You are unknown, commercially unsuccessful and would not be able to live off the money you make from commissions. Them's the facts.
Been paying my bills with a camera for over quarter of a century: You never take any photographs. I'm content doing what I do now, so glean whatever schadenfreude you want, from whatever scenario you wish to invent for me. It's an irrelevance to me.
As for flickr, you could probably find your 'original' work or concept on there. As I said, you've not seen 99.95% of what is on it.
Maybe, maybe not - if you're right, we'll never know
It's certainly full of stuff that looks like Joe Cornish though when I search for Landscape. Even more of it is just utter rubbish you can dismiss at a glance, granted... But.. Far less of it looks like most of David Ward's work for example because his work is clearly better conceived, and his work more original. For that reason alone, I think David Ward is immeasurably better than Cornish because I'm not judging Cornish by his popularity. Having said that, it's still landscape and I think it's one of the most difficult art forms to be original with, as the only way you can inject any of yourself into it, is the REASON you're taking the landscape and not the landscape itself. Landscape needs to stop merely showing things for showing's sake because unless it does, pretty soon, the only way to get any originality is to try to find more and more remote, or exotic locations, as that's all there is left now. We've seen everything. You can't keep photographing the same stuff and expect anyone to think of it as artful except other photographers, and they only really do so by appreciating the technical. You heard it in the talk between Cornish and Ward - the vast majority of the conversation was about composition, or technical matters... not the place.. the SUBJECT itself. It's almost as if the subject is irrelevant once the image is taken... that it's served it's purpose and all there is to discuss now is the photograph. How boring must that be when everyone who views your work just wants to talk about the actual image and not the reasons behind the image? It's as they want us to talk about THEM really... by discussing THEIR work. I'm content to disappear into the background and have people discuss the work because that's what I actually want. Why would I want someone asking me why I placed blade of grass X in corner Y? I probably never even noticed blade of grass X... I bet David Ward never gave that blade of grass a moment's thought either at the time. Time and time again I hear the usual detractors referring to Art Speak, yet have you heard those two bang on about each other's work? Tell me that's not sheer b******s being talked right there. How the barn "projects" into the space left by the grass... and how the blades of grass form an exclamation point (even though it doesn't)? What?? Does any of that actually matter or make me think differently when I view it? No. No one would even notice such irrelevances.
Any way...... All Flickr is, is a barometer of what's popular, not what's good. Art has never followed popular fashion, never has, never will. You can't make any kind of art if all you do is copy what's already popular - not unless you're doing it on purpose to appropriate it for some other use..... other than it's intended one.. or you're parodying it.
I think there are two types of photographers the purest and the artistic.
For me a purest image is a transparency no filters even a polariser ! YOU CANT OR LIGHTEN DARKEN THE IMAGES ! It is presented as it was taken and processed !
"NOT CROSS PROCESSED EITHER "
Then you have the artist who likes woking with scanned film or digital images manipulating and creating images not unlike dark room users who would dodge burn or sandwich images.
For me they both have a place in our world just in different places.
So artists only manipulate and only purists don't? Quite a polarised view isn't it? Do you break everything else in life down to such binaries? It probably makes life easier, but it probably means you truly understand little.
