[Author’s note: This week is part 1 (part 2 next week) of what I would call my photo manifesto. I’ve published a version of the piece below on Medium and Substack earlier in the year but not in this space yet.
It coincides with the launch of my upcoming photo workshop - a six-week, in-person, small-group format called See For Yourself - on October 26 in Takoma Park. It’s a kind of distillation of my 15-year teaching career, it resembles an indie version of my advanced Photo Seminar class at Maret. If you’re interested, a PDF with more info is here. Act fast, I’ve already got a few people in the pipeline and space is limited to six participants. The focus is on developing a personal approach and, more broadly, reclaiming our agency and vibrancy through photography. In brief, as I put in the overview:
Photography is energetic engagement with the world, other people, and ourselves. The quality of the photos reflects the quality of that engagement, and the ability to translate that engagement visually.
Photography is not just pictures, it’s a stance: curiosity, empathy, mindfulness, a worldview. That's a revolutionary stance.
All experience levels welcome!
I’d been wrestling with the idea of online courses for a while, finally I decided IRL is the way. So for now that’s what I’m doing. I have a new boho studio/meeting/music/photo library space that I’m excited to inaugurate.]
“Most photography today sucks. We are drowning in pictures, too many of them formulaic, banal, or mediocre. We have enough, we should just stop. Why bother?”
Over my 15-year photo teaching career, I would sometimes start my classes for the year with statements like these. They were meant to provoke my new students and get their attention.
Wait, our photo teacher thinks photography sucks??
Well, consider some of the greats of 20th century photography, just to name a few: Gordon Parks, Josef Koudelka, Diane Arbus, Daido Moriyama, Ansel Adams, Mary Ellen Mark. They had very different strengths, skill sets, and circumstances but each had a powerful, singular voice. It is quite easy to identify their photos just by looking at them. That’s what made them great.
Today you’d be forgiven for thinking that much of what you see out there (usually online) was taken by the same person. Pretty perhaps, maybe even visually interesting, but too often not compelling or distinctive. Weak sauce.
Of course there is powerful and sensitive imagery being made on a regular basis by talented photographers, but you need to dig for it. There are young photographers across Africa carrying the torch. Finding new visual vocabularies and telling their own stories. I know because I met a few of them at a workshop I gave in Nairobi.
But the firehose of images made every day is drowning out the good stuff, making it harder to find — and even slowly chipping away at the very notion of ‘good stuff’. If it’s true that everyone’s a photographer now, maybe it means no one is. I hope it’s not controversial that today’s ease and sheer quantity of image-making has been democratizing photography but not necessarily making it better.
Of course, from a DIY standpoint this democratization is a dream come true and traditional gatekeepers are an elitist vestige of the past to be vanquished. So that gets complicated, and this is not a piece advocating for gatekeepers.
Still, I do believe my provocative statements, to a degree, with plenty of caveats. Of course anyone should do what brings them joy, in any way they like. There are countless ways and reasons to make pictures. Doing it just for fun is fine, in fact I encourage people to do photography for themselves. Any camera will do. Sometimes so-called professional photography is the worst.
As a practice, photography has become much less of an artisanal craft but is still a tremendous mindfulness exercise. Being attentive to beauty, other people, and our surroundings has its rewards for our well-being. Those are good reasons right there.
Yet “why bother?” was a question I posed to my students. Why strive and struggle to make images just like those that have been made by others, over and over, for decades, so they keep piling up?
We don’t need more ‘photographers’.
Meaning those who want to be famous (does anyone really believe this?) or rich (extremely unlikely), who are obsessed with equipment or technique (I assure you it’s not about cameras or f-stops).
What we need are photo-authors.
Those able, even determined, to show us their vision and ideas in new and surprising ways.
Those with the courage — because courage is required — to infuse their images with their sensibility. Their unique point of view, personality, stories, and ideas. This means a continuous deep dive into yourself in parallel with figuring out how to put that into your work.
As the great Czech photographer Viktor Kolar once told me, “if you want to elevate your photography to something more spiritual, develop your sensibility and learn how to make it visual.”
It’s really not about who can make the ‘best’ photos anymore. Those days are over. To use a music metaphor, imagine one of those TV singing contests like American Idol. Think about the panel of judges deciding who hit their high notes the best and checked certain boxes. Usually they sound mostly alike and will not have much impact on the listener.
Too often, that’s photography.
Now imagine, say, a young, unknown Bob Dylan taking the stage on American Idol. His lyrics, voice, guitar playing, and demeanor utterly idiosyncratic, unconventional, even contrary to the notion of ‘good’. Doing things completely on his own terms. He would probably get yanked off-stage. Yet he became one of the most celebrated musical poets of all time, with vast impact and influence across decades and genres.
Which one do you want to be?
Don’t worry, you don’t have to call yourself a ‘photo-author’ out loud, it does sound a bit pretentious. Not the kind of thing one says. Use ‘photographer’ but think of yourself as an author. It can be your undercover identity as a art-spy.
Being an author of course requires having ideas, which for many people is a scary prospect: “What if I don’t, or what if they’re no good??” Rest assured, you don’t have to know what your ideas are in advance. But you can still commit to developing them as a vital part of your process, and they will come.
I didn’t used to have ideas. Now I can’t keep up with them.
It’s a transformative process that asks more of you than simply shooting a lot and hoping to get some ‘good ones’ to show off. Don’t stop there, as many do. The main reason photographers don’t advance beyond technical competence is failure to wrestle with their ideas.
Photography is a kind of return on investment — in yourself.
Often ego gets in the way just as photography gets hard. People would often prefer to convince themselves their pictures are good enough as-is, rather than do the difficult — even painful — personal and creative work to make them next-level better.
WHY are you photographing, what are your goals, intentions, and ideas? This comes from your critical thinking, your observations, your instincts, your dreams. What books you’re reading, films you’re watching, music you’re listening to.
HOW do you make your ideas as visually effective as possible? This includes basic technique, but also finding your own strategies, visual approaches, and experimentation. How you interact with people and your surroundings. These also take courage, the world right now is not an easy or safe place for critical observers.
If all of this seems daunting, keep in mind that even my youngest photo students — 14-15 year-olds who would get kind of wide-eyed when I said these sorts of things — were able to understand the quest, and forge the beginnings of a personal vision. Sometimes in just a few months they began to make and recognize ‘their’ images. Sometimes right away. Usually not consistently or with technical polish. But their best images were mysterious, evocative, sensitive, curious, poetic, raw, compassionate, suggestive. And this was darkroom photography, where you have to do twenty things right even to make a bad picture.
Which are all great reasons to bother. I could look at my students’ best work all day long (which of course is what I did). These were not sunsets, kittens in a basket, or overworked Photoshop contrivances (or, god help us, AI fabrications).
We don’t need more eye candy or sentimentality in the world. As Viktor Kolar also liked to say, sentimentality won’t save us.
If you want to know how to make your work better, make it more personal.
In a world where truth, intelligence, decency, and hope are under siege, I would argue we need all of the arts to assert a new humanism, a word which has fallen out of fashion over the years. A newly confident, savvy humanism springing from beauty, poetry, and solidarity. But not soft, it’s the new punk-rock stance. Ready for a street fight with the alternative.
The unique ability of photography to reflect our world in profound ways can be reclaimed by skilled and committed photo-authors — who can also help reclaim our zeitgeist from cynicism, despair, and pervasive dark trends. And in the process maybe even help us imagine a better future.
Is that all a bit much? Ok, maybe. But hasn’t the world dimmed a bit since smartphones/cameras and selfie culture took over, and the stream of mediocre images became a barrage?
Ok, or since David Bowie died. Coincidence?