from this... I'm going to capitalize on that too!" And then those other people go and steal that original creators ideas for tiers, goals and rewards, projects, etc. I find it absolutely disgusting that someone would take what we, creators put so much time and effort into and say "I'm going to try and make money off of what their idea was"

For example: Reed and I created our Reed X AW Media Vol. II, we spent enormous amounts of time, money and effort finding the perfect location, shopping for the perfect lingerie, FaceTime and phone calls dedicated to envisioning the book. Post shoot, editing, finalizing, sorting, building and printing the photos into a book format. It almost seemed surreal when we held those books in our hands to be able to say "We created this." When only a day later, a person who owns a camera, no, I am not even going to call them a photographer; comments on a post "Hey @________ let's do this!"

I can not begin to explain how irate, annoyed and infuriated I was that someone would simply copy what we worked so hard to create, just because they saw they could make money.

My point is, I do not care if I continue to make $24 a month from my Patreon, I will continue to post content, I will continue to shoot and I will continue to keep my head held high, because I know that I am creating out of my love for photography. Not because I see that another photographer is making $3000 a month doing the same thing.

As I said before, I will said it again. If you create simply because you see that you can make a quick paycheck from calling yourself an artist, photographer, or model. Fuck you.

- AW Media