Essays & Perspectives / Ideas

Our Photographic Hypocrisy

By Adam Welch4 min read

I look to the future and what I see there is doomed.

I look to the future and what I see there is bright and shining. Somewhere in the middle, floating between these two most extreme of observations, lies a quiet hypocrisy. It’s nearly silent but it’s there. Writ in the posts and programs and courses that urge us to improve and evolve. “Take your photography to the next level” is the mantra oft sung by the peddlers and the sellers. Therein lies the hypocrisy.

Hell, I’ve been a part of it, too. A well-intentioned perpetrator and a complacent cog. At least I used to be.

The world of modern photography, at the consumer level, is a perpetually motive machine that offers to carve out a path for you and your photo work unto a destination that is never actually reached. That “next level” is a rabbit hole. It’s a pipe dream with built in fail-safes which serves no other purpose than to distract you from the truly difficult reflections that must be bounced off every photographer or any other creative-type person for that matter.

Granted, that last sentence was partially a lie. Not every photographer kicks around their cameras so they can express and capture a part of themselves in a picture. Some people do straight commercial work, gig work, technical work that lies outside the strange little niche that might otherwise be called “art photography.” To those individuals I say good for you. Continue and soldier on in your course with incomparable bliss. For the rest of us, the hypocrisy is real and it festers and shifts like a boil on the back of natural creativity.

Outside of a minor collective of nuanced accoutrements the reasonably astute individual can learn the entire technical relationship of aperture, shutter time, and ISO sensitivity in a single day. For the lesser encephalically gifted among us it might require a week. I’m sure it took me over a month.

Film work, fundamental darkroom printing, select alternative processes; all these can be dialed into the mind’s lockbox in similar timeframes. Virtually every piece of digital post-processing software operates from nearly identical platforms. Once learned even on the most basilar level all these facets of capturing and processing/developing a final image will take you far. Unfortunately, these are the easy, tangible portions located towards the thin end of a very fat wedge. Naturally, these are also what the majority of the photographic industry will emphasize to you the most.

The rest — the hard parts — can never be taught and are thusly primarily ignored in workshops and courses and classwork for good reason. Try explaining to a blind person the color green. Teach a dog French. Invent a stringless Yo-Yo. All these things are impossible because they lie outside the inherent nature of the person, the animal, the thing. It doesn’t mean these are incorrect or wrong aspirations or even a waste of time. It simply indicates that natural inclination must never be discounted when determining the likelihood of perceived outcome. Owning a brush might make you a painter but it doesn’t mean you’re an artist.

We all have a brand burned into our souls at birth. Sadly, the scar it leaves goes unfelt by so many because to understand it requires the asking of extremely uncomfortable questions. What are you meant to do? Are you meant to use a camera or is it something else? This is the unsellable truth that you must come to understand if you ever hope to fully realize any potential as a photomaker. No amount of time or money can manifest that which was not there to begin with. Just as important, no amount of time or money can rob you of what you possessed all along.

Never underestimate the power of a shitty photograph. After a certain tipping point technical considerations must give way to personal intuition and certainty; even if that certainty lies in the acceptance of uncertainty. This is why necessity of technical correctness is altogether overstated when compared to the fostering of an internal sense of “rightness”.

At most, dogmatic adhesion to the notion of a “right and wrong” way to make a photographer is absurd and inherently hypocritical. Yet, this absurdity prevails because it steers us along the course of least resistance. Beware the man or woman who professes to know any secret to making someone else feel what you feel via your camera. At best, they’ll show you how to make pictures like they make them. At worst, they’ll make you forget how to make pictures the way you want to make them.

Somebody get Nic Flamel on the phone.