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We Don’t Need More Photographers
Should we just stop?
“Most photography today sucks. We are drowning in pictures, too many of them formulaic, banal, or mediocre. We have enough, we should just stop. Why bother?”
Over my 15-year photo teaching career in Washington DC, I would sometimes start my classes for the year with statements like these. They were meant to provoke my new students and get their attention. Wait, our photo teacher thinks photography sucks??
Well, consider some of the greats of 20th century photography: Gordon Parks, Josef Koudelka, Diane Arbus, Daido Moriyama, Ansel Adams, Mary Ellen Mark. They had very different strengths, skill sets, and circumstances but each had a powerful, singular voice. It is quite easy to identify their photos just by looking at them. That’s what made them great.
In contrast today, you’d be forgiven for thinking that much of what you see out there (usually meaning online) was taken by the same person. Pretty perhaps, maybe even visually interesting, but too often not compelling or distinctive. While some might not like to hear it, I hope it’s not controversial that today’s ease and sheer quantity of image-making has been democratizing photography but not necessarily making it better.
