It is true, this post is more a little but not evil provocation. I think the discussions (not the rant) under such a provocation are more interesting than the +1's, 'As Usual' and 'Good Grab' comments.
All tough, it's not a provocation for the provocation, I do believe in photography as pure registration with no attempt to conceal a boisterous or disturbing environment. I strongly believe in William Eggleston's statements:
“You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.” –
“It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.” – William Eggelston
I like to search the boundaries of my work, stretching my photographic comfort zone.
Alas, I can only dream of a consistent body of work, it's not me, I'm not enough concentrated on one thing, when I understand one thing, I move to the next.
But I have no time for Eggleston, not finding him interesting at all, despite watching documentaries in an efffort to discover what I may have been missing, that clouds my perception of his greatness. One thing that pisses me off, of course, is the commonly applied comment that he was the founder of colour photography within the vernacular canon. What utter rubbish! When those who promote someone can't get their facts right, it makes for a lousy start for the belief system to latch onto any positive vibe.
Now, if you want a consistent body of work, then it's not hard to do: you decide what interests you most and go with that, if only not to bore yourself with diversionary excursions down blind alleys.
Maybe you just don't feel any overriding interest in any particular area of visual expression or subject, in which case I offer my sympathies, because I know that without having such a desire I would not have become a photographer if just to be a GP. I, for one, require an obsession to become motivated enough to do the work, or I'd be better off spending my time, at this stage of life, sitting in cafés drinking coffee all day long. Faced with that lack of obsession in my youth, I'd probably have remained an unhapppy engineer all my life, or eventually said the hell with it, and gone to work in my brother-in-law's chain of estate agencies and own my Mercedes today. But I did have the obsession, and it gave me the life I wanted if not much wealth at the end of it all, but that was my fault, not that of the obsession.
Frankly, I find the idea of being lukewarm about one's photography unbelievable; why would anyone bother and spend so much time and money over very little?