Photos About Themselves

Most photos, almost all photos, are naive witnesses to something or to someone. The snapshot from the party or the beach, the selfie, whatever. These are maybe not well-made, these are maybe meaningful only to a few people. That's ok. All they do is attest to that-which-was, and that's all they are meant to do.

At the other end, there are well-made photos that are about something else. Maybe they're very beautiful, or they witness something more universal, more accessible.

In the middle, where all the photographers live, there is a desperate hell-scape of photos that are about themselves.

Consider the dismal grey mess from the MFA student, the photo that's allegedly a biting critique of late-stage capitalism but is in the end a cluster of weeds in front of a trash bin. This thing isn't about capitalism or weeds or trash, it testifies only to the student's opinion of themself as an insightful commentator of late-stage capitalism, whatever that even is. With a quick adjustment of the text, it's a profound commentary on patriarchy, or a plea for de-growth, or a satirical commentary on climate change. It witnesses nothing except that the photographer is in an MFA program.

By the same token, the minimalist photo of the peach on a cutting board, illuminated by the well-placed warm ray of sunshine witnesses nothing more than the insightful eye of the photographer. It may be in some way beautiful, but god damn it we've seen this picture so many times, and it's always the same, and after a while you realize that most of what you like about it is the way the photographer cranked the saturation and warmth sliders up.

The witty juxtaposition street photo. Look, the pedestrian walks left under the big arrow pointing right! Ha ha it looks like the steam is coming from the person's head! The giant hand in the poster appears to be grabbing the bus! Ha ha! Nobody cares. Again, the photo does nothing more than testify that you're in the hands a sharp and curious photographic eye, an insightful and witty commenter on the human condition.

Except that none of these actually comment on whatever. They all comment on the photographer, and ultimately, on themselves. They are hermetically sealed into a self-referential container. These photographs mainly observe that they themselves are examples of a well-worn trope, the well-observed something-or-other.

As a rule, photographs like these are made to appeal to other photographers, and photographers, as a rule, are the only people who like them.

There are endless awful little silos of photographers. There's the "5 light studio portrait" guys, the Miksang guys, the nude figure studies guys, the dismal grey bullshit MFA guys, the street photography guys, and so on. The common thread is that people in the silo are the only people in the world who give the smallest shit about the photos made by the people in the silo. Even they don't care that much. They print their own photos, and drone on about how important it is to print your work, but they don't even want prints of one another's photos, and don't much care about them. They buy one another's books, but it's purely a quid pro quo. The average self-styled Serious Photographer's interest in printed photos, while intense, begins and ends with their own photos.

You can tell the narrowness of interest by the commentary. Everything is "wow! So good. Just.. so good. wow. wow." We might reasonably expect many photographers to be kind of inarticulate, but surely not every single one?

Normies don't care about any of this shit even slightly. None of these photos would incite even a flicker of interest from anyone outside the relevant silo. Ok, maybe the first time you see that goddamned peach photo, you'll glance at it. But normies instinctively feel the emptiness of these things, they're much more interested in even the naive snaps.

To be fair, it's not like normies pace slowly through the gallery, minutely examining everything. Still, for even the most jaded normie there's that one painting, that one photo; they'll wander over and puzzle over it for a minute or two.

This is, essentially, why photo communities are bad. They seem, inevitably, to turn into weird echo chambers that endlessly refine an increasingly uninteresting set of tropes. Everything from twitter to forums to MFA programs to local photo clubs of middle-aged ladies does the same thing: they all converge on some remarkably limited and uninteresting set of visual ideas, and grind them into a sort of thin gruel that nobody likes. I don't know if painters do the same thing. Maybe it's just photographers that are special in some way.

Certainly photographers are, as a group, remarkably lazy. Many a photographer aspires to creativity without labor. The AI Art community seems to have a lot of photographers in it, presumably because it's even easier than taking photos. Photographers, more than any other single group, seem to be in love with the insane idea that "art is subjective" especially as a justification for pretty much any kind of dumb shit.

I won't describe it as universal, but it is at any rate common to discover that the photographers I actually like are loners, or at best hang (hung) out in a fairly small, fairly thoughtful, community of like-minded people. Often they hang around with literary types, but not photographers. What a poet has to say about a photo might be a lot more interesting than what another photographer has to say about it. And, perhaps, vice versa.

In any case, do try not to take photographs mainly for the purpose of illustrating your own incisive wit or whatever. Or, you know, do, if you like. It costs me nothing, after all.