The Negative Space
By: CHU Photographs
There's a book I keep coming back to. I Don't Want to Grow Up by Scott Stillman isn't really about refusing responsibility — it's about refusing to let the world squeeze the wonder out of you. Stillman's central argument is that modern society enforces a path of conformity, prioritizing productivity and material possessions over the joys of living in the present moment. He writes about how we're born with everything — full curiosity, raw awe, an unfiltered sense of what's real and beautiful — and how the longer we live inside systems built to reward output over experience, the more of that gets sanded away. He suggests that life should be lived in a childlike state of wonder, adventure, and gratitude, and that true fulfillment comes from embracing one's passions rather than fitting into traditional roles. For a creative building a business — where the pressure to professionalize, package, and monetize everything is constant — that argument hits differently than it does for anyone else. Yelp DSPhotography
The part of the book that I haven't been able to stop thinking about is this:
"…we cannot have left without right… they're two parts of the same thing… like negative and positive… nature is precisely divided containing the same amount of negative as positive energy. This delicate division balances us out" (Stillman, 121).
If you can't embrace all the negatives that come with being in a creative field, you won't ever find peace or happiness in it. The rejected pitches. The shoots that don't go the way you planned. The seasons where the bookings dry up. The comparison spiral at 11pm when you're editing and someone else's work is all over your feed. Those aren't signs you chose the wrong thing. They're the left side of the equation. To appreciate the good, you have to sit with the bad long enough to understand what it's teaching you. Most people want the highlight reel of a creative life without the negative space that gives it shape.
What Stillman is really arguing — and what I think gets more urgent every year — is that the struggle itself is the point. Not suffering for suffering's sake, but the lived experience of building something by hand, failing, adjusting, and trying again. That process is what produces work with a soul. He describes artists, adrenaline junkies, nomads, and life seekers as people who doubt conventional wisdom, question authority, and continually search for newer, better ways to live — and argues the world needs them now more than ever. In a world where AI is thinking, creating, and working for us, it is becoming more clear that humans aren't appreciating the struggle of building a life for themselves — leaning on each other for support. Instead we are leaning on AI to be our teacher and give us the upper hand. The irony is that the more we outsource the hard parts of creating, the less we have to say with the work we produce. CHU Photographs, LLC
What separates amazing work from great work is the human experience. A slight facial editing flaw. Broken English scattered through a "perfect" essay. A doodle next to your test answers. The imperfect thing that tells you a real person was present. A recent piece I came across on wedding photography trends made this point more clearly than most industry conversations I've seen. Photographers described moving toward "a more transparent kind of storytelling by valuing what would have been seen as an 'outtake'" — photos of the catering staff, a messy table, a small imperfect moment right between sets of family portraits. And further: "Often, it's a couple frames after that 'perfect' moment where something softens or falls slightly out of place that ends up feeling the most strong and real." That's the negative space. That's what Stillman is talking about. The slightly-off frame is the one that actually carries the memory. AI can generate technically perfect imagery all day long. It cannot generate the emotional connection, the personal memory, or the human response that makes someone look at a photograph and feel something they can't fully explain. Muschlitzphoto Muschlitzphoto
The most honest thing I can say about building CHU is that none of it has gone perfectly. The plan has changed, the positioning has shifted, the pricing has been reworked. Some ideas landed, some didn't. And every version of this business that got closer to what it needed to be came directly out of something that didn't work the first time. That's not failure — that's the left side of the equation doing its job. If you're in a creative field and you're waiting for it to feel clean and linear before you commit to it fully, you're waiting for something that doesn't exist. The negative space is part of the composition. Always has been.
Sources Stillman, Scott. I Don't Want to Grow Up: Life, Liberty, and Happiness. Without a Career. Wild Soul Press, 2021.
McFadden, Kayla. "The 11 Photography Trends Top Wedding Photographers Are Loving Right Now." The Wed, April 1, 2026. thewed.com/magazine/photography-trends-top-wedding-photographers-are-loving-right-now
-CHU (Colin Harmon-Ulmer)
