Creativity, conformity and keeping yourself real
I wanted to see The Face: Culture Shift at the National Portrait Gallery badly enough to plan a trip to London around it. Booked flights. Bought an NPG annual membership. Found a house sitter. Arranged meetings. Rescheduled classes.
The last time I picked up The Face had to have been 20 years ago (it stopped publishing in 2004 before resuming in 2019). I don’t have any old copies, nor the pages I tore out to adorn dorm-room walls: Richard Ashcroft’s vaulted cheekbones, the close-up shot of a dilated pupil that illustrated the Drugs Issue.
That The Face had a Drugs Issue was one of the many things that made it revelatory; that the Drugs Issue contained crisp factual reportage about what to expect if you smoked this or snorted that made it subversive and powerful: here was no moralistic propaganda, but useful information.
From here to there
Where did I first encounter The Face? It certainly didn’t sit alongside Runner’s World, Glamour and Dog Fancy in the Safeway magazine rack. I can only think it was on my first trip to London — a generous and life-altering gift from my sister. Somewhere between ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, Feet First at Camden Palace and vending-machine Dairy Milk bars, I must have picked up a copy.
When I went to Penn, my regular supplier became the same shoebox storefront on Sansom Street that sold Q and clove cigarettes.
Collectively, The Face and Q opened a door to a world of music, culture and fashion so spectacular as to seem beamed from outer space. Familiar words described mysteries: house, garage, rave; fashion shoots where bodies became puzzle pieces and designers appeared in superhero guises.
Even when the semantics eluded my grasp, The Face told me something I needed to hear: there’s a world out here where the things you love — music, style, creativity — matter.
Lincoln City, Oregon, was a fine place to source salt water taffy, Mo’s world-famous clam chowder and sand dollars, but it was not a place to suggest wider possibilities.
Magazine pages were a casement: peering through, I thought, let’s go.
Creativity // Diversity
Walking through the exhibition, I kept tugging my friend’s arm: “Isn’t that amazing?”
Photo after photo looked like nothing seen before, or since, yet they were relatable, fresh, modern. Images from 1984 looked like outtakes from the Met Gala, 2024; more-perfect-than-AI panoramas and portraits created with purely analogue means; witty, critical dissections of politics, class, gender, sex and sexuality.
The photos struck me as the antithesis of what came next: culture shift describes not just The Face’s influence but culture’s Mach-speed evolution since.
Captions described painstaking mechanical and technical innovations — layering, long exposures, tinting, physically dissecting and composing individual frames — in a sense, magazine production of the 80s-00s was profoundly undemocratic.
It required expensive cameras and lenses, studio space, chunky light rigs, darkrooms, chemicals; one of my tasks when I worked at Q was taking items to be shot in a Fitzrovia then trotting the film across to Soho to be developed.
Yet the concentration of the means of production led to the opposite of homogeneity. Now, scrolling through Instagram, or any website, so many images share a sleek, soulless similarity. If a person or a thing doesn’t already look like an image of itself, filters or AI tweaks are available to instantly polish rough edges.
Media/tion
Mass media, for all its shortcomings and limitations, permits individual response. In the broadcast culture of the 80s and 90s, one could tune in to transmissions, or not. Reading a physical magazine was fundamentally a private, unmediated experience. Editors, journalists and photographers created and published their work, but had little capacity to shape its reception beyond the work itself.
The audience might be thrilled or annoyed, but the feedback loop was long — there was time for everyone to mull ideas, change minds, see with new eyes.
Contrast this to our insta-meta-interactions with digital media: algorithms are the first gatekeeper, ‘likes’ and comments saturate us in others’ opinions before we have a chance to form our own, ‘going viral’ is the primary success metric — even though virality says everything about audience malleablity and nothing about originality, creativity or significance.
Give yourself a try
As digital natives, my students and essay-coaching clients were born into a world that superficially rewards conformity and ‘like’ability yet low-key reserves its greatest rewards for those who operate outside the system.
Content creators will never in a trillion years earn as much as the men who built and control the platforms they use, and that’s just the sharpest end of this dilemma.
Students who strive to tick every box get to senior year and find themselves competing with other uber-achievers for limited space in elite universities. Suddenly, they need to identify and articulate what makes them unique; many are so schooled in correctness and conformity they don’t know where to begin.
There is no one-size-fits-all corrective. Students must reflect on their values, look for connections between interests, and consider what they’d do if they could do anything.
These are three excellent ways to aid these efforts:
Read
I would say this, wouldn’t I?
Reading (and writing) build a better brain. Any reading, even the backs of cereal boxes or, ahem, TikTok comments, constructs neural networks that can then be further enriched by a wider variety of material.
Also, reading allows for personalized processing in a way that, say, podcasts or videos don’t; the reader controls the pace.
Reflect
When we take things at our own pace, we have the chance to reflect. Reading is fantastic, but the deepest nourishment comes from reflection: on books, on nature, on conversations.
Taking the time to consider our ideas, responses and beliefs creates space to refine or reconstruct them. It is a quirk of my mind that I make it up instantly and with prejudice; it is only by taking the time to chew things over (often in writing) that I am able to think bigger.
(Re)connect
Culture Shift reminded me that looking back can illuminate a way forward. Many of the teenagers I work with are so focused on who they want to be that they are already divorced from who they are.
Self-abnegation is a poor basis for progress.
What you love matters. What you loathe, too. What other people want or expect of you matters much less.
I’ve always loved to read and write; my flirtation with medicine was a double time waste: it got me no closer to an inappropriate goal and diverted time, energy and resources from a fitting one.
Nobody eludes themselves for long, at least not without inflicting serious self-harm. So I urge students to take themselves seriously, to trust their lights, to connect and reconnect with the selves they have ignored or dismissed as insignificant.
Follow your path
The Face exhibition elicited a rush of emotion.
I was there
How crazy is it that a poor kid from a tiny Oregon beach town made it across the Atlantic and into a world she only knew from magazines?
Nothing in my background suggested such a thing was possible, yet it happened.
The music, the fashion, the nightclubs, the festivals, the photographers: I got to hear, see, experience, meet them; my contribution was small, but it existed. There are copies of Q with my name on the masthead, my words on the pages.
Improbable is not impossible, I tell my students. You may not get what you think you want but, if you wear your true face in the world, what you do will mean something.
