2025 10 18
Night scene. Chicago, Illinois. May, 2025. © Clayton Hauck
Having lived in the same general area for twenty-some years now, it’s always a memorable moment when I stumble down a street that I’d never previously been down. This was one of those streets and I loved the vibes of this house.
The other day, I had the thought that it would be nice to make this blog a bit more robust, immediate, and interactive. I could post and write about things as they happen in my life and make the whole thing a bit more purposeful, instead of the random spur-of-the-moment grab bag it has been lately. But considering I’m days behind on posting and severely behind on other life tasks, I’m not sure how realistic of an idea this is. All that said, I think a bit part of why I’m so behind on various parts of my life lately is in fact because they are lacking a defined purpose. Posting a photo a day just because is nice in theory, but what’s the deeper meaning behind doing so? Is is just because I have folders full of images and I need to put them somewhere? That’s nice, but it’s not keeping the creative juices flowing as much as it had been and perhaps it is time to find a new angle around here.
-Clayton
2025 10 15
Free money. Chicago, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
I’ve really been going through it at work lately. My boss is just riding me very hard and I’m putting all of my waking hours into the job with no downtime to relax and enjoy life. The irony, of course, is that I am my own boss and these jobs I’m doing are of my own making (photography gigs, studio managing, bookshop tasks). While sitting in the newly-renovated Old Post Office eating a sandwich for lunch, after wrapping two early morning editorial portraits, it hit me — in my two decades of doing photography as a job, I can’t recall ever taking a single “sick day” or missing an assignment due to being sick, crabby, too tired, etc. Sure, non-shoot days are different and I fuck off quite regularly, but as a freelancer, it’s not really possible to miss an assignment for nearly any reason.
This thought occurred to me after I’d had an especially hilarious run of work, spending all weekend at the studio editing photos and managing events. A Sunday dinner event went late and I ended up leaving the studio at 1am, setting my alarm for 5:30am, getting up on three hours of sleep and driving myself to the south side to do a scheduled portrait shoot. As I frantically cleaned up the studio as efficiently as I could (the studio had to get clean as there was also a casting the following morning), I laughed at the situation I’d put myself in.
If I had a “normal job,” it would’ve been a no brainer to fib being sick and sleep in that following morning. But I’m a freelance photographer, so off I went to make the images.
The weird thing is, I’m glad it played out like this! Had I been able to skip the work day, I would’ve missed the most incredible sunrise I’d ever experienced as I drove downtown on the fluid, pre-rush hour Kennedy Expressway. The first portrait shoot went well; I met a stray cat; then I had a few hours of time to myself to explore Hyde Park and the surrounding area (been amazed by how big and beautiful Chicago is lately). I stopped in to Powell’s and grabbed a few photobooks before heading to my second shoot downtown, which was also an enjoyable one. After wrapping that, it was sandwich time, where I pondered the weirdness of my jobs and my life, while feeling fortunate I had it this way, despite the occasional extreme situations I find myself in.
-Clayton
2025 10 14
Allison gets into a burger. Chicago, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
-Clayton
2025 10 13
Vines, making their move. Chicago, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
-Clayton
2025 10 01
Night moon. Where’s your focus? Douglas, Michigan. October, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
The Anecdotal Evidence That Keeps Me Up At Night
by Clayton Hauck
The thing is, I’ve been a commercial photographer for over a decade now. Close to 100% of my working time and energies were put towards this profession, weird as it can be. When things were good, they were very good. And when things were bad, well, they were still relatively okay. I was able to make a respectable living doing this work and had close to zero complaints about the deal. It’s still kind of hard to believe I bought a house through making photos.
As I sit in my photo studio today, things are about as different as can be from the pleasant picture I’ve just laid out. Even the studio I now run was opened more as a compliment to my existing commercial photography business. While the reasons are plentiful, I’ll soon get to the specific one I thought of this morning while cleaning up the studio. But first a bit more detail on where my focus is now: yes, I’m still a commercial photographer but my focus is far more split both within the profession and outside of it. I’m now directing and shooting video, and putting a lot more effort towards the art photography world (perhaps teaching is in my future, as well). This has been wildly motivating for me, which is nice, but I’m still super level-headed about the realities of making a decent living through this line of work. Secondly, the studio that I opened without much thought to profitability is now being handled entirely differently. Making this place make money is priority number one, and if I can’t make that happen, it will have to go. Thirdly, I’m now running a photobook shop called realmbooks.co. Much like my newfound artistic photography practice, this side hustle has given me a lot of excitement and motivation, however, I’m equally as level-headed about its chances at producing a living wage for myself. What makes me feel better about this difficult financial reality is that it’s very complimentary to my photography work, and in many ways I feel like I’m back at school learning a ton of new things (without the baggage of student loans).
All this to say: my life is wildly different now than it was even a few years ago. My time is being spread very thin amongst all of these new practices and I have very little downtime to relax and socialize. Fortunately, much of the work is work that is often enjoyable. This helps me justify things.
So why the need to put myself into this situation, you may ask. Here’s the anecdotal story as told from my perspective as a photo studio operator:
Last year we had a client do a shoot in our space. It was all more or less normal aside from my own observation that the photographer was being wildly over-worked for what they were likely being paid. It was a relentless shot list (this is not unusual. Most of my shoots are also this way), but they didn’t have the budget for an appropriate support crew, so I got the sense everyone was miserable. This was the first warning. It’s increasingly hard for Clayton the commercial photographer to compete with the countless productions being run on a far lower budget than I will ever be able to compete with. It is what it is and I don’t take this personally, as I was once the young and scrappy photographer doing things for far less than the established photographers would ever think to do them for.
Fast forward a year and this same client pops back onto my radar asking for studio availability to do a photo shoot last minute. Cool! The space is available and I could very much use the rental income. A few days go by and word comes they decided against the shoot altogether. Fine, it happens. But the reason they decided against it is the thing that has me scrambling to find a half dozen new jobs — they’re just going to run the images they made internally using ai.
Some of us don’t think it’s coming. Some of us are scared shitless. Nobody yet knows how this will all play out, but my previous cautious optimism has cooled quite dramatically. Now, my current base-case thinking is that nearly all jobs linked to the creation of visual images for commercial use (be it stills, video, animation, etc, etc) will either be gone completely — outsourced to ai — or vastly diluted from a price-leverage perspective within just a few short years.
If anyone wants to rent my studio for a birthday party, wedding, baby shower, or hell maybe even an old-fashioned photo shoot you know where to find me!
-Clayton
2025 09 30
Mysterious house. Chicago, Illinois. October, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
I’m not entirely sure why, but most times I pass this house I feel an urge to make a photo of it.
-Clayton
2025 09 29
Dead mall. Chicagoland. October, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
My buddy who I haven’t spoken with in a while just asked what’s new?
My reply: Everything, kind of. Working my ass off trying to learn some new skills and invent some new revenue sources in a world where soon most visuals will be instantly generated by machines run on electricity that I subsidize.
Yeah, that kinda sums up my mood these days. I’m working nonstop, all of the time, in a seemingly fleeting attempt to keep my lifestyle afloat. I’m not sure it will work but I keep telling myself that if it does come to a worst case scenario, I will have plenty of company.
-Clayton
2025 09 23
Bare tree in summer. Franklin Grove, Illinois. August, 2025. © Clayton Hauck
-Clayton
2025 09 17
Some of my photos hanging on the wall. Chicago, Illinois. June, 2025. © Clayton Hauck
I continue to be behind on so many things. Clearly, this is because I am doing (or at least attempting to do) far too many things. One of the big things I need to do is catch up on editing my Illinois Wandering personal images I’ve made this year. Perhaps even more importantly, I need to send out all of the photos I’ve made of people on the road whom I told I would send photos to. I’m convinced this is creating some kind of cosmic jam that is preventing me from moving forward on a number of things. Sorry, everyone. I will send you those images I promised you soon.
-Clayton
2025 09 13
Neon art. Chicago, Illinois. May, 2025. © Clayton Hauck
I have a friend who is having weird thoughts. I’m beginning to get concerned. He wants to be an artist, he says. He’s doing all sorts of things that don’t make any logical sense. He wiped his social media clear of all normal photos. No selfies, no family, no friends. People are calling him, asking him what’s the meaning of all this. To this, he calmly explains himself, but this only gets the people even more riled up and angry. I think a wellness check is in order. Maybe he’s got a couple screws loose. I think I need to distance myself from him; to claim I never met the fella.
-Clayton
2025 09 08
Dave sports Don’t Fret. Chicago, Illinois. June, 2025. © Clayton Hauck
-Clayton
2025 08 31
A tree disappears into the distance. Bloomington, Indiana. November, 2022. © Clayton Hauck
In “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” C.S. Lewis goes all-in on a vision of democratic decline. His writing from seventy-or-so years ago hit me like a slap to the face while our democracy appears to be failing all around us. The read is worth you time (as is his book I found it in: The Screwtape Letters), but I only bring it up to lay out the scene for today’s short story.
Perhaps it was my mood affecting me; on a rare day off, while doing house chores, dripping in sweat, I opened my email to see a message from a producer asking me to get him an image pull by the end of the day. Everything is always needed immediately in my business. What would normally be a nice thing to see (someone potentially interested in you working on a project), on this day struck me as being so frustrating that I reconsidered my entire career. Clearly, this specific incident, while slightly annoying in its timing (I’d really needed this day to catch up on house chores I’d been neglecting!), was more so a reminder of bigger concerns and frustrations with the industry (won’t get into all that now). Regardless of why I was frustrated, it was another detail that put me over the edge this specific day: I didn’t like the specific client I would be making the work for.
While I was having my existential crisis, I reached out to a number of trusted friends to get their opinion on my dilemma. The client, you see, was one that hasn’t had much good PR recently. Quite the opposite, in fact. I figured the trusted council I received would at least somewhat mirror my reluctance to drop everything to help out this particular corporation, however, without fail everyone told me, simply: take the money! In my head, it was a lose-lose situation. The universe was testing me and I didn’t even fully understand the potential consequences, I just knew it was somehow a fork-in-the-road moment.
I don’t think I’m unique in feeling like not much is working these days. It’s not just my job and my industry, it’s most peoples’. This, perhaps, was my biggest takeaway from the incident, which is now well behind me (I didn’t get the job, but I did try to! I could really use the money, of course). My thinking was that friends would see my frustrations and side with me, but I was instead met with the exact opposite reaction — shit is hard right now and you need to take a win when you can get it.
In trying to end this thought on a positive note, I pondered a way to tie it back towards The Screwtape Letters. But since this incident occurred, screwworm has entered the United States, so perhaps it is more appropriate to end it in dismay. Stay sane out there.
-Clayton
2025 08 30
Wild house. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. August, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
Summer is nearly over and we haven’t made it up to Milwaukee once yet! I’m bummed about this. We also never made it to Cedar Point, or Six Flags, or Pittsburgh, or Bob Chin’s Crab House. There’s always next year, I guess. Until there’s not.
-Clayton
2025 08 28
Haley at Consignment Lounge, Chicago, Illinois. June 2025. © Clayton Hauck
Yes, behind on posting again. We’ve been out visiting family over the weekend. Specifically, at my sister’s new spot in rural Illinois. Lots of fun and lots of photos, as well. I’m so behind on editing. Aiming to get a bunch of that done this coming week, which will hopefully then lead to more regularly-scheduled posting around here.
-Clayton
2025 08 24
Side of house at sunset. Chicago, Illinois. July, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
-Clayton
2025 08 20
Free chair (free advice). Chicago, Illinois. December, 2022. © Clayton Hauck
Agency. It’s something that, when I look back, seems to account for quite a lot of my success through the years. I don’t think it’s even something I’ve actively worked to improve. Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s learned, probably it’s a bit of both.
I’m not going to write some big in-depth blog post about how valuable agency is today, but instead I’d like to link to two things I ingested that both made me feel slightly better about our mostly-automated futures and felt like valuable calls to actions in a way that might help me improve on myself (and perhaps you, too).
First, a recent favorite thinker of mine, Cate Hall, dedicated her Ted Talk to the subject. You can watch that talk here.
Second, a web search of the quote she mentioned in the talk led me to this blog post, which does a nice job of summing things up from a tech perspective.
And now I get back to getting shit done… how agentic of me.
-Clayton
2025 08 19
It’s me (Covid free)! See You Soon, Chicago, Illinois. December, 2022. © Clayton Hauck
I’m on day it feels like twelve of having covid but it seems like I’m about out of the woods (* knocks on wood *…long covid terrifies me). One upside to being sick for a week is that I’ve had a lot of downtime. I’ve put much of that towards building (yet another) website for our Realm photobook popup. I’m aiming to get a soft launch up in the next week or so, and will drop the info here when it’s live.
One really exciting benefit to putting all of this time into selling other peoples’ photography is that I’m schooling myself on many things I didn’t know that I should’ve known. Having somewhat neglected the photo world (esp the fine art part of it) for many years myself, it’s been refreshing to jump back in headfirst and fully submerge myself in all-things-photography. My inspiration levels are quite high, and while I have no shortage of images to share currently, I’m still quite excited to get back out and make new work exploring new areas of the field.
-Clayton