Did Picasso paint "Portraits" or "Nudes"?
Don't you feel these questions are ridiculous?
Don#t you agree they miss the point, they prove the asking person should take a far closer look to the body of work of the artist in question?
Yet we professional photographers are confronted with it every time we dare to add a whatever "off-topic photo" to an otherwise pure corporate portrait portfolio. ADs or editors don't fail to prompt that picture with
THE MOST EVIL QUESTION OF ALL TIMES:
Back in the early 90s (my experience is about Germany so maybe in the US it happened at a different time) I had the chance to get a look at a lot of photographers portfolios. Usually they where full of pictures from what today we call "people", "portrait", "nude", "nature", "tarvel", "architecture" and "wildlife". You could not only see the personal style of a photographer, the broad band of subjects photographed (or not!) showed an almost intimate portrait of the photographer itself. Clients liked (or didn't) you, your "eye", your style and gave you the assignment relying on your craftsmanship and artistry. Then the whole system changed when people that had never had a look at a photo (from a professional point of view) came to be editors. They couldn't "read" the pictures anymore (I'm not blaming THEM - it would be the same for me having to chose from modern art - I just cant relate to it's theoretical approach) and they got confused with all the pictures so they nonchalantly asked: "What is it that you really do?"
While I was so bewildered with the question that I almost choked on the billions of words that question whirled up in a blink of a shutter, at the same time I still had to face the fact that THEY WERE LOST and that I needed to be clear about what service I provided when I wanted them to trust me.
So we "cleared the mess", narrowed the portfolios to the one thing we beleived was the most promissing (not the most interesting or artistic - it often was the LEAST artistic). But your existence shapes your conscience: Since there was no more reason for taking pictures that your commercial mind (that you were forcing on your artistry) labelled as useless, you stopped shooting in the first place what couldn't make it into your portfolio anyway.
It took me almost 20 years to get aware of this and to allow myself to photograph as I did when I started out, enthusiastic and with an open mind and not categorizing what I had in front of my eyes as sellable or not.
The truth is, I am a photographer not because I didn't know what else to do with my time, BUT because I perceive the world through pictures, I relate to it in my personal way through my viewfinder, I strive to learn from it when I look at its every detail, I celebrate it when showing my work to others.
What is it that you REALLY do?
I am a photographer!
Beauty vs Megapixel
Photography and the real world
Freitag, Juli 09, 2010
Donnerstag, Juli 08, 2010
2 EASY STEPS: How to become a successful photographer
1. Open a blog
2. Write and write and write. Every day! Write your fingers off (and I mean blood!)
It might actually be helpful if you owned a camera (a Holga wouldn't be too bourgeois, I guess), but remember when taking pictures, never meter nor focus.
How is it that more and more photographers feel the urge to telecast their brainwaves to the internet?
If you are serious about your photography business you are to consider blogging every day as otherwise GOOGLE will not see you. And we know: I rank first page therefor I am. Or to update what philosopher Wittgenstein put almost 100 years ago in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "The world is everything that ranks first page."
Imho this has 2 major flaws:
1. I am a photographer not an essayist and should be taking pictures.
Your fav bakery changes into a flowrist. You cannot buy any flowers there, in fact he's still selling the same rolls and muffins as before. When you ask: "What happened, I almost didn't find you!" he replies: "Nothing, it's the same as before but the sign "flowers" attract more "traffic"..."
2. With the need to create written content everyone (including those like me that don't have the gift of "poetry") now writes pages and pages of useless wording increasing the cacophonic babble and putting the customer EVEN FARTHER away from finding the proper photographer.
In what way is my ability to write and draw attention to my blog a criteria for the quality of my work as a photographer? I'd almost put it the other way around: If you blog every day and you're good at it, why would you call yourself a photographer in the first place. I can't see how you are going to do some serious shooting while spending your days in front of the screen..
Fact is, this bad habit has been created by Google's crawler (and of course it's programmers) - not being able to index the contents of pictures, they initially relied on captions but since they cannot tell the captions from the rest of the text they give it equal weight.
This leads to the absurd that if you have a highly grafic website with little to no text you just don't exist for Google or the other way around: You can rank first page as a photographer without one single picture on display.
Instead of trying to comply with insane standards and a way to theoretical approach to photography we should ask Google to change it's "formula".
One way of doing this could be to have a google specific metatag that tell it's robot whether the contents of the page is about pictures or about text allowing for them to give higher value to captions and for us to do what we are best at:
taking pictures.
2. Write and write and write. Every day! Write your fingers off (and I mean blood!)
It might actually be helpful if you owned a camera (a Holga wouldn't be too bourgeois, I guess), but remember when taking pictures, never meter nor focus.
How is it that more and more photographers feel the urge to telecast their brainwaves to the internet?
If you are serious about your photography business you are to consider blogging every day as otherwise GOOGLE will not see you. And we know: I rank first page therefor I am. Or to update what philosopher Wittgenstein put almost 100 years ago in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "The world is everything that ranks first page."
Imho this has 2 major flaws:
1. I am a photographer not an essayist and should be taking pictures.
Your fav bakery changes into a flowrist. You cannot buy any flowers there, in fact he's still selling the same rolls and muffins as before. When you ask: "What happened, I almost didn't find you!" he replies: "Nothing, it's the same as before but the sign "flowers" attract more "traffic"..."
2. With the need to create written content everyone (including those like me that don't have the gift of "poetry") now writes pages and pages of useless wording increasing the cacophonic babble and putting the customer EVEN FARTHER away from finding the proper photographer.
In what way is my ability to write and draw attention to my blog a criteria for the quality of my work as a photographer? I'd almost put it the other way around: If you blog every day and you're good at it, why would you call yourself a photographer in the first place. I can't see how you are going to do some serious shooting while spending your days in front of the screen..
Fact is, this bad habit has been created by Google's crawler (and of course it's programmers) - not being able to index the contents of pictures, they initially relied on captions but since they cannot tell the captions from the rest of the text they give it equal weight.
This leads to the absurd that if you have a highly grafic website with little to no text you just don't exist for Google or the other way around: You can rank first page as a photographer without one single picture on display.
Instead of trying to comply with insane standards and a way to theoretical approach to photography we should ask Google to change it's "formula".
One way of doing this could be to have a google specific metatag that tell it's robot whether the contents of the page is about pictures or about text allowing for them to give higher value to captions and for us to do what we are best at:
taking pictures.