Dear Flickr
What is going on with us? When we first met it was love at first sight, although you always were slightly aloof towards me. I loved your creativity and enthusiasm and you made me feel like anything was possible. Our relationship was easy and effortless and I couldn't wait to spend time with you everyday. Over the years our relationship matured: our initial lust may have faded but my respect for you remained solid. Recently, however, you've become incredibly distant and our relationship has become a chore.
What's going on with us? I feel like we're at a critical juncture. We both need to work on our relationship or just call it a day and walk away.
You seem to have so much going on in your life that you don't have time for me anymore. You used to give me gifts and pay attention to what I was doing but it has been so long since you noticed what I was doing I nearly fell off my chair when you put one of my pictures in explorer yesterday. But it's too little too late. I feel like you're complacent and that you're taking us for granted. Didn't you learn anything from you parent, Yahoo? Don't you remember what happened when Google came along and knocked her off the top. Don't let the same happen to you.
I know it's not all you. I know it takes two to tango and it's partly my fault too. I know I've sometimes posted unworthy images just to go through the motions and to say that I posted something but, as you weren't paying attention to me anyway, it didn't seem to matter. You're so busy with business and recruiting new friends you seem to be forgetting about those of us who were there with you from the start. Haven't you noticed our old mutual friends don't come round here anymore? They've moved on while you ignored them.
So it all comes down to this: we've both got to work at this thing or go our separate ways. I'm going to try harder; what about you?
On the whole I like the Lens Work podcast and I've been listening to it for a number of years. In a large part it is due to its format which is slow and considered, especially when compared to most other photography podcasts which are long winded and rambling. That said I always cringe at Mr Jensen's scripted chuckles and his precious approach to photography seems out dated. As a result I usually find his point of view interesting but rarely wholeheartedly agree with what he has to say....
... until this week's podcast on The Work of Other Photographers.
Mr Jensen's proposal was that photographers who deliberately avoided the work of other photographers to keep themselves artistically pure were self-delusional. I'd go one step further and say that they're lazy liars. I talking here about photographers who have pretensions to be 'serious' not your average camera club member or shutter mom. I'm talking about people who want to be seen as artists.
In a previous life my wife was a poet. She worked hard at her craft and studied hard to keep up with contemporary poets and poetry. As her chaperon to poetry readings and salons I always encountered young, cocksure poets who avoided reading other poets for fear that it would somehow corrupt their own innate talent. I call 'bullshit'. They didn't read other poets because they were so self-involved they didn't have time for anyone else. They didn't learn about the giants of modern and classic poetry because they were too lazy to work through the backlog of poetic history that took work and could be tough to digest and understand.
A lot of artists have innate talent but very few are savants that don't need to develop their craft or to learn from the history that defines their time and place. If you don't really know who your influences are you are almost doomed to make sophomoric mistakes - I'm not talking technical mistakes I'm talking about artistic blunders. Even worse than knowing no photo art history is knowing very little and then basing your understanding on half-baked ideas. There are so many more photographers that deserve your attention than saint Ansel and HCB. Both of them were great photographers but they are not the start and end of art photography history.
Stop reading those camera magazines and PhotoShop tutorials and get out to a real photography show or go to your library and spend and afternoon going through some photography monographs. The history of art photography is not nearly as expansive as the history of poetry - the first real photo was 1826 and there aren't so many names between then and now as to be totally overwhelming. Photographers are influenced by everything they see weather they cop to it or not. You may as well know what you love and why (and what you can't stand and why) or you are going to just be influenced by photographers and movements secondhand via advertising hacks and Flickr imitators. Go to the source, not the copy.
Punk was seen as a movement that threw away all prior influences and rejected everything that went before them but that was only a half-truth. They still stayed within a well defined song format and they knew what they were rejecting and why (the excesses of prog rock). Punk wasn't mindless - far from it. Knowing your history does not make you a slave to it but it opens your mind to the possibilities and allows you to avoid making many mistakes. I'm not suggesting that you have to know entire academic history of art photography before you can make anything approaching art ... but it might help.
It was the 80's in a grey, Northern English town. I was the smallest guy and youngest person in my high-school year at an average sized secondary school. I wasn't very good at sports, I was the son of a minister, I wore chain store brand jeans and sneakers, I was academic; I desperately wanted to be cool and popular but I was none of those things. Life was not fun.
I learnt how to blend into the background and tried not be noticed but it wasn't enough to avoid the classroom bullies. I've been kicked around a classroom floor while the rest of the class cheered and laughed. I was punched, hit or kicked most days. I learnt not to cry, not to fight back and to laugh it off like I was in on the joke despite the humiliation and discomfort. From very early in my high-school 'career' until I left for college I knew high-school was just something I had to survive until I could get out of there. I have never gone back to the town my high-school is in and I have not kept in touch with anyone from there beyond a few superficial Facebook 'friends'.
I got through it by knowing it would end and from believing that it was just kids being kids and that children are cruel. It turns out high-school never ends and it will even follow you into your artistic life despite your best efforts. We tell each other that art is not a competitive sport and that we belong to a huge supportive community but don't you believe it. Flickr, especially is just like high-school and I'm sure most other online communities that have any analytics for measuring your 'popularity' are similar.
It turns out I'm still not one of the cool kids. It turns out that, even though I put a brave face on, that still hurts. It turns out there are cliques and groups that I don't have enough heat to be included in. It turns out that being able to fade into the background is not a great way to get your work noticed. It turns out that the cliche that if you consistently and persistently do good and thoughtful work you will be discovered is a lie ... either that, or my work is not as good as I believe and that is a truth I'm not yet ready to face. It turns out these thoughts and attitudes are not conducive to creative work.
How do you get past this?
I am not a spiritual person who believes in fate or karma. Good people and good work gets overlooked everyday while popular, beautiful people can rise to the top by the power of personality and charisma alone. There is no consolation in this. I can only live my life and make my work within my belief system. I will, however, be even more vigilant about how I treat others. I have to build the world I want to live in so I will try not to roll my eyes at yet another fuzzy sunset shot at camera club. Instead I will keep trying to put myself behind the photographer's eyes; to see the beauty they saw and the felling they are trying to express. I will not be dismissive and I will try to keep the snobbishness I know I can be prone to, in check.
Children can be cruel but adults can be equally so and they should know better. Photographers and other artistic types are not immune from this petty gamesmanship but it is not conducive to living an artistic life and so I am going to try not to get sucked in. I am going to try to treat everyone with respect and not get hurt that I am still not cool enough to play with the popular kids.