Burnout and photography: how a crisis made me a better photographer

At the end of 2020 I hit a wall. Not slowly, but all at once. At least, that is how it felt. Looking back, I had been ignoring the signs for months.

I was co-owner and chief operating officer of Yoast, one of the biggest WordPress plugins in the world. I worked hard, I worked a lot, and it felt as though I worked all the time. And one day I could not do it any more.

The burnout announced itself the way these things apparently do: not with a bang, but with a slow exhaustion you only notice once there is nothing left.

What happened next

The twelve months that followed were the hardest of my life and also the most decisive. I sold my share in Yoast. I turned everything around. I chose photography.

That sounds romantic. It was not. It was necessity. Photography was the only thing where I did not think about performance. When I photographed on the street there were no KPIs, no reviews, nobody to answer to. There was only the image that was there or was not.

What I took with me

What the burnout gave me, besides a couple of years off my life, was a different capacity for looking. At people, I mean. As chief operating officer I assessed people. That is the job. You look at performance, at potential, at behaviour in relation to the rest of the team.

In street photography you cannot do that. You photograph a stranger and you know nothing. Not what happened that morning, not what is going on at home, not what they are like. You only see what is there at that moment.

That absence of judgement is what I took with me into my portrait sessions.

What this means for PAUSE

PAUSE did not come about because I thought: this is a good product. PAUSE came about because I know myself what it is like to forget who you are when you stop running for a moment.

In the sessions I do I do not ask about achievements. I do not ask what you have accomplished or what your plan is. I ask who you are when you stop thinking. And once you have found that, I take a photo.

That may sound bigger than it is. It is just a conversation and a camera. But the photo that comes out is guaranteed to be different from what you are used to. I know that not only from my clients, I know it from myself.

➡ More about PAUSE and how a session works
➡ More about who I am and how I work