The Terrible Creative

By Patrick Fore

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Category: Personal Journals

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Episodes: 72

Description

The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers. Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth. This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread. Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem. If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.

Episode Date
We’ll See - The quiet anxiety of marketing
Jun 16, 2026
Playing Hurt - How Professional Creatives Perform at Full Capacity When Everything Goes Wrong
Jun 09, 2026
Death Grip - Google AI Just Changed How Clients Find You. Here's What It Can't Replace.
Jun 02, 2026
Mute - You've Spent Years Getting Good. Do You Have Anything Left to Say?
May 26, 2026
Clown Nose - What the Creator Economy Actually Costs a Working Creative
May 19, 2026
Terrible Conversations - Tom Wright - Tom Wright on Creative Work and Photography
May 14, 2026
Stop Being A Tool - Why Creatives Were Never Just Useful
May 12, 2026
The Cost of Getting Good - The Cost of Getting Good - How Success Becomes a Creative Trap for Creatives
May 05, 2026
Subterranean - On Obsession, Part II
Apr 28, 2026
Obsessed - Finding Your Creative Voice When the Algorithm Rewards Everyone Else's
Apr 21, 2026
The Unknown - The Version of Yourself Nobody Has Seen Yet
Apr 14, 2026
The Facade - The Gap Between What You Show and What's Actually Driving the Work
Apr 07, 2026
The Tell — Self-Handicapping, and What Everyone Around You Already Knows
Mar 31, 2026
The Glass House - Visibility, the Johari Window, and Why Being Seen Isn't the Same as Being Known
Mar 24, 2026
The Audit - Was Your Work Already Replaceable Before AI Arrived?
Mar 17, 2026
Widening The Frame - Welcome to the Terrible Creative
Mar 15, 2026
Cosmic Cruelty - Freelancing, Isolation & Why the Universe Feels Like It’s Against You.
Mar 10, 2026
The Cliff - Why Freelancing Has No Floor
Mar 03, 2026
The Mask - The Hidden Cost of Performing Expertise You Actually Have
Feb 24, 2026
Heresies - The Hyde - How Photography Is Used for Sexual Exploitation
Feb 17, 2026
Heresies - The Corpse - How Instagram Trained Photographers to Be Perfect, Then Called It Boring
Feb 10, 2026
Heresies - The Oracle - Why Photography Influencers Are Modern Televangelists
Feb 03, 2026
Heresies - The Cult Member - Why Your Camera Brand Doesn't Care If You're a Good Photographer
Jan 27, 2026
Basics, Deconstructed - Editing is Violence - How to Choose What Matters When Everything Looks Good
Jan 22, 2026
Heresies - The Proxy - Why Listening to Your Clients Might Be A Bad Idea
Jan 20, 2026
Amature - Why I Envy Photographers Who Don't Get Paid
Jan 13, 2026
The Fresh Start Fallacy - Are You Building a Boat or Just Floating in a Tube?
Jan 06, 2026
The Long Middle - The Third Space - How to Actually Build Community When Traditional Third Spaces Are Dead (And Why We Have to Try Anyway)
Dec 30, 2025
The Long Middle - Part 3 - The Enemy - How Gatekeeping and Hierarchy Keep Creative Professionals Isolated (And Why We're All Complicit)
Dec 23, 2025
Basics, Deconstructed - Framing - Deconstructing Christopher Anderson’s Vanity Fair Portraits: What Every Photographer Needs to Know About Framing Power.
Dec 17, 2025
The Long Middle - Part 2 - The Costume - Why We Hide Behind Professional Roles
Dec 16, 2025
The Long Middle - Part 1 - The Island - Why Mastery Is Lonely
Dec 09, 2025
The Curator's Disease - The Cost of Turning Your Life Into Content
Dec 02, 2025
Noise in the Shadows - When the Enemy is Competence
Nov 25, 2025
Basics, Deconstructed - Good vs. Bad - If It Feels Safe, It's Dead
Nov 20, 2025
Still Terrible - A Confession About Fear, Failure, and the Middle of the Story
Nov 18, 2025
Bloody Knuckles - Let’s talk about A.I.
Nov 10, 2025
Economic Dumpster Fire - Why the Creative Economy Split in Half (and How to Navigate It)
Nov 04, 2025
Yeah, Maybe - Why Some People Kill Your Ideas (And How to Protect Them)
Oct 28, 2025
Gold Star - Why Artists Keep Chasing Validation and How to Find Meaning Without the Awards
Oct 21, 2025
The Cage - Three Invisible Prisons That Keep Creatives Small
Oct 14, 2025
Dirty Little Secrets - 8 Secrets Photographers Never Admit
Oct 07, 2025
The Sacred Mundane - Beating Hustle Culture, Escape Procrastination, and Focus Deeply
Sep 30, 2025
The Tyranny of Okay - Why Most Creative Work Is Just Work
Sep 23, 2025
Permission to Quit - AI, burnout, and why photographers are leaving the industry
Sep 16, 2025
Pub Meditations - Six Meditations, One Pint: Notes on Survival, Shadows, and Light
Sep 09, 2025
Is It Good? - Photography, Approval, and the Fight for Creative Truth
Sep 02, 2025
In the Shadows- A creative deep dive into photography, shadow work, Carl Jung, and the emotional weight of what we avoid.
Aug 26, 2025
We Work, Rome Burns - How to Keep Creating When Everything Feels Like It's Falling Apart
Aug 19, 2025
The Dangerous Creative - How Solving Problems Makes You Dangerous (Even If You're a Barista)
Aug 12, 2025
Permission to Suck - Turning Failure Into Data
Aug 05, 2025
The Wrong Target - When Freelance Invoices Go Unpaid, and Rage Takes the Mic
Jul 29, 2025
The Job I Hate The Least - Because photography isn’t about the photos. It’s about surviving the job.
Jul 22, 2025
The Light Hits Back - What if the worst thing for your art… is being seen?
Jul 17, 2025
The Technician - When the identity you built starts to crumble, what do you build next?
Jul 15, 2025
Angry - A brutally honest episode about creative burnout, anger, and the choice to keep going.
Jul 08, 2025
Insider/Outsider - Surviving the Creative Industry
Jul 01, 2025
Why Shapes How - On Intention, Execution, and the Lie of Objectivity
Jun 24, 2025
Tear Gas & Pixels - What protest photography teaches us about truth, power, and not looking away.
Jun 14, 2025
The Revolt - Why Your Creative Rebellion is Failing
Jun 10, 2025
The Silence - When the work goes quiet, what is it trying to say?
Jun 03, 2025
Stinky Dead Mouse - Why most portfolios all look the same, and how to stop being everyone else.
May 27, 2025
Pillow Talk - The emotional and economic toll of creative work.
May 20, 2025
Copy Machine - On Imitation, Identity, and Making Work That’s Actually Yours
May 13, 2025
My Friend Hue - Seeing Color as Emotion, Language, and Power
May 06, 2025
Dim, Not Done - Burnout, Breakdown, and the Slow Road Back
May 01, 2025
Still Here - Why Resilience Is a Creative Act
Apr 29, 2025
No Secret Sauce: Just Show Up (How Careers Are Actually Built)
Apr 24, 2025
Your Brain is the Biggest Dick - Photographers Can Be Dicks – Part 2
Apr 23, 2025
Photographers Can Be D*cks (But You Don’t Have to Be One)
Apr 22, 2025
You’re Not Terrible, You’re Just Early - Why showing up bad is the only way to get good
Apr 22, 2025
Trailer
Apr 22, 2025