For early career creatives, it can be difficult to get your name and work out there without a list of exhibitions, commissions and press coverage already under your belt. While that’s always been the way, to an extent, there’s an added challenge now in that the people you might be trying to reach – whether that’s an audience, commissioner, curator or employer – are likely to be more time-poor and overwhelmed with noise than they ever have been.

It can feel like a slog, and a lonely one at that, especially if you’re self-taught. “I definitely had a lot of anxiety when I was first starting out as I didn’t have a network from college to lean on and I felt like I had to do a lot of catching up,” says Jordi Ng, a designer and art director at Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, “but in retrospect I think a lot of that worry was moot. I’ve found that people in this industry don’t really care who you know, they mostly care about your work and the POV behind that work.”

This rings true for Ashleigh Kane, who is, among other things, Dazed’s art and photography editor-at-large and an art buyer for Thursday’s Child, a production company and licensing platform dealing with rising and unrepresented talent. “I’m looking for a point of view, a perspective, and that could be aesthetic or content-wise – the kind of stories [creatives are] making images about. It could also be a specific style of photography they’re exploring that seems interesting to me, or just the way they put things together. Mise-en-scène is super important.”