My photographs here are a document of autodidactism, a fancy word for “self-taught”. So I’ll start with a reflection on self-teaching.
We are awash now in people who believe they can teach themselves anything and in companies trying to sell us online education that they claim can do the same thing. As a professional educator, I bristle at both prospects. As an amateur photographer, I’ve learned equally that there are limits to what you can teach yourself.
Digital cameras are a nearly perfect autodidactical machine, and that’s the first limitation. Most of what we want to learn in life doesn’t have that affordance. A digital camera provisions a nearly instantaneous feedback loop where each experience of making an image has no direct material cost and almost no cost in terms of time. Someone learning can get real-time feedback on what they’ve done. Does it look good? Is it what you wanted? Change a setting. Change the framing. Step up. Step back. Change the lens.
The equipment has a cost, but not per picture, unlike film photography. Processing has a cost for the software, but after that it’s only time and storage. It’s clear that one ingredient of effective learning is quick feedback, the closer to real-time the better. But we can’t do that for many things in life: either each iterative experience of learning is expensive in material terms or expensive in terms of time.
And yet I found very quickly with my first DSLR, a Nikon d3000, that if I wasn’t willing to learn how to manually control every aspect of a shot, I wouldn’t really understand why images came out one way or the other. None of those settings: ISO, shutter speed, white balance, etc. are self-explanatory. Here suddenly the autodidact is probably spending more time learning what could be taught (if taught well) by an experienced person, and learning it haphazardly, out of order. Nothing is there but trial-and-error to correct a misunderstanding. Today’s photo is the first I did on fully manual: a shot through a window of an ash tree on an early foggy morning. I was happy with the result but I didn’t really understand what I was doing. It took many other walks in early morning fog to make an image with purpose.
The autodidact needs extra motivation both to continue learning and to understand why they want to learn. That’s been the graveyard of massively-online courses and other self-teaching approaches and it will continue to be so. Most people beginning a self-learning process have hazy ideas about what the consequences of being knowledgeable will be and ought to be. If what they’re learning is required or compulsory for some end goal that is hard to see from the outset, most people will quit before getting there.
Other obstacles eventually await. There are people who make culture or knowledge completely alone, driven by introspection or even compulsion. But most of what we want to know and want to make has a social motivation of some kind: work we want to do, things we want to sell or share. That’s where I hit the hard limit of self-learning photography: where I came to borderlands of art after finding my way through the basics of skill. I understand the tools now fairly well, though with the odd gaps and confusions of the self-learning. But now I want to have an idea about what I’m making with the tools, and that’s another matter altogether—and something, I find, you cannot do without a community of viewers and makers and without mentors or teachers who have ideas about making.