“Call a photographer”

 

Foreword to all my non-Catalan or Spanish speaking friends:

This will be an English resume of my blog texts. Please by kind with me about my grammar skills, and never doubt in suggesting any correction for the mistakes you may find.

 

It’s a phenomenon I’ve been observing quite often nowadays.

Having almost 25 years of academic experience, I’ve never seen it until now, and it’s becoming something “normal”.

It is said that “ignorance is daring·. If we add sentences like “if you want you can” or “everybody can do whatever” or even worst “I like it this way”, and we add some drops of egotism and the actual cult to ignorance – because technology will do it – we just got it.

A teacher of mine use to say “don’t lose time with people that don’t know and don’t know that don’t know”. As a teacher, I don’t really agree with that, but this profile is the target about what I want to talk.

Where I’m going?

Let start with an example: a person in a basic photography course, with a simple camera. Photography knowledge? Almost zero. References? None. It is the usual profile of people who don’t know and want to learn. Perfect.

The problem comes when this person, after a couple of basic sessions asks “I’ve been committed to take pictures in a wedding this weekend. What I have to do to get good pictures?” This is a real situation, and not an isolated one. The answer is always the same “call a photographer”.

There are several variations on this sample: “I have an assignment for a real estate agency. How do I have to take the pictures?” (not even a tripod available) etc. Just remember that we are talking about someone with almost zero photography knowledge.

One of the reasons for that is the actual techno philia: the “machine” will do everything, the AI will give me all answers… And this is very dangerous when there’s no criteria to evaluate if what is done by the machine is correct (often it is not) or if what the AI says is ok (sometimes not).

Further than technical contents, there’s a session in my courses very significative: this last session when students come with their pictures to talk about them in the class. There are always some interesting pictures, but what’s evident is that most people don’t know how read or analyze a picture, not even in a formal level (exposition / composition) and, more than that, the level of self-demand is very low, there’s always an excuse to apologize for mistakes, no matter how big are they.

And we go back to the main subject. This would be ok (everyone enjoys it his way) if we were talking about a personal photography. No pretensions. But when we step to a ground, the professional one, which is too big for us because our lack of knowledge, gear (yes: gear does matter) and workflow, we should think about what are we doing.

Photography is a mistreated job, and the problem has two sides: the daring ignorance of the transmitter and the visual analphabetism of the receptor in a world with a tendency of distrusting the professional. Let’s think about how many city halls (in Spain) document important events of the town thanks to the pictures of any neighbor who, besides good will, can’t contribute with anything more, with a mediocre result for what it should be the historical archive of the town

That can be extensive to others jobs (a salute to my designer friends) but I’m a photographer (not a hobby, not a job: just something you are) and I feel very concerned about that.

And fighting against ignorance is very hard; the only way is teaching and letting people realize how hard can be to take a decent picture.

We’ll let for another moment the idea of a “good photography”.