What is a photographer? What we can learn from Facebook photography.

I recently heard that a true photographer understands how to use their equipment. That they know how to see light. That they know how to make things look pretty. That they don’t need to snap away relentlessly to create a good shot. Bunk. Total bunk. There’s no such thing as a true photographer, and there’s no one characteristic that defines or excludes someone. With regularity, I see better pictures from people’s iPhones uploaded to Facebook than I see from a lot of professionals. Not because the Facebook pictures look better. Some look like garbage. Because they feel better. They have something to say. And that’s something absent from the majority of actual practitioners of the field.

People who take pictures with their phones for their status updates – they don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about light, image quality, prettiness and all of that stuff. They have no one to impress. They just snap away when they feel it. What a great way to shoot. A true and basic inner urge compels someone to pick up their cell phone camera and share it with others. How much more direct can you get? Punchline after punchline, picture after picture, I see an unending array of shots with honest-to-goodness observations. Simple things, to be sure, but immediate. Maybe something funny like an odd juxtaposition of words on a menu or a poorly designed street sign. Maybe something sad, like a person all alone. Maybe something unfortunate like a fly in soup, or maybe something honest, like a simple self-portrait without any pretense. But whatever the case, on so many of these you can just look at them pictures and get it. You don’t look at the technique. You look at what they say. These Facebook pictures contain more sincerity and originality than the majority of saccharine-soaked editorial-inspired wedding pictures I see. They’re not formulaic, they’re not contrived. They may not be sophisticated, but they’re true observations of real things, and they’re personal. I think photographers can benefit by getting back to these basics.

Somewhere along the way, we lose that. Much like a child learns the the right way to behave and shrouds his inner self to protect it from the rest of the world, photographers bury their natural instincts with a bunch of gobbledigook rules telling us how we’re supposed to shoot. Pretty soon, we’re shooting to conform to rules, instead of shooting to conform to our voice. We get stuck focusing on the craft, and we forget about the art. Yeah, as a business owner, you should know your craft. But to work in conjunction with the art. The art is where the humanity lives. When we get stuck on the craft, we get locked into notions of wrong and right. The idea that there are ways things are simply supposed to be done. Ridiculous. Says who? There might be pictures that work and pictures that don’t, but the idea that we can compartmentalize photography into a simple set of rules handed down to us by mediocre publications with dedicated sections on the rule of thirds, levels, Photoshop, what shutter speed is, how aperture works, and how to white balance your camera? Not a chance.

Yet this is exactly what we do. When I read a critique, I rarely see anything about content. What I read about is exposure, white balance, toning, and focus. I hear about technicals, and how the picture violates this rule or that rule. Rules are guides, not straight jackets. Worse yet, whenever someone new enters the industry, we make sure to do our best to break them, mold them, and scorn them until they conform to the likeness of our own image. In some cases, they win. They make big bank and prove us wrong. In such instances, with a little bit of persuasion by the mighty dollar being dangled in front of us, we then attend their workshops to learn The New Way and carve out their new vision as an exception to the rule. Groundbreaking, we say. The truth is we can all break new ground. We just need to dare to do so. Or maybe in the face of this new approach we stand our ground with even greater voracity, because to recognize the value of an alternative approach would be to recognize a chink in the armor that is our own model of the world. But, fortunately, in most cases, we win. The newcomer languishes and never gets where he could, because everyone is so focused on capturing perfect light, they forget to capture imperfect life. We criticize any technical imperfection, we knock their methodology, and we complain about their business practices. They are valueless people until they learn to pre-design their albums or withhold their negatives. We give ourselves ownership of their shortcomings by complaining that they diminish our value for being in the marketplace. Because, if they don’t, what right would we have to complain of them? It would be none of our business.

If our value is being lowered by someone who knows nothing and just picked up a camera, that’s our problem, not theirs. We need to reevaluate. Because that means we’re living in a house of cards, and we are just waiting for that gust of wind to blow us over. This approach may successfully elevate our own standing in our own minds. But in exchange, we narrow our world and limit or view, fortifying a position by retreating to a simple and limited idea that good is a fixed set of standards. Usually standards that happen to mirror our own preferred practices and values. This whole cycle is a sad interpretation of photography. The rest of society could care less about all of this. Most of my friends hardly know what I do – I could just as soon be a gardener. We might fancy the thought that some of people are the real deal and some are not, but clients simply pay for what they like and who they trust, real photographer or not. The public simply likes things or not. Our best path towards salvation lies within ourselves. Forget what other people are doing wrong. We should challenge our own assumptions. It’s not as fun, but we’ll get more out of it.

Photography is open-ended. It is exploration. It is personal. It is our way of relating to our community and the environment that surrounds us. It is communication made visual, a language, a construct, a philosophy, and a feeling. Ansel Adams said he’s rather see a bad picture of a good idea than a good picture of a bad idea. It is an idea. It is heart. Your average iPhone snapshooter on Facebook gets this. We should too.