People who Insist on Doing Their Own Thing are Ruining Art

Overnight, I have learned some new things about photography.

The first thing is that there is no use whatsoever in asking other photographers for artistic advice. About 95% of the people I would be asking can’t create good art. They can’t understand it. Good art makes them angry. They would trash the best aspects of my pictures and brag about their own rule-following hack jobs. This has already happened, now that I think about it.

The second thing: a person in a portrait is not a model; models are props, not people. If you turn a portrait subject into a model, you have ruined everything.

I belong to some photo forums, and I started out with questions about artistic merit and technical skills. I’m never asking anyone for help with the artistic side again. No one can teach me how to have an interesting personality that projects itself through images I make, and no one can teach me good taste. Either these things will come out on their own, or they won’t.

This decision will save me a lot of facepalm moments.

As for the distinction between subjects and models, I got that revelation while I was thinking about a famous baby photographer named Ann Geddes. People mentioned her as an example of a baby photographer who does wonderful work.

Does she really?

I looked at her site. The photos I saw, which are the only ones I can judge, don’t appeal to me. They are extremely creative. They are technically flawless. The props and makeup require transcendental skill. But they turn babies into props that say a lot about her and nothing about the babies. Same for her other subjects.

To give an example of things I didn’t like, she took a child and made it (appropriate pronoun) look like a fairy or something. An imaginary creature that lives in an enchanted forest and sleeps on top of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Fifty years from now, who is going to look at that photo, feel tears welling up, and say, “Wow; I remember how Mom used to flit around the enchanted forest, sipping nectar from giant flowers with all the other fairies”?

The babies in her photos are not subjects. They are not individuals with unique traits to be remembered and celebrated. They are props. Remove one baby, insert another, and nothing changes.

She also does dramatic shots of people in which she puts them in fantasy sets and makes them look like the people in, say, Richard Avedon or Herb Ritts pictures.

Now that I think about it, her photos remind me of deceptive Facebook posts. “Here we are on the beach at Sandals, trying to look like celebrities, holding fancy drinks and wearing overpriced beachwear on a perfect day.” Meanwhile, their credit cards are maxed out, they’re cheating on each other and contemplating divorce, their kids are sullen video-game addicts, they hate their jobs…

Put her photos in a gallery and call them art? Sure. That’s what they are, and they are extremely impressive. Not fine art in my opinion, but art. They are not portraits, however. A portrait speaks about the subject. They are more like avatars; creatures she or her models wish the models could be.

If you put me in a Batman costume and take a photo that is technically and artistically superb, is it a portrait? Of course not.

Some guy on a forum got mad at me for saying anyone could take formulaic baby shots, and he told me my photos wouldn’t even make it to his sensor. Maybe he’s a baby photographer. What he definitely is is a gatekeeper, a rule-follower, and a net liability to the art of photography. Asking the likes of him for artistic advice would be like asking Bob Ross. That’s an almost-perfect analogy, except that Bob Ross never pretended to be an art expert or even a serious artist.

How blessed I am to have God’s help in standing up to such people. Most of us are still shackled by the desire to please the mob. What if I listened to guys like this?

Here is the evidence that formula shots are easy to take: they all look alike, and thousands and thousands of people take them and sell them. That’s conclusive proof.

The existence of the coaching-marketing-manipulation-markup industry is evidence that anyone can take typical baby photos. The industry exists to make commodities look like franchises. If baby photographers were really producing unique top-notch work, they wouldn’t need anyone to convince the public they were good.

As for me and my efforts, I am confident that I will do well. I’m not going to be shaken by gatekeepers.

When I was a little kid, I loved to sing. One day, my sister started following me around and making fun of my singing. Eventually, I began to find it hard to sing in front of people, and that problem persists until today. When I started showing an interest in girls, my sister and my dad started making fun of me ruthlessly. As a result, I had a very hard time talking to girls and I rarely dated. It also made it impossible for me to hold onto girls, because my persistent need for confirmation that they wanted me drove them off. I think this is one reason I didn’t marry when I was young.

The same principles apply to everything we do. The world is full of people who love to crush other people’s hopes. There is no point in letting them get a foothold.

When I see someone complain that my lighting is weird or that there are too many things in the background of a portrait shot, I think of the great photographers of the past and what stupid people said about them.

Robert Frank was very good. His photos were often depressing, but they were artistically excellent. Here is what a magazine said about his work: “The images are flawed by meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.”

Here’s a quote about Saul Leiter, who took wonderful photos: “Color photography is vulgar, fit only for commercial advertisements and the snapshots of ignorant tourists.” Wow. One of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. I congratulate whoever wrote that deservedly-immortal sentence on the importance he attached to rules. You know what they say about hobgoblins.

“You’re no Robert Frank.” “You’re no Saul Leiter.” Not saying I am. I’m discussing principle. I do some good work, and people give me invalid, destructive criticism that sometimes comes from good intentions but often does not. If I listen to them, I won’t try to develop ideas that could bring me and my family an excellent harvest.