Attention vs. Impact

Obsession & What Numbers Cannot Tell Us About Art

Hello subscribers,

I return here after a small absence with thoughts that have long been circulating my mind. The idea of attention vs. impact feels particularly relevant culturally. As always, adding to the discussion is welcome in the comments. I’ll leave this article up as public discourse.

<3

The distinction between attention and impact has long occupied my thoughts as an artist navigating social media, sustaining a career, and simply existing in the modern world.

I began thinking about this with heightened awareness while reading the coverage surrounding the recent film Obsession. Nearly every headline lead with the same astonishment: how little the film cost, how much money it earned, & how many people watched it. Every week there was more astonishment about the numbers! These are significant facts, certainly, and having seen the film in theaters, I’m truly impressed by what Curry Barker and his team accomplished. The media and press, however, reveal how impoverished our language around art is, especially through the culture of social media, reels, capitalism and content monetization.

Obsession is only one example; this distinction extends beyond cinema.

We can calculate a film’s viewership with ease, yet we rarely ask what occurred inside the people who encountered it. Why not?

Why did this particular film compel such a large audience? What fear, desire, fantasy, or cultural tension did it bring to the surface? What drove viewers to tell others that they needed to watch it? What did they bring home from the theater? Did the film alter how they understood intimacy, others or themselves?

Commercial success tells us engagement on a vast scale, but it misses the depth of how it affected people. I am curious about why a work reaches people rather than how much money its popularity generates.

This distinction matters because attention has become one of the primary ways we assign value. We count followers, views, ticket sales, headlines, subscribers, and impressions, then allow those numbers to stand in for something much more difficult to determine: whether a work matters and how successful it is.

Attention is visible, and within our systems it can be monetized. Impact is quieter and more difficult to measure. I am asking people to sit more deeply with art, their own actions, and the audiences they cultivate: What is the impact? Who is being affected? How are they being affected? Is it possible to move beyond the allure of attention? Impact reveals itself privately, long after an encounter. It may appear in a conversation, a changed decision, a memory that refuses to disappear, or the sudden recognition of something a person had previously been unable to name.

The culture of social media has amplified this confusion. Artists are encouraged to regard visibility as evidence of relevance and silence as evidence of failure. A work that receives thousands of reactions appears successful, while a work that reaches only a few people may appear to have vanished. Those reactions tell us very little about how the work landed in the viewer.

For an artist, this creates a dangerous temptation. Once attention becomes the dominant measurement, the question shifts from “What am I trying to reveal?” to “What will make people respond?” The work can begin bending toward the appetite of the platform. This is one of the corrosive effects of treating art and information as commodities.

I began thinking seriously about impact in 2020, at a moment when I was receiving a great deal of attention. There was attention directed toward my photographs, my social media presence, and inevitably, toward my body and desirability. My figure could circulate quickly online, an alluring or erotic image could produce an immediate response. The platforms made that response visible and offered it back to me as evidence that the work was succeeding.

But after years of traveling with In Rooms, meeting viewers in person, and hearing from people who had lived with the work, I began to recognize another form of success that was less public and more difficult to quantify.

People told me that the photographs had moved them emotionally or returned them to their own creativity. Some said the work had given form to experiences they had felt but could not articulate. Others wrote to me from periods of profound depression and described the images as something that had helped them remain connected to their lives. These exchanges did not always arrive beneath the most popular photographs or comment sections of social media. They were not visible in the number of likes, nor could they be translated neatly into reach or engagement. These in person exchanges revealed the deeper life of the work and inspired me to align my practice and actions to the deeper impact.

It became clear that I knew how to attract attention. The more difficult question was whether I was willing to organize my practice, and perhaps my life, around something that could not be so easily measured.

That decision carried risk, and with every passing month I find myself taking larger and larger risks towards less visibility and popularity. Attention helped me build an audience, sell photographs and books, and sustain a career. I do not believe attention is inherently bad either or that attention and impact are opposing forces. Attention can lead someone toward an image, idea, person, or experience that later becomes important to them. It can also generate momentum and provide necessary encouragement and feedback to the person receiving it.

I began to question in 2020 what would happen if I stopped allowing the most immediately consumable aspects of my work - my body, eroticism, spectacle, novelty, to determine how I understood its value. What would happen if I aligned my decisions with the responses that occurred more quietly: the private messages, the long conversations at exhibitions, or the person who returned years later to describe what an image had awakened in them?

The answer was, in part, that things became quieter and less visible.

The algorithm does not necessarily reward the deepening of the work. The effects of the work became less visible to me through public metrics, but more legible through the relationships and conversations that formed around it.

The unexpected result was that this quiet did not destroy my career. Over the past six years, my sales and financial resources have continued to grow, even as the public response has become less immediate and less dramatic. My dm’s are in fact, very sparse. This does not prove that quietness is more virtuous or that financial success is evidence of having deeper impact. It has shown me that algorithmic attention is not the only path toward sustainability.

Technology companies benefit from convincing us that constant visibility is necessary for growth. My own experience has turned this entire idea on its back. When the platform is removed from the equation, other questions emerge: Who returns to the work? Who speaks about it to others? Who purchases it, lives with it, studies it, or carries it into another part of their life?

I began to understand that attention and impact move according to different timelines. Attention announces itself immediately, impact may take years to disclose its meaning. Attention gathers around the surface of an encounter, Impact continues working after the encounter appears to be over.

This realization has changed the questions I ask about my practice.

I remain aware of attention because I still live within the material realities of being an artist. Visibility, sales, and recognition affect whether I can continue making work. I am not free from those pressures, but I no longer want attention to be the primary measure through which I understand the work’s value.

These questions have gradually led me beyond the production and circulation of photographs alone. I feel pulled towards teaching, lectures, writing, mentorship, books, collaborative environments, and now the building of a foundation. I am not abandoning the artwork, but I am asking what forms might carry its meaning, deepen its impact, and create conditions in which others can return more fully to their own creativity and inner self.

What would our culture look like if impact were supported as deliberately as attention is monetized? What if we invested not only in what attracts the largest audience, or the highest grossing product, but in what creates sustained transformation within its audience? What if artists were given the time and resources to deepen the relationships surrounding their work rather than being asked to continually produce evidence of visibility?

And what might change in our own lives if we became more discerning about attention, both the attention we seek and the attention we give? Who receives our sustained presence rather than our passing reaction? What do we support after the excitement fades? What are we helping to grow, and what are we merely helping to circulate?

If you have arrived this far into the article, I invite you to direct your attention toward the art, artists, individuals, and communities whose impact may not be immediately visible. Return to the work that has changed you: speak about it, write to the artist, leave a thoughtful response, purchase or contribute when you have the resources, recommend the work to a friend, curator, institution, or someone with the ability to help sustain it.

We have a power to shift our values towards impact rather than attention.

These days, as it’s quiet here, in the darkroom and in my camera, much of my own work is taking place beyond the photographic frame. I am building systems for teaching, mentorship, collaboration, sustained creativity, and the emergence of new work, not just my own. From the outside, this labor may appear quieter than producing another image or announcing another exhibition, but quiet does not mean inactive despite the algorithms need for constant evidence.

I am learning to trust that impact does not always announce itself, nor does it need to. Sometimes it moves privately from one life into another, held within the deeper thoughts of its participants.

I am also finding that the most consequential work is not always the most visible. Sometimes, it is the work that quietly creates conditions for someone else to see, create, or live more authentically.

<3 Brittany