Photography Doesn't Have a Camera Problem

The tragedy is believing that loving cameras is the same thing as loving photography.

Every now and then I make the mistake of wandering into a camera store, not because I need anything in particular, but because there is something strangely fascinating about watching photography trying very hard to forget what it is. The scene rarely changes. There is always somebody turning a lens toward the ceiling to inspect sharpness, someone else scrolling through menus with the concentration of an air traffic controller, another customer asking whether this year's autofocus is finally reliable enough to justify replacing the camera he bought nine months earlier, while somewhere in the background a YouTube review is probably being filmed, destined to become another 45 minutes devoted to the microscopic differences between two machines that will both be obsolete long before anyone remembers the photographs they produced.

What always strikes me isn't the technology itself. I like cameras. I've spent most of my life carrying one, and I still enjoy the reassuring mechanical certainty of a shutter closing exactly when I ask it to. The camera has never been the problem. The problem begins when the camera quietly replaces the photograph, when conversations drift so completely toward engineering that nobody notices the original subject has slipped out of the room without saying goodbye.

It happens so gradually that almost nobody questions it anymore. Photography becomes an endless sequence of comparisons, specifications, firmware updates, laboratory measurements, and buying advice, as though the medium had somehow reached the extraordinary conclusion that understanding a sensor is more important than understanding the strange, unpredictable, and often contradictory creatures standing in front of it. You can spend an entire afternoon surrounded by people discussing photography without hearing a single conversation about photographs, which would be absurd in any other creative discipline and yet has become perfectly ordinary in ours. Imagine walking into a bookshop where aspiring novelists spend hours comparing keyboards without mentioning a single novel, or a gathering of filmmakers where every discussion eventually collapses into sensor size while nobody brings up Fellini, Tarkovsky, or Varda. You would suspect that something essential had been lost. Photography, however, has become remarkably comfortable with this arrangement. Do you think Fellini was talking about the cameras grabbing the scenes or about life?

I sometimes wonder whether many people actually love photography or whether they simply enjoy belonging to an industry built around perpetual consumption, because the behavior looks suspiciously familiar. The objects change, but the ritual remains the same. One year it's cameras. In another life it could have been hi-fi systems, mechanical watches, or espresso machines. There is always another product promising to solve a problem that nobody had until an advertising department decided it existed, and there is always an audience eager to believe that the missing ingredient separating them from meaningful work can be purchased, charged overnight, and delivered before the weekend.

The uncomfortable possibility, of course, is that the missing ingredient has never been inside the box.

Nobody has ever looked at The Americans and wondered whether Robert Frank would have benefited from faster subject detection. Nobody stands in front of a Koudelka print trying to calculate its dynamic range. Nobody remembers Saul Leiter because of the coatings on his lenses. The photographs survived because they carried something infinitely more durable than technology. They carried a point of view, and points of view have always been inconvenient because they cannot be downloaded, upgraded, or compared in a spreadsheet. They demand something far less comfortable than shopping. They demand attention. Curiosity. A willingness to spend years looking before expecting to be seen.

Perhaps that explains why technical discussions have become so attractive. Technical knowledge behaves politely. It rewards effort with certainty. If you study autofocus systems, eventually you understand autofocus systems. Human beings are considerably less cooperative. Spend 20 years walking the streets with a camera and you may still fail to understand why one fleeting gesture suddenly contains an entire story while another, photographed with flawless technique, remains emotionally weightless. The camera cannot answer that question because it was never designed to. Asking it to do so is rather like asking a typewriter to write a novel by itself.

We need to be authors and not camera testers. But I see more camera testers than ever, and this affects photography. Recently, a man came to me expecting a tutorial, when I am more in the line of a philosophical approach to photography. If a tutorial is what you are after, there is no shortage of them, and something like The Well-Rounded Photographer: 8 Instructors Teach 8 Genres of Photography will serve you far better than I will. 

Somewhere along the way we confused mastering the instrument with mastering the language, and because instruments can be measured while languages cannot, we slowly drifted toward the comforting illusion that photography had become a branch of engineering. It never did. Engineering builds the tool. Photography begins only after the tool has disappeared from your thoughts, when what remains is the difficult task of deciding what deserves to be remembered and why. I am talking about emotions, memory, and documents, not pretty pictures. 

That is the part no specification sheet has ever managed to explain, and perhaps never will.