The Changing Pace and Attitudes in Photography

Hello folks. This article is inspired by a communication from my friend, professional photographer James Connelly in response to my article on Generational Fill. Jim has been a working photographer for his entire adult life, in newspapers, magazines, commercial services and in culinary work.

Jim, like myself, came from the time of film. We agree on the combination of the Nikon F2 and Nikkor 105/2.5 as the finest combination of kit that either of us ever put a roll (or hundreds of rolls) of film through. I suppose then, that this dates us, but since neither of us care about that sort of thing, it is immaterial.

While I still shoot film to a limited extent and solely in medium and large format, Jim has completed the reinvestment and build out of a film darkroom going from film development to printing using chemical modes.

His most recent communication related to how freeing going back to film has been for him. While one can successfully argue that digital has the capability for more dynamic range and far greater options in post processing, film, however complex the processes is simpler and to be blunt, far more honest.

We both prefer commercial clients who understand process flow, definition of requirements, and that a good photograph that delivers on the requirements is actual work, and that the eye of the photographer is tantamount. Gear is irrelevant if the person using it has not learned to actively see and to actively listen. We have both done work for individuals including weddings, engagements, graduations, headshots and have walked or run away from those areas as the client’s valuation of skill has diminished as it has become easier to make a snapshot that is dependent on the kit and vaguely pointing it in the right direction. Moreover, the clientele of today have expectations set by what they see in media productions, where the results of photographs do not accurately resemble the real person. A set of demands today will not be for half a dozen finished images to pick from, instead will be for hundreds of finished images, and for which the client might be willing to pay for two.

The work in completion is enormous. They want larger chests, smaller chests, smaller stomach areas, wider cheekbones, narrower cheekbones, smaller noses, changes in hairlines, the removal of jowls, clarity of eyes and a laundry list of other metamorphic changes. Certainly there are software applications that can churn out final images based on an import that achieves those things, but the results no longer look like the person and are clearly massively retouched cardboard cutouts of some generic entity that no person actually looks like. Great amounts of work to high levels of rejection because the demand for fake has overridden the demand for real.

So we move onto other subjects and discover that the desired plate of food bears little resemblance to what is requested. That a real burger from a chain has never ever looked like the burger in the advertisement. That the pictured lobster bears no resemblance to the lobster delivered from the kitchen. Fakery not facts.

Neither of us are documentarians by trade or bent. We do however struggle with the ever increasing demand for the unreal. Remove this, change that, give me a different sky, or a different skin tone. Change the eyes to hazel from dark brown. We wonder what has caused so many people to become so unhappy with their reality? When so many believe that the photograph is the reality and the reality is fiction, is photography now relegated to illusion and sophistry?

There is more reality in the facial expressions in Jim Cameron’s Avatar:The Way of Water than in most other television and movies today. Because he understands that emotion beats all the tech crap in the world when it comes to having lasting power.

Why are so many images increasingly disposable. A flower is pretty by its nature. Yet a photograph of that flower is criticized because it adds nothing to the flower. Why is the memorable lifetime of a photo less than five seconds today, when a photograph from the 1930s has lasting power,. emotion and statement even today. I heard a young girl criticize Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother complaining that the photographer was lousy because the woman’s hair was out of place and her skin not touched up. While it is easy, and convenient to blame this kind of ignorance on Kardashians and increasingly reconstructed CGI renditions of performers is this where photography should be? Where there are no weeds, no broken twigs, no trash, no dandelions on the lawn. Where no one has a double chin, or a belly? Where no one is short or heavy set? Where all skies are blue and have perfect clouds? Where no teen has acne or an imperfect build, whatever the hells that means?

Is this the future that photography as a creative art is to follow? Is there in truth no beauty?

If that is to be the case, fuck that noise. Embrace the real and celebrate it because it exists even if some moron wishes it were not. See the world as it is and make it your subject, not some plastic fantastic fakery that falls out of some algorithmic driven assembly line.

If you shop at B&H Photo Video, please do so through the link on the main page as it costs you nothing and pays me a small commission. Thank you for reading and until next time, peace.