I have been photographing women since 2008, and in that time I have watched the same woman walk into my studio dressed as about eleven different people.

She was the Myspace girl first, with the side fringe and the camera held above her head. Then she was a hipster in thick glasses she didn't need. Then she painted the hallway grey, bought a wide-brimmed hat and started selling leggings to her school friends. She's been beige. She's been dewy. Right now she's carrying a film camera and a canvas tote and telling me she's “going analog,” which is funny, because I first photographed her doing exactly that in about 2013.

I've seen the whole cycle come round once. That makes me either very wise or very old, and my knees would like to vote.

I don't think any of these women were fake, by the way. They were trying things on, the way we all do. But after nearly twenty years behind a camera, watching women become a type and then one day just stop being it, I couldn't help but wonder…

Why do we keep performing ourselves? And when, if ever, does the performance stop?

There is a particular type of photographer whose entire portfolio is 18-year-old girls, and every single one of them is captioned “muse.”

Let's call them the Muse Collector. They’re usually somewhere between 45 and dead inside. Their muses are always lying down. They are always slightly damp, as though they've been caught in a light drizzle on the way to the shoot, and they're looking up at the camera through their eyelashes like a spaniel who's eaten your sandwich. They call it art, and they’ll tell you about light for forty minutes if you let them.

We all know they’re uncool. Most of us have known for years.

But I ran a women's portrait studio for a long time, and what I learned in that studio is that a lot of women don't know why this style of portraiture is uncool. They can feel it, a bit like a draught. They just can't name it, because they've been looking at the world through the male lens their whole lives. Films, adverts, magazine covers and every portrait they've ever been told was beautiful were made the same way.

And once you see it, you can't unsee it. Which is a lovely moment, and also a slightly horrible one, because then you have to go back and look at everything again. I did. I unpicked the shit out of that until there was nothing left.

So I couldn't help but wonder…

How do you explain the male gaze to a woman who has only ever seen herself through it?

She declared 2026 “The Age of Analog” in a video. She has an “analog bag,” which is a canvas tote full of craft supplies she takes out instead of her phone, and she'll show you exactly what's in it, in a reel, with a trending sound. Her journal has a $150 cover and has been photographed in golden hour more times than I've had hot dinners. Hobonichi, the Japanese planner brand, has been mentioned more than 1.5 million times on Instagram.

She's selling something, too, even when she isn't. That Chicago stationery shop with the 45-minute sell-out has a 40-person staff that includes a social media content team, and its co-owner calls social media “by far the most important driver” of customers through the door. One creator in the same story only started journaling because she saw a Hobonichi on TikTok.

So yes, there's a performance going on. Of course there is. You can't announce to your followers that you're spending less time online without spotting the joke.

But here's where I land, and you're welcome to fight me on it. Posting about something doesn't make it fake. I post my journal pages. I'm a photographer. If something's beautiful I'm going to point a camera at it, and I'll probably tell you about it afterwards.

The test for me is whether you'd still do it if the post got four likes and one of them was your mum. The Analog Influencer's bag only exists if it's filmed. My journal is mostly lists, crossings-out and handwriting I can't read the next morning, and nobody will ever see 95% of it. I'd still write in it on a desert island. I'd photograph it too, if I could find one bit of decent light.

Getty Images emailed me today to tell me it's going bankrupt, and that I'm not to worry about it.

It's the corporate version of a man ringing to say he's moving back in with his mum, but the relationship is absolutely fine. Business as usual, they said. Keep uploading, the royalties will keep coming, nothing to see here.

I've spent more than two decades in this industry, and for most of them Getty has been its grand dame: the archive, the gallery on Eastcastle Street, the photo of every red carpet you've ever seen. So I couldn't help but wonder…

When everyone has millions of images at their fingertips, what's a stock photo actually worth? And is uploading to stock libraries still worth a photographer's time?