Mike Stacey

Your Free Daily Inspiration

Added 2020-05-18 08:47:43 +0000 UTC

To My Patrons: thank you so much for your support. This article was written for my website blog and directed at consumers of social media. You are the 'few' people who are true supporters of the arts and your investment is unique and powerful.

Support the Creators of Your Daily Image Consumption

Lockdown here in Poland has been strict, as in most European countries. I’ve been busy with my partner developing creative and finance-based ideas and trying hard to generate income from these ideas. Models have been hit hard by this and the current ‘social’ online model photographic phenomenon, namely Instagram, makes this very hard indeed.

What is that phenomenon? It is this: consumers of photographic work portraying models can be consumed for free without thought on the consumer’s behalf as to how the model sustains this output of work that is devoured so willingly. Very few consumers think about how models can sustain their output of images for your free consumption. To those of you who do consider this, I take a bow - you are a supporter of the arts in the truest sense.

OK, I can only be classified as a keen hobby photographer who has a trickle of income from a few different paths of endeavour but many models are full time creators, it is their fucking job. Daily, their work, and their bodies, provide a source of inspiration, enjoyment AND sexual gratification for anywhere between thousands and millions of social media ‘watchers’.

There are numerous avenues now for providing your support - OnlyFans and Patreon, to name two big ones. Most models have these accounts, so why not express your support by scraping together a couple of dollars, euros or zlotys per month and really showing that you are someone who cares about the arts you are so engrossed in on a daily basis?

Projects

I work as a full time English teacher here in Poland and have been doing so for the last 9 months. I am yet to break even and be in a situation where I am living exclusively off my Polish income. Still, I’m hopeful this will happen soon and am working hard towards it.

My photography is one way I can supplement this income and try to get myself out of the red. I have a Patreon account as the sole means of achieving this. I’m aware of many people on Instagram who appreciate what I do and are happy to gain inspiration and ideas from the work I continue to pour into their daily social media streams. A few of these people support me via Patreon, but the majority are just happy to consume and many are also happy to copy. I have never considered myself a ‘great’ photographer, but the situation is blatantly obvious and frustrating when I see the same people watching my stories, liking my images and using them as inspiration for their own work. Am I begging? Nup, my daily efforts at financial security are concentrated on my professional career as an English teacher. I realised long ago the fruitlessness of relying on photography as a source of income but the situation with social media ‘watchers’ is one that will always be frustrating, somewhat depressing and definitely one that causes me to loose inspiration for sharing images for free.

Recent Efforts

Recently, much of my camera work has been invested in helping Poetic Minx with her own efforts toward some kind of income. Her situation is far more serious than my own and all the aspects I’ve mentioned above are felt more acutely by her.

I’ve also been working with a DJ friend in creating a music video for one of his new tunes. Poetic Minx has helped me with this - by modelling and also with her bubbling creative mind.

Together, Poetic Minx and I have developed the idea of online photographic workshops (see last blog post) and this is something that we hope can grow. Feedback so far has been very positive.

The work I do with Poetic Minx has continued to develop along many paths and lockdown has helped this in many ways. The work we do is good, very fucking good. The time and effort we both invest into creating photographic output at the highest possible level is non-trivial and involves many hours, every day of the week. The best fruits of that labour are not shared publicly for a number of reasons including all of the above.