Photography and Invisibility

You may or may not know this, but I teach at a college that has decided, for cost cutting reasons, to discontinue the photography program. There's a lot of directions that I could view this from, but for me, it goes back to the invisibility of photography. 

When I was in my teens, like most people I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Of course I'm still waiting to feel grown up, but that's another post. It was really just by chance that I stumbled into a job as a photographer at the University of Chicago Billings Hospital. I started as a projectionist (it's a teaching hospital) and the only way to get a pay raise was to become a photographer. Fortunately for me, the photographers there liked me and embarked on training me for the job. I learned how to do everything from photograph dead bodies to run a color line. I remember being surprised that a job didn't have to be something you were disconnected from. It opened my mind to understand the difference between having a job and a career. That you could find something that was interesting and fit who you were in life - that you felt really "you" when you were doing it. 

A few years later I moved back to Cali and decided to pursue photography and get a degree. I remember telling my grandmother I was going to college to learn photography and she looked at me...laughed...and said, "Why would you want to do that? Nobody needs to have their picture taken." About the only thing she could connect it to was the Sears Portrait Studio. She was surrounded by images, loved magazines and had tons of cookbooks...but the invisibility and ubiquity of photography made it invisible to her. It's a very sad truth that I heard this same reference last month...from an administrator at my school.

We have a son who works at a very large hotel chain in the bay area and he was telling me that one year they sent every hotel a really nice camera saying "from now on, you're taking your own photos." It was a complete disaster, not only for the fact that none of them knew how to operate the cameras, but the fact is cameras don't take pictures by themselves and amateurs usually take amateurish photographs in professional settings. 

So here we are in 2013 and we still face the same issue. Photography is completely embedded in the fiber of our being, so many of us use it and yet we don't understand there's more to it than the camera - or software. Taking an interesting image can happen in an instant - but making interesting images, day after day,  to meet specific needs on a deadline is a skill that takes years of training to develop (pun intended) and it's foolish to think otherwise.

Here's an interesting article from the NY Times on the rise of photography...too bad my school doesn't have the same vision...