The Online Photographer

When I asked for suggestions for topics yesterday, Todd Scholten wrote: "Get out. Go take some photos. Come back and write about them and why and how you took them. Inspire us to do the same." Several other people similarly suggested I should write more about my own work.

Perhaps I should, and perhaps I will, but this is actually a traditional issue, and there's a long history to it, as I shall 'splain. But a few ancillary points first:

Long ago I was invited to give a lecture on photography to a high school. I spoke about the photo scene in Washington D.C. in that era and drew three circles on the chalkboard, of different sizes, partially overlapping to the degree I thought was vaguely accurate, and labeled the circles "professional photography," "photojournalism," and "art photography," representing the three main kinds of photography in that town at that time. I had intimate connections to all three of those separate worlds at the time, as I was an assistant at a professional advertising studio, a recent graduate of art school, and was doing dribs and drabs of work for newspapers and acting as a custom printer for local photojournalists. In my lecture, the three circles served as a window for explaining what those three groups did, and how they practiced, and what markets they served.

A hand went up from the back of the room. "What kind of photographer are you?"

I thought for a minute and answered, "I'm a writer."

So there's that. If somebody wants to pay me to be a photographer, that would be nice, but, like most photographers, I've tried and failed to make a living doing exactly what I please, and my present employment (writer) seems to be about the best I can manage as a compromise. There is actually surprisingly little actual photographing involved in the great majority of photography-related jobs, including for a lot of people who are nominally full-time photographers.

Secondly, I actually publish a lot of my work here. You just don't notice because it's not presented...densely. For example: This post includes a casual illustration taken with my iPhone. Then, here's a portrait I did of a doctor friend for her professional use with my Fuji X-T1. I wrote several posts about that. And then here and here you can find examples of the work I do with my B&W camera. There have been lots and lots of my pictures posted here over the years; just not, as I say, densely.

Furthermore, I didn't do a lot of B&W photography in 2023, for two reasons. First, the cost of gas (petrol) was rather alarming. Going out for a drive three to five times a week to find a picture was effective, but it was sucking down even more gas money than life here usually requires—and it already requires a lot, because almost everything in this sparsely populated rural region is far away from almost everything else. I admit I also had a slight but non-trivial amount of guilt about polluting the atmosphere merely to add varying amounts of electrical signal to millions of photosites, mostly to no purpose. (This would be an absolutely perfect use of an electric vehicle as a second car, come to think. I could sign up to get my electricity from solar fields, and toodle about the countryside to my heart's content, guilt-free. Of course the car would cost way more than the gas money I'd save, but I'm never going to get to do it anyway so it's a moot point). Also, you have to bear in mind I was basically in heart failure last Fall, and doubtless suffering some effects of heart disease before that, culminating in my getting a pacemaker implant on January 23rd of this year. So although I had high hopes for the coming year when the calendar clicked over to 2023, I wasn't in the finest fettle during that year, the way things turned out.

I also have a Flickr site of some of that work. It sort of morphed from test pictures to real work, so there's a bit of both; it's not very well "curated" if you will. Despite which, lots of those photos got lots of views: for instance this one, which has 68,013 views as of today, and this one, which got an improbable 77,813 views (why, I have no idea. Perhaps some larger forum somewhere was discussing the resolution of converted sensors and was using those two shots as examples?). But unfortunately all those views didn't do the blog any good at all, so I've kinda slacked off on that. I sure enjoyed doing it, though. (Remind me to write another post on what I'd need to keep that project going. And another on how to bestir one's sludgey self and get up and get out and get cracking.)

The history
There's a not-so-grand tradition in photography, going almost all the way back, of using nuts-and-bolts instructional writing as a sneaky way of getting your own work published. I hasten to add that many people who wrote in an instructional way were also top-flight photographers and it was, and is, perfectly natural for them to use their own work to illustrate their points. For example, P.H. (Peter Henry) Emerson's Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (1889); or Ansel Adams's Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography (1935), which was later expanded into the Basic Photo Series which then went through several editions and adaptations (I still recommend The Negative as a book every photo enthusiast should have, even film virgins); or Paul Outerbridge's Photographing in Color (1940) which had tipped-in plates of some of his more inoffensive work. Outerbridge was a master carbro printer and primarily a fetish photographer. His execrable middlebrow wife, one of the villains of the history of photography if you ask me, destroyed most of his work after his death "to protect his reputation," thereby dealing a grievous blow to his reputation. And I say that as one to whom sexual fetishism is foreign and inscrutable. More recently and blog-relatedly, our friends Kirk Tuck's Minimalist Lighting and Gordon Lewis's Street Photography come to mind.

But apart from such positive examples, there's also a longstanding pattern of people publishing "instructional books" merely as a pretext for publishing their own work. Or submitting articles to magazines for the same reason. As most people reading probably know already, I was chief editor of a photography magazine for a while. One of the things I always had to be on the lookout for were people whose motives in submitting manuscripts were not earnest or pure. I recall one wealthy gentleman who hired a public relations firm to write a plausible article which could then be illustrated with many examples of the gentleman's own work. Of course the text was peppered with lavish praise for the pictures, and that was a bit of a tip-off, on account of I'm so canny and not entirely immune to the obvious. Another such gentleman actually paid to create a bricks-and-mortar art gallery to feature other photographers but most prominently himself. I received not only a torrent of press releases about his shows, written as though the gallery were independent, but also articles reviewing his shows at his gallery. I forbore from publishing any of that, reasoning that he already had provided for his work a more generous amount of exposure than most amateur snappers are privileged to receive.

When the rain comes
Another aspect of this is the issue of editors publishing their own work. Howard Moss, who was the poetry editor of The New Yorker for a short eternity, published his own poems sometimes. I don't know how often he did so, and I don't know the circumstances under which he did so, but, when I attended a lecture of his at Dartmouth College, there were a couple of students who brought umbrellas to the lecture. When Mr. Moss spoke about this issue, they deployed the umbrellas in silent protest. I talked to one of them later. In animated fashion he communicated his displeasure at the editor for taking up space in a magazine that already allotted very little space to poetry. (The New Yorker at the time supposedly paid far and away the most for poetry of any publication; I have a bad memory for numbers, but I think it was $5 a word, when the next-best publication paid $2 per word.)

The Editor of small magazines also holds the purse strings, and one editor I once worked for would publish one of his own photographs in every issue along with a brief paragraph about it, and pay himself a sum for the contribution that was many times what he paid for much longer and more substantive content. The Group Editor was evidently a chum of the publisher and owner of the company, and my boss's little scam evidently flew under the radar of their oversight.

Bob Shell, the longtime editor of Shutterbug magazine, was notorious for publishing in his magazine copious numbers of his humdrum and inexpert "glamour photographs" of amateur models. These were usually unknown young local women of average appearance in whom Shell was widely suspected of taking a prurient interest. My memory is that some or most of them were pictured in their underwear in the woods. Shell was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of one of those models, and has been in prison for it ever since. The details of the crime were extremely lurid. One of the "true crime" television programs was reportedly scheduled to do an episode about it, or so it was said, but ended up passing on it because the details were too shocking for broadcast television.

I seldom published myself at the magazine I edited—just the occasional picture here and there—but I did have a portfolio published by a different magazine that I wrote for.

Elbowing to the front
Meanwhile, there's a concomitant tradition, long settled in print media at least, for editors and writers of integrity to be appropriately restrained about putting their own work forward. This might not even apply to the online world, but then, my values were not formed by the online world.

I took as my model my onetime mentor Phil Davis, the author of Beyond the Zone System and Photography, an excellent general textbook which has fallen into obscurity because it hasn't been updated since Phil's death from prostate cancer in 2007. Phil actually came in for some contentious criticism online because he refused to set himself up as a know-it-all guru. He wouldn't promote his own photography like he thought some other such gurus did. I tried to talk him into accepting the title of Technical Editor of Photo Techniques, but he resisted because, even though we were the most scrupulous magazine in print at the time about technical matters, he didn't want to be held accountable for what he saw as other authors' lack of rigor. He was actually a prolific and skilled photographer, and an accomplished one, and had retired from a lucrative professional career as an advertising photographer for the Detroit automakers. I saw some dye transfer prints of car ads he made in the 1950s that were stunning.

When my article "Your Camera Roll Contains a Masterpiece" was published on the New Yorker's website in 2022 (the pinnacle of my life as a writer toiling in the trenches, by the way), a goodly segment of the text discussed a single picture, and I thought it would have been appropriate to publish the picture itself. The magazine, however, first proposed to provide a drawn illustration of the picture, and then decided that the written description was enough. I accepted that decision without complaint—and without any private resentment, either. Editors know best.

So I'll try to post more of my own work if the discussion about it seems like it would be interesting. But I'll close here with one more observation: despite my increasingly self-centered blats in recent years (because a blog is voracious and relentless and everything has to become fodder), the "online photographer" in this site's title is you, not me.

Mike

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