My Generation

Laurie Simmons, "Big Camera, Small Camera," 1977

I've been wearing my grumpy old guy pants all week, but the job (chasing kids off my lawn?)  is still not done. 

This works...

This, not so much...

Yes, I know another judgment call. How unfair.

Listen, I like Green Day. I think American Idiot is a great album, but this half-hearted cover of The Who doesn't do justice to the original. It doesn't even come close.

So why is that? For me at least, it starts with the dismissive way (I think that's) Billie Joe Armstrong refers to it as a "hippie" song. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending hippies here. That's Ron Paul's job.

I'm saying that you either pay proper homage to that little bit of (I mean huge) genius that The Who came up with, or you stay off their grass.

Don't be embarrassed of your work, or by work that has influenced you, and never talk down to your audience. Trust that they'll get what you're trying to do, without being spoon fed.

That said, it is perfectly natural to push away from the generation before you. I think it's a good thing. That's how humans evolve. By breaking away and trying new things.

Regardless of the example above, it's no secret that Green Day would be nowhere today without careful study of bands like The Who. I think they'd readily admit to it also.

However, in photojournalism we made a bad evolutionary leap, the rolls got reversed, and now we're paying the price.

It happened when the older generation suddenly didn't know how to use their cameras. Well, not just their cameras, but the computers and applications that came with them.

The student became the teacher, and not in a cool kung-fu type of way.

It makes sense, why would someone want to learn from, or respect someone that doesn't even know what "command-M" does?

This is one of our biggest problems (out of quite a few). We've got a generation that raised themselves. It's not their fault. We dropped the ball, not them. Well, sure they're a bunch of arrogant know-it-alls, but that's part of the job description when you're starting out. It's required just to survive.

The second mistake (as this conversation goes), started happening about five or six years ago. It kind of snuck in at some point. It started the first time you looked at a contest result and thought, "WTF?"

We (at least I) ignored it, but the marketplace didn't (once again venturing into Ron Paul territory).

Photographers started to get rewarded for producing set-up images, or over-photoshopping, or removing unwanted elements, and delivering style over content.

The snowball grew. Editors, judges, and photographers all followed the carrot, when they should probably have been swinging a stick.

The publishing industry, by doing stupid things like the WASHINGTONIAN did (the cover of their May issue) over and over again, sent a very clear message to their readers.

These images don't matter. See how little we care about them? See how little we respect them (and the people that make them)?

And the readers agreed. If the don't mean anything to you, they asked, why should we pay to buy them off of the newsstand?

Things have gotten out of hand, and (for the most part) the older generation seems content to remain on the sidelines and not try to fix the mess they've largely created.

Which isn't keeping with the spirit that got many of you to grab a camera in the first place.

Comments

[Michal Daniel]

It's quite hopeless, when this is considered to be "stunning."

http://www.tech2check.org/2009/03/15-stunning-photo-manipulations-by-erik.html

[Michal Daniel]

And the impact of "gaming" on everything cannot be underestimated, when considering the death of believability of photos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uofWfXOzX-g

[Jack Simpson]

A great and believable read and I linked it to a British PJ site:

http://www.f8andbethere.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6245

after finding it, via your response to 'A photoeditor' discussing the new SI book about cropping covers, which I discovered in a Canadian
Photojurnalism site ( http://npac.ca/smf/index.php?topic=2161.0)

Cheers and continue to tell the truth :)

Jack Simpson