Photographers
I’m not sure what other people imagine when they think of photographers.
Before the personal computer, the word “geek” conjured a mental 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, arcane rituals and a bizarre systems of measurement. The craft is a common refuge for the sort of bright, quiet adolescent who feel 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 an ticket to parts of the world he’d never get to see otherwise and a shield to keep the people there from getting too close. I think that’s true for many of us. But there are other things we have in common with one another; with other artists. I wonder if the rest of the world sees beyond the camera.
But maybe this description fits you better: Enormously visual (of course); hypnotized by beauty; fixated on detail. You’re afflicted by some of the same infirmities that so many artists share: an obsession with nuance (the falling of a note, the declination of a line, the rounding of a curve in to shadow and then to black. difference between black andblack-black). A tendency to be arrested by subtle details that others never see.
It’s a sickness. It’s the sour fruit that we have somehow turned into the fuel for our lemonade stand.
We were geeks before it was cool.
But the digital revolution today produces a powerful mash-up: the geekiness of the photographic arts with the colossal nerditude of computer science. Talk about synergy. Hours in a darkroom bathed in noxious chemicals have been replaced by hours in front of a calibrated display.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.