Pop the Bubble!

Or perhaps, more grotesquely: Lance the boil!

Apparently I have been blissfully unaware of a tiny tempest out there over a pair of photographers (or perhaps "photographers" -- more on those irony quotes later).  As best as I can tell from this Peta-Pixel piece, a pair of wedding photographers became stars of the seminar and blogging world from their appealing marketing methods -- exciting speaking engagements, clever Tweets, etc.  It has since been established that some of those blogs and Tweets and so on were plagiarized.  I actually took a moment to read through some of the supporting material hotlinked in the Peta-Pixel article to figure this out -- when I saw plagiarism, I jumped to the conclusion that they had lifted photos from someone else's website or something, but that's apparently not the problem at all.  And that's the problem.

This doesn't appear to be about pictures in any way; it's about image and marketing.  As the article says:
"As DSLR ownership proliferated, the audience for workshops and conferences moved from the traditional professional to the photo enthusiast creating a huge opportunity for new faces in the world of education. At Rich Clarkson’s Photography at the Summit workshop two weeks ago, I bemoaned the rise of 'internet famous' photographers, and commiserated with titans like Jodi Cobb and David Alan Harvey about their relative anonymity in today’s world of photography."

There are two issues here:
1. The obvious one, that people like Cobb and Harvey and dozens of others I could name (including many unjustly forgotten) aren't celebrated and feted and learned from as they should be.
And 2. less obvious but more important, that the rising mob of DSLR-enabled anticipatory "photographers" think that, with a couple of energizing seminars with these exciting "teachers" (the irony quotes are getting thick around here), they can become just as good as someone who has chosen and worked at photography for their careers.

Says Allen Murabayashi in Peta-Pixel: "The 'rockstar' photographers might not be great photographers, but they are master marketers and they provide inspiration for a certain segment of photographer that is disinterested in what has preceded them – a segment that the old guard wasn’t satisfying, so it’s hard to begrudge their success. And let’s face it. Being a good photographer doesn’t mean you’re a good teacher, and vice versa."

No no no.  Here's the thing: I do begrudge them their success.  Why?  Because it's the empty success of an inflated balloon.  The "old guard" he quickly celebrates and then dismisses worked hard to make real pictures that meant real things.  These were the "concerned photographers" that Cornel Capa celebrated, the true masters who toiled in obscurity in the old Life magazine and National Geographic.  (And don't argue with me about that obscurity thing; you know that no one outside the photo world could easily name, for example, who shot the picture of the Afghan girl from Geographic's cover.  It was Steve McCurry.)

I don't care that a thousand people think that they have the talent to be professional photographers.  I don't care that there's a massive, hugely profitable market in teaching them -- or rather running seminars in which they think they are learning -- how to be professional photographers.  This does not, or at least should not make superstars out of people with a talent for exciting a room full of hopeful artistes or writing intriguing blogs.  These people, in my mind, are not important.  They are charlatans from the get go, regardless of who actually writes their blogs.

Is it a tragedy that Henri Cartier-Bresson never taught a course on street photography?  Should I wonder whether Alfred Eisenstaedt had it in him to fascinate and encourage a roomfull of students?  Maybe.  But I will not be interested in someone being a "rockstar photographer" until they are first a photographer.