Against Professionalism

A close friend is traveling through China. He's sent back photos, but says today's batch may be the last: "This is not art. It is not a labor of love. I probably won't send any more photos." (Part of) my reply to him follows.

Chris and I have both enjoyed the China snapshots. I know very well I can see the buildings and monuments and streets and like that in lots of guidebooks and photo spreads at Borders, but there's something convincing about snapshots, as Cartier-Bresson well understood.

The day after 9/11 one of the people who posted to the photo critique site I frequented put up his own photos of Ground Zero. He lived nearby and simply went into the disaster area immediately after the buildings fell, and had pictures, not especially artful, of dead folks being toted off, and similar horrors. He simply avoided the cops and the officials in the confusion – which, I should say, is what Great Photographers like Mr Nachtwey, who was on the scene also, had to do, since bystanders and sightseers were definitely not welcome.

Anyway, one of the other regulars came down hard on this guy. The regular is a NY pro photog who visited the critique site with a very uppity attitude, making it clear he was slumming and deigning to drop a few pearls of wisdom in front of the swine now and then. He said in no uncertain way that the amateur had no place at Ground Zero, that he was "just a shutterbug" who was taking advantage of the Great Tragedy That Changed Everything, that he wasn't "trained" for it and constituted a clear and present danger to himself and others. Such work should be left to the Pros.

I said nothing online because I was too mad to be convincing. But the whole point is that there's something inherently unbelievable about "professional" photos – even if they're not staged, they look that way. Some part of the viewer's mind has doubts. Too good to be true. So we tend to see the things in Pulitzer-winning news photos and National Geographic travel photos as events in a sister universe, probably the same universe we see on TV, but not our universe. C-B's greatness inheres in his ability to make "art" photos as convincing as snapshots – hell, they are snapshots in any meaningful sense, but with the qualities of composition and drama you'd expect from something staged.

Anyway, lest I get carried too far from the point, what I mean to say is that your snapshots of Dalian and such places have the immediacy of snapshots. Seeing them convinces me that the place looks that way even to the people who see it every day. Art it ain't, maybe, but then we don't live in a museum either.