How Many Deadly Sins?

I look at photographs.  I look at all of them.  Every one that is available.  Do you know how many there are?  Trillions.  A day.  No one can keep up.  But I try.

There are a lot of people making good images.  There are the professionals who have help.  They have location people and art directors and make up and hair people and wardrobe assistants and someone doing lights.  After the shoot, there is a Photoshop wizard to sweeten the photos.  Everything is perfect.

Then there are the fine arts photographers.  They don't have so many assistants.  And they have different attitudes.  They spend a lot of time with an image.  They are horrid and beautiful.

Then there are those wannabes who shoot as much as they can between working and all the rest.  They have less time and fewer resources.  There can be a rich weirdness to their images.

And there are those who have no aspirations.  They just shoot.  Most of the time the processing and post-processing is lacking.  Or awful.  They are the snapshots of a generation and the purest form of documentary photography.

O.K.  These categories suck.  They won't hold up.  I am only thinking out loud here at my dining room table in the dark threat of daybreak.  But that is what I saw as I made my internet rounds this morning.  I just go mad for all of them, though.  I do.  All of them.

Yesterday, one of my images went into a pile of other pictures on the blog of a significant woman photographer.  I looked at those images today and went to the associated websites.  And because I was in the pile, it made me miserable.  Suddenly it was a competition.  I felt mean looking at those photographs by other photographers as if they were trying to steal something from me.  In the end, I looked at mine and saw it lacking.  Why did I subject myself to this humiliation, I wondered.  They were a group, it seemed, a club, a gang, and I was an outsider.  They all knew one another, I imagined, complimented one another and remembered the birthdays of children and spouses.  They celebrated each other's victories.  I could feel them laughing at my picture and disparaging anything I ever considered to be my so-called talent.

For some reason, I clicked on the link above my photo that was supposed to direct the viewer back to Cafe Selavy.  And it didn't work!  There were extra symbols in the web address.  Who had put them there?  I had hoped to expose thousands of new viewers to my work, hoped to intrigue some of them, hoped that they would come back.  That wouldn't happen.

I am not so good at the group hug.  I've learned to do it over the years, but my family was not a huggy lot.  We expressed joys and sorrows and were loyal and supportive, but effusive emotionalism was considered gaudy.

Maybe that is what shaped me most.  When I see the Hollywood smiles and the breathless voices, I go cold.  Groups scare me. Rather, I see them as packs, dangerous and potentially viscous.  They can turn any second, as soon as there is blood in the water.  Group behavior.  It is different.  There are endless studies.

I've never watched an entire episode of "The Simpsons" and have barely seen it at all.  In the one memorable scene I did watch, Bart's father tells him the Rule of the American Playground--Don't Say Anything Unless You're Sure Everyone Agrees.

I have a colleague who encourages admirers.  Needs them.  Feeds off them.  He is good at it.  Exceptionally.  It is a talent.  And it pisses me off.  I can't do it.

Last night, I turned down an invitation to go and see the fireworks.  The thought of all those people together had no appeal.  If I wanted to, I could see the fireworks in the sky above my house.  I didn't.  And so I sat alone doing the long work of scanning and processing pictures until I'd had it.  Then I poured a scotch, took my laptop to the couch, put on the headphones, and watched three episodes of "Entourage" sitting in the dark.  There is something terribly wrong with that.

I was happy.

On the photo thing, I know it wasn't intentional.  I know that all those photographers don't know one another.  I know they are not a club.  And I know that they are not disparaging my work as a group.  I'm just saying.

I'll keep making pictures.  Like these for awhile longer.  They are the culmination of looking at all those photographs--trillions of them--every single day.  I want to be the professional photographer, the fine arts photographer, the sometimes photographer, and the raw amateur all rolled up into to one big ball.  I want the images to be good and slick and horridly creative and much like those raw snapshots that people take that become so precious in the end.  They are all so good.  It just pisses me off.