Why does everything start looking the same?
A few nights ago I was scrolling through Instagram for way too long again, and somewhere in between all those images I suddenly realized I could barely remember anything I had just seen.
Not because the work was bad.
Actually, most of it looked incredible.
Beautiful light.
Perfect skin.
Perfect editing.
Perfect everything.
And still… almost nothing stayed with me emotionally.
That thought kept sitting with me afterward.
Anton Corbijn exhibition
Because I remember a time when images affected me differently.
When I could stare at a photograph for minutes and feel something difficult to explain.
Not because it was technically perfect —
but because there was some kind of life inside it.
Now I often catch myself scrolling through hundreds of technically flawless images that somehow all dissolve into each other after a few seconds.
Different faces.
Different photographers.
Different places.
But emotionally, the same feeling over and over again.
And honestly, I don’t even say this critically anymore.
More as an observation I’ve been noticing inside myself too.
I think constant exposure slowly changes the way I look at things.
The more I consume,
the more I notice how easily my own perception starts getting influenced by repetition.
Not consciously.
More subtly than that.
At some point I stop asking myself what genuinely moves me,
and start recognizing what I’ve simply learned to associate with “good.”
That difference became really important to me lately.
Because I’ve realized how easy it is to slowly drift away from instinct without noticing it immediately.
Especially online.
Everything moves so fast now.
Every day there’s a new aesthetic.
A new trend.
A new way things are supposed to look.
And after a while it almost feels like everybody is referencing everybody else at the same time.
Including me.
That’s probably the uncomfortable part.
There were moments over the last years where I knew exactly how to create images people would react to.
And instead of feeling proud of that, it sometimes made me strangely empty afterward.
Not because there’s anything wrong with understanding visual language.
But because I quietly started wondering whether I was still emotionally connected to what I was creating —
or simply becoming efficient at producing things that already felt familiar to people.
I think that question changed a lot for me.
Especially recently,
with AI entering everything more and more.
The more optimized, generated and polished the world becomes,
the more I find myself emotionally reacting to things that still feel imperfectly human.
A photograph that breathes a little.
A moment that feels unplanned.
A face carrying uncertainty.
An image that doesn’t try too hard to convince me of something.
Maybe that’s also why my relationship with photography has been changing.
I still care deeply about aesthetics.
Probably more than ever.
But I think I’ve become less interested in creating images that immediately impress people,
and more interested in creating images that quietly stay somewhere inside them afterward.
Images that feel emotionally present.
Not just visually effective.
I don’t know if that even makes sense outside my own head sometimes.
But lately I’ve been craving things that feel real again.
Conversations that aren’t optimized.
Moments that aren’t performed.
People who don’t constantly turn themselves into content.
Work that still carries uncertainty, emotion, atmosphere… maybe even a little silence.
Because maybe that’s exactly what starts disappearing when everything becomes too polished.
And maybe originality is less about trying to be different —
and more about protecting the part of yourself that still reacts honestly before the world tells you how things should look.
I don’t know.
But lately these thoughts stay with me much longer
than most of the images disappearing through my screen every day.
At what point do we stop creating from ourselves — and begin creating from expectation?
Images and Text © Sascha van der Werf
