ON BEING A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER
(or perhaps a professional composer, novelist, poet, painter etc)
Dear reader…i am away for several weeks, so the next few essays are more like notes, but perhaps worth a quick read.
How many times have I heard someone say, “you’ve shot so may good pics, you must be lucky”. Usually I say, “uhha, lucky and perhaps helped by 60 years experience”. Or,” gosh, your pics look so good; must be my camera’s not as good.”
There is a chasm that separates an amateur making images and the work of a professional. But even within the amateur’s scope there is a deep chasm.
On one side there is the innocent recalling of people and events in one’s own world of friends, family and holiday places. On the other side is the picture making of strange, foreign and socially remote people and places. In both cases, pictures are made for the sake of having visual reminders of the things experienced, but picture making of any kind expresses two things: acquisition of a moment and, to a degree, a claim of ownership over the moment and its location. Susan Sontag’s insightful book ON PHOTOGRAPHY speaks of this in detail.
People pictured others and themselves in front of Ground Zero, not only as a reminder but as a way of proving “I have been there” which is a way of saying “My money, my status, my adventures have allowed me to own that moment”.
At best this is an innocent, unconscious action but when photographing poverty and other socially stressed conditions, the act of photographing with the intention of providing friends proof of where one has been is morally dubious.
Pointing a camera at an unwilling person becomes an act of aggression, perhaps a transgression of local beliefs or an act of imperialistic acquisition. One must be careful, knowing to photograph may negatively affect the subject.
These things are also true for professionals but their intention is different: to make a reputation, to make an income and sometimes to do something far more: to help change the world for the better.
The later has always driven me in my work in the world. I have always wished to expose the adverse so that the world may react, may decide the injustice, the inequality, the oppression is wrong and must be changed or, in the humblest way, to be a voice for those without one. This is difficult ground requiring the photographer to have the right intentions, to empathize with the community and to become, in some way, a part of it sufficiently able to express its aims and desires.