Less and Less About Photography
It was never about the photography.
Truth is, it was never about the music, either.
It was always about making a living doing something I love, because I long ago swore that my relationship with “work” would be different than my dad’s relationship with the factory. And because if we have to spend our entire lives earning every breath we take, I’d rather mine happiness than excavate despair. I’ve done both, and I’ve made my choice. I’d rather breathe love than anger. For me personally, that’s being an artist.
But it’s not easy to make a living this way. Most photographers make the bulk of their income by teaching, so when we talk about how to be a “successful” working photographer in 2023, that’s typically the first valid suggestion. I’m often asked why I don’t teach photography.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy explaining what the exposure triangle is, or talking about new gear and technology that allow us to more easily create the visually spectacular. That’s all very exciting. These days, however, I would rather show someone why they should pick up a camera in the first place.
I’d rather teach how to see light, especially in moments when it’s imperceptible to the human eye. I know it’s there, because I’ve drawn it out with a camera in some of the darkest moments of the last decade. I want to share the possibility in that.
You can Google all of the technical stuff. But you can’t Google the feeling you get the first time you photograph that imperceptible light hitting the side of a weathered face in the dark, as if the light is emanating from within their being. The feeling that maybe, just maybe, there’s a light within all of us, waiting to be seen. You can’t Google a desire to capture that over and over again, whether a human subject or not, to feel more connected to the utterly extraordinary and show others that yes, there is still magic in the world. It’s magic in the sense that you must first be willing to see what’s there as extraordinary.
The truth is, you need more magic than skill to be a photographer. More love. More why behind picking up a camera.
You don’t need to spend hours in a practice room with a camera (as is necessary with a musical instrument to become a good musician). You need only to be present in the world around you.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s certainly a technical skillset to photographic art-making. You can Google it.
You can’t Google the magic.