What Rick Rubin taught me

In July 2024, I was reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I had a notebook next to me.

A lot of books about creativity talk about output. How to make more, how to stay consistent, how to build an audience. This one kept coming back to awareness. To what you notice. To what you're paying attention to before you ever pick up a camera.

The idea that stuck most: being an artist isn't a job or a skill set. It's a way of moving through the world. The work is just evidence of that.

I kept thinking about my walks around Malé. The best photos have always come from a certain kind of attention. Not hunting for a shot, but being present enough that the shot finds you. The light does something. A shadow moves. You're already there.

That's the real work. Not the output, but the sensitivity. The hours spent looking at things that have nothing to do with what you're making. Everything feeds everything.

After reading it, I started paying closer attention to what I was watching, listening to, noticing. Daft Punk. Architecture. The texture of a specific wall. None of it is separate. It all ends up in the photos somehow.