I went through a period of posting photos to a number of image-focused sites and joining forums to talk about my images and the images of others. I know now that I was pretty cringey at times, with the enthusiasm of a newcomer but also the ignorance of one. But I’m not sure how you learn what a concept like “bokeh” is without trying to talk about it and getting corrected by someone who knows what the word really means.
That’s a general problem with online conversations that’s been talked about a fair amount: how do you teach people when you’re the expert in a conversational space that mixes in inexperienced people who are more confident than is warranted? There are a lot of reasons why academics and expert practitioners stay out of spaces of that kind. If nothing else, because they believe their time is more valuable or think they need to prove that it is by not being there. But one major issue is that they come from working worlds where inexperience and relative ignorance are only suffered if they come from students or apprentices, if they are encoded with a kind of performance humility and dependence. Having someone present as a seeming peer who doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about even as they act like they do is a fingernails-on-chalkboard experience for a lot of experts. Having that happen over and over and over again, as it will if you’re in an online forum with an endless supply of new people showing up, can be worse.
But there’s more going on beyond that. For one, the really expert people in any field, including practicing artists and performers, have often come to a point where it’s actually hard to explain the basics. The more that some of the basic components of your practice have become second nature to you, the more you struggle to remember what it’s like to not know them. (And if those second nature practices are actually getting in the way of work you want to do now, it’s even more hellishly difficult to unravel them and relearn them in some reconfigured form.) So what you often get in active forums where relative experts and complete n00bs intermingle is that the experts are actually just experienced amateurs and the n00bs are just two steps away from being just as knowledgeable. That either creates incredibly gentle and helpful interactions because of that proximity or it creates brittle, fearful attempts by the ostensible mentors to ward off their mentees and reinforce the gap between them.
So sometimes I got really helpful critiques or quiet redirections of my unearned confidence about a new composition or lighting strategy. And sometimes I got a couple of the grizzled oldsters saying “that’s a terrible photo, just throw it away”.
This was one I was once told was just terrible. I didn’t throw it away. I think now what I thought then, that the zig-zags of the railing are a different kind of “leading line” into the central subject of the composition and that it’s precisely because the corners of the zigs-and-zags are cut off that this works. And that the tower behind the cellphone-looking woman pulls the eye all the way into the background. I’m not saying it’s a work of genius or anything, but as the title of this piece says, I still like it.