spoiled

These past few weeks I've been looking at a fair amount of top quality photography. Enough that I just haven't paid much attention to the mediocrity that is, of course, everywhere.

Mostly, I've been looking at work in the context of thinking about who to invite in for a gallery exhibit. Either my intuition is on this week, or I've just been lucky.... a lot of the web presence I've viewed has been pretty good, and some of it has been world class.

It had to end.

Today I unfolded a scrap of paper someone gave me the other day, punched in the url of this guy they had met, said he was a photographer. The home page didn't completely turn me away, but anybody can get lucky once. In one more level, look around for a few minutes. OK, that's enough, time to go. Nope, not this guy.

There's nothing wrong with it technically, in the exposure and photoshop sense. But if this guy ever had an imagination, it took a vacation. He's a technician with a camera. And he thinks he's good, to the point that he writes about photography in his blog as if he needs to explain to the world why he takes pictures. But he can't compose a picture (or a paragraph, for that matter), and his work is just... bland. It's about the subject, in a neatly boxed and strictly representational sense. There's no deeper connection. There's no passion, no feeling.

He reminded me of myself, at about 17, shooting for the papers, thinking I was a hotshot just because people paid for my photos. I didn't understand yet that they paid because I delivered reliably, every Monday morning, in time for deadline. They tolerated reliable mediocrity, while shunning some shining creative talents who couldn't deliver two weeks in a row.

I look back at some of those old images and wonder why anyone paid for them. I hope Mr. photo dude gets to that point someday. Unfortunatly, I know firsthand that it takes a pretty profound existential kick in the head to wake up.