For the Love of ...

Okay, I know I said I wouldn't go on about this any more, but I just saw this TV ad for Lynda.com (which I would post here, but no one has it on YouTube yet).  The theme is that you can be whatever you want to be, just go onto Lynda.com and watch the appropriate tutorials to learn how.

Fair enough.

That is, until they start having the happy actors list off what they want to learn: "Business  management," chirps a woman dressed as a baker.  "Spreadsheets," says another, and then a man with a consumer DSLR on a tripod says, "Photography!" and they move on.  Photography?  So someone who is a professional cook and wants to learn a few tricks in managing her business and expand it, and that's the same as starting up a profession I've spent 30 years working at?  Yeah, just watch a few video tutorials and you're the next David Hume Kennerly!  Start working on that Pulitzer acceptance speech now, friend.

And why am I upset (again)?  Because: look at the other things they list.  Learning about spreadsheets  is a technical thing involving a tool.  They don't say, "Learn how to be a sculptor!"  Rather, it's like saying "Learn how to choose a good piece of marble."  One is a skill that is part of a profession, the other is a profession.

Ugh.

Now THAT's Writing ...

There's an anecdote that when the miraculous comedy writing team that worked on Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows" came up with a great joke, none of them would laugh.  They never actually laughed as they wrote some of the best sketch comedy ever.  When someone came up with a truly wonderful gag, the rest would simply nod and say, "Yeah, that's funny."

Though I lack that kind of self control, I sometimes feel I want to do something similar -- but with an added tone of awe in my voice -- when I run across truly great journalistic writing.  Usually, it's old writing, the kind of reporting that's not done anymore.  It's the kind of journalism that was necessary in an age when the reports had to be mailed back, and the news was often days if not weeks old.  It was the kind of description that had to be put on the page when there were no 24-hour cable networks, no television at all.  You'd be lucky if there was a newsreel, and that usually without synch sound.  The reporter had to put you there, and do it only with the written word.

I think that art is too often forgotten today.  Look at the complaints when, at the recent "Whitey" Bulger trial, cameras were not allowed in the courtroom.  Legions of journalists, used to having their television  -- with sound -- and still images, found themselves at a loss when composing reports of the most dramatic mafia trial in recent memory.  People were describing murders right out of the movies, old gangsters were staring each other down in the courtroom ... novels have been built on such things, and you can't crank out a decent minute-and-a-half with drawings?

I look at things like Kirke Simpson's 1922 account for AP of the return of the Unknown Soldier from France to Arlington.  It won the Pulitzer.  Sure, it's sort of antiquated in style, but look at that rich description of the ship slowly moving up the Potomac, the minute guns thumping as she comes.  You want to savor the words like a fine wine, rolling them around in your head.  Or the articles that triggered this post, in the New Yorker, chosen by editor David Remnick (of whom I am jealous beyond words in general).  He points to two separate reports on the Nuremberg trials, both written in 1946, but in a way neither describing the trials per se.  Rather, they are rich descriptive stories, telling about the places and people who are what make something like the trial an event worth reporting.  Because, when you think about it, an event is rarely a thing unto itself.  Rather, it is the actions of people in a place, even when that event seems apart from the people.

Tornado ratings, for example, are not really rating the tornado itself, but its effects on houses and people.  There can be (and I suppose are) tornadoes out to sea, away from ships and people, about which we never know ... and never shall.  They are not, for us, an event.  But what if someone should go out seeking those storms ...

Anyway, great writing, writing like these authors created, now that's something a person can aspire to, something one can wish to create for a magazine or a book or a blog ...

The Love You Take ...

Every young photojournalist -- or at least when this photojournalist was young, it was true of me -- approaches every demonstration with visions of Stanley Forman's Pulitzer winner, or some other great moment that every old guy has overlooked in his nonchalance.  And every young photojournalist eventually becomes one of those old guys, knowing how every demonstration plays out the same as the last one, aware that moments that win Pulitzers are rare and special things ... and something that could happen at any time.  So, yeah, they go to the demonstration with the exact same hopes.

Really, photography is a special thing, a giving of yourself that everyone gets to see and, eventually, criticize.  And if you make a career of it -- a real career -- it's something that you have to dedicate yourself to wholly.  If you go to that demonstration thinking, "I'll just grab the usual couple pictures of the speakers, maybe a nice reaction shot of the crowd and a wide to show the size, then I'll be done in time for a nice lunch" ... well, you're just not trying, and you will be at best a mediocre hack.  You always need to be looking, hoping, convinced that the one great picture is out there, no matter how boring and commonplace the event.  Every parade might have a little boy talking to a cop on the sidelines.

By extension, if you're just doing this on weekends, if you're the most dedicated of hobbyists, if you have real talent and all your friends say your pictures are better than what they see in the magazines, but you still are doing the day job, well, you may make photographs, but you're not a Photographer.

I have friends who fancy themselves photographers.  They've spent money on gear and time perfecting their craft.  Some have shot jobs for pay.  I look at their pictures -- they're often quite good -- with patience and care, commenting as honestly as possible while remaining polite, but I still can't help regarding them as photo tourists, slumming for a while in the artsy scene, then claiming the title and expecting respect.

I resent that they think they can dip into photography, make some pretty pics in their spare time and collect a prize or two at the local art fair, and then go on with their more profitable lives.  It's like someone putting in a decent time in a 10K and then claiming equality with an Olympic athlete.

You can point out that they've made some great pictures, and I won't disagree, but a weekend softball player can make an astounding triple play ... and he still doesn't deserve to be in the majors.

Here's the thing -- and perhaps I'm now stretching the sports metaphor to the breaking point -- pro athletes didn't just wake up one day and say: "It would be fun to play ball for a living."  They start working in childhood, practicing, going to summer camps, refining their skill in order to reach their level of work.  Many don't make it; are they treated as equals?

I just think that professional photographers -- people who have worked at it, given things up for it, dedicated their lives to it -- deserve some respect for the time and effort and success that we have now spent a lifetime on.  (God knows we'll never be paid appropriately.) And you're welcome to put in that time and sacrifice and join us.

In the meantime, I'll look at your pictures and praise your talents, however meager or grand, but don't act like you're a true Photographer until you've committed everything to it.

This is the problem with things like the Chicago Sun-Times firing ALL their photographers and replacing them with iPhones.  Or, rather, it's one of the problems.  They fail to value photography because they've put no effort into it.  The "leadership" at that paper, and at all the other places that think they can use viewer videos and reporter snapshots and unpaid interns and freelancers who are really housewives and dentists and stuff, of course are happy with second rate material from people who aren't full-time professional photojournalists.  The new "photographers" are people who have not given themselves over to photography, and so they do not value it.  They're happy with a cutsheet and maybe $30.  "Wow, look at me, I'm a real Photographer!  Would you like fries with that?"  This is the easy way for the editors, and less effort is required, less dedication to the craft (and that means the craft of journalism as well as photography) is necessary all the way around.

Coming soon to a mailbox...

For purely self-abusive reasons, I've been reviewing my old posts here (among other odd reactions, that little twitch I get at seeing "0 comments" over and over; at least I've gotten used to having 4 followers -- thanks guys!)

It's when I noticed an old post on writing an article for News Photographer magazine, the journal of the NPPA, on the recent decision to allow coverage of the return of war dead to Dover AFB.  Well, that piece is coming out this month, and I wanted again to mention the articles I found on the return of the first Unknown Soldier in 1921.  They won the Pulitzer for AP reporter Kirke :. Simpson and it's some of the most beautiful journalistic writing you're likely to see this side of Ernie Pyle.

You've gotta' check this out...

I've been working on a story for "News Photographer" magazine about the recent lifting of the photo coverage of US military dead returning to Dover Air Force Base.  There's a lot more history and background to the subject than you might think; like, for example, did you know that we only really started returning the bodies of US soldiers as a matter of course -- in other words, immediately shipping the dead back, rather than burying them where they fell and straightening it all out when the war was over -- during the Korean War?

At any rate, as an example of earlier procedures, I'm using the return of the first Unknown Soldier -- the one from World War I -- as an example of what was done after that war, and I've used the account of that from the AP articles by Kirke L. Simpson, which won the Pulitzer in 1922.

Lately, I keep sending people to look at those articles (most easily available at http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/wwi-unk.htm).  Man, this is writing.  I mean, real writing, the kind of writing that makes you just want to quit trying to do it, or maybe try harder...