LIGHT TRAFFIC

Calling myself a photographer never was a huge deal. I called myself a photographer because I did photography. Because I started taking photos as a kid, with my mom’s clunky old Minolta with the hippied-out embroidered shoulder strap, and never stopped. I took photos, developed photos, attended every kind of photo workshop, landed jobs because I could take a decent photo and made coin selling photos. It was one of those obvious things, the way eating food makes you an eater.

These days, that statement no longer feels so self-evident. It is hard to say through which door doubt crept in, or through which it didn’t.

First there’s the internet giving us access to the (good/bad/ugly) portfolios of thousands and thousands of photographers; everything from super boring Gaussian Blur wedding stuff to uncensored photojournalism.

Then there’s everyone and their step-cousin now owning fancy DSLRs, and using them; pointing unnecessarily long lenses at anything that moves, or doesn’t, for that matter – babies, dogs, sunsets, totally hot tatted-up girlfriends wilding out at socially relevant pool parties, themselves, etc.

There’s our phones – our telephones! – with or without those fancy filters that help simulate flattering, nostalgia-inducing light conditions, documenting every inch of everything, every day the Lord brings (cf. Instagram.) There’s everyone fiddling with their cracked Photoshop, silently boosting saturation and contrast. There’s all of our millions of Facebook albums.

So what now? Have we all become photographers, given we all take photos everyday? Assuming the answer is no (no offence to everyone’s step-cousin), who then is a bone fide photographer? Who’s the photographer chaff, and who the photographer wheat?

This kid I follow on Twitter tweeted something that poked straight into the funny bone of this line of questioning a while back – an all-caps jolt to the brain. (My brain, anyway.)

MUST STRATEGIZE HOW TO MAKE ART IN WORLD FULL OF ART

I’m still parsing that statement.

How indeed are we to make art in a world already brimming with art? Is there such a thing as too much art? Will there always be room for more art?

I was in New York a little while ago. If the world is full of art, New York is especially full of art. Good art. Carrying my camera around the boroughs, I couldn’t picture what I possibly could add to the world full of art that is New York City. See and show what hasn’t been seen and shown? Preposterous notion, I thought.

So I made a sly sort of pact with myself that I’d take photos, but only unintentionally. (So wily.) Without the intention of making a worthwhile product. So I started taking photos without looking through the viewfinder, shooting, as it were, from the hip. Vaguely aiming at things in front of me and pressing the shutter. Haphazardly.

The exercise was both futile and freeing. It had nothing to do with emulating the masters of the genre (they exist, look them up) or experimenting with a new technique. It had everything to do with getting back in the flow of taking photographs, a gentle sort of prodding, like freewriting for my eyes.

The (internal) jury is still out on whether I can call myself a photographer or not but here are some of the shots I shot that day, straight from the hip.