Shutterjockey

I’m not sure what other people imagine when they think of us, photographers, as a group. 

Before the personal computer, the word “geek” would bring to mind an image of someone holding a slide-rule or a test-tube or a camera. The craft is gear-heavy and highly technical. It employs obscure terminology, intricate rituals and relies on a unique system of measurement. The craft is a common refuge for the sort of bright, quiet adolescent who feels a bit threatened by the social demands of the Chess Club.

It’s an image of myself that I’ve never quite shaken: an ungainly kid with tape holding his glasses together, for whom a camera is both a ticket to parts of the world he’d never get to see otherwise and a shield to keep the people he finds there from getting too close. I think that’s true for many of us. But there are other things photographers have in common with one another and with other artists. I wonder if the rest of the world sees beyond the camera. 

Maybe this description fits you better: You’re afflicted by some of the same infirmities shared by so many other artists in so many other disciplines. Besides a preoccupation with the visual (of course) you are hypnotized by beauty, fixated on detail. Obsessed with nuance (the falling of a note, the declination of a line, the rounding of a curve into shadow and then to black). It’s just stupid how easily you can find yourself lost in subtle details that others seem not to notice. 

It’s a sickness. It’s the sour fruit that we have transformed into fuel for our lemonade stand. 

We were geeks before it was cool.

But the digital revolution has produced a powerful mash-up: the geekiness of the photographic arts with the colossal nerditude of computer science. Hours in a darkroom bathed in noxious chemicals have been replaced by hours in front of a calibrated display. Our finger nails are no longer blackened by Dektol. We have carpal tunnel syndrome instead. Progress.