Tag: definition

Labeling and Defining Photographers and Photography

As a professional photographer, I am often labeled—even pigeon-holed—using simple titles like stock photographer, documentary photographer, photo-essayist or fine-art photographer. That makes sense to me, because people want a quick way of knowing who I am as a photographer, and what kind of work I can do. A student recently asked me to explain how one photographer (me), would approach one subject, and photograph that subject different ways while wearing those four different hats. Read More

Poets not painters

Why is it that so many photographers aspire to be painters (or at least want their work to look like paintings?) I never understood that since I never wanted to emulate painters. I always wanted my photographs to have the presumed veracity that we attribute to photographs. The fact that they are derived from reality is what makes them photographs. Over the decades that I have worked as a photographer (and the decades I have been hearing photographers long to be like painters) I have tried to come up with another creative persona for photographers to emulate, rather than painters. Read More

A big, what is the meaning of life, kind of a question

A former student/intern wrote me with a big, “what is the meaning of life” kind of a question. The process of answering her ended up becoming something of a dialogue within myself about photography and “meaning” for me. After I sorted things out in my own thinking, I wrote her an answer I could also use as a blog posting. Read More

The important process of naming a project

The members of a critique group that I head recently had an email dialogue about what to call one of the member’s ongoing projects. As the process unfolded, I thought about my own struggles naming my projects and how the naming of a photographic project is arguably the most important step in the process of defining and shaping such a project. Read More

Photo-essays, past, present and future

I have been producing photo-essays in one form or another for a couple decades. In that time, my approach to them has changed, as have the various ways that photo-essays are seen. After a long, slow decline in outlets, a new and exciting one has appeared. Read More