Why I am sometimes afraid I have photographed everything already

Sometimes I catch myself in a strange kind of tiredness. Not physical, but visual. As though my eyes are saturated. As though I woke up one day and thought: I have photographed everything already.

Every street corner looks familiar, every scene feels like a repeat. And deep inside, that small voice starts whispering: what have you got left to add?

That nagging feeling that everything has been made

It is not even that I have no inspiration. On the contrary, my head works overtime and in my diary personal work and commercial jobs fight for attention.

But in my street photography I mostly see a great many new street photographers all making the same work. Do not misunderstand me: some four years ago I was that new street photographer.

I see 85mm lenses making the same portraits from a distance and I get annoyed by the f/1.2 apertures. People find that attractive soon enough, I think, and I know that photo will end up on Instagram and be forgotten. They are not exciting photos, and of course I once made them too.

I see a 28mm lens up close at f/8 and understand that photographer better, but those photos have been made already as well. Sometimes I see a hidden gem and end up on Julia’s Street Repeat and realise that the gem is one of a dozen too. Everything has been made already. It gnaws.

The same round, once more

Perhaps a change is as good as a rest, and I decide to pick other cities for my wanderings. They inspire, and for a brief moment I think I have found the holy grail. New cities, new images.

Then I come home and lay them beside my old images. Rather a lot of similarities after all. A different background does not make the story fundamentally different.

A man runs for the train and I think: ‘Got that one’. As though I am collecting football stickers and only need that one goalkeeper from that one club before my album is full.

I stare seriously into the distance and remember scrapbooks with A-Team stickers, a red one and a yellow one. I spent hours sticking pictures in, saving for new packets and swapping in the playground. Once the album was full, the book started gathering dust. I never looked at it again.

What if I have already made my best photo?

Seriously. What if that is so? Perhaps it is the woman cleaning windows in Domburg, or the boy in the New York subway. I also like that photo in Paris, of the woman in the hat on those endlessly wide steps. Would those be my best images, then? Am I carrying coals to Newcastle? Who knows.

The doubt hits. It feels as though I trained for a year for the Nijmegen Four Days Marches and the committee decided, the day before the start, never to organise them again. What now?

I feel frustration. Mostly frustration, and honestly no appetite at all to go out into the street again. What am I even doing it for. I repeat myself, over and over. The cake seems to be finished, does it not?

It is all in how you look at it.

On YouTube I see Hayden explain that, driven by the urge for likes and views, he has deleted his YouTube channel. A million subscribers gone, deals with Sony among others gone, and Jesus has helped him remove the madness.

I am taken aback. This feeling of having done everything can drive you completely mad. Hayden in this case; happily I am nowhere near that.

I watch his second video on his new channel and realise that on this newly started channel he is doing exactly the same as on his old one. Photo battles and the like. Popular. Nothing new.

Absent-mindedly I scroll through my own photos on my website and see change. Improvement. My older photos and recent photos sit perfectly well side by side, but the light is different. I open my Instagram. The same change.

My old photos are sometimes a little dark and flat, and in the new ones I seem to be looking for light, looking for light far more. Interesting.

Looking differently

I do not think I have changed all that much myself. And perhaps it is logical that I then think I keep making the same thing. Change comes slowly and sits in small things. It seems that I am certainly making new things. Not because I have become different, but because I have started looking differently.

Things fall into place. I understand better why I no longer find many street photographs that interesting. I understand why I hold on to that urge for a better image; my way of looking is changing, after all.

What I found beautiful yesterday need not be beautiful today. A photo is an interplay of the moment and how you feel at that moment. And my doubt has blocked that feeling, it seems.

Perhaps it is no bad thing to hear that nagging voice now and then. It forces you to look again, not at the world, but at yourself as a photographer.

Because even if you have photographed everything once, today is still different. The light falls just that bit differently. Your mood is new. And precisely there, in that difference, lies the reason I go out into the street again after all. To see afresh what I thought I already knew.

This article first appeared on Photofacts.nl (the biggest photography platform in the Netherlands), for which I have written a monthly column since 2025.