Photo: REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko (from The Big Picture)
Now that I’m on the verge of graduation, I often get asked about what I want to do with my photography degree. I mostly tell people that I know I don’t want to be shooting and instead I’d like to go into editorial or some kind of non-shooting-photo-related career. There are plenty out there, so I’m not worried. But when I tell people this, they respond by asking me why this is. I tell them it’s because after 4 years of photography school, I’m sick and tired of being forced to take pictures of things I really don’t want to. It’s a sort of half-assed answer to a question I really hate answering.
But the real reason why I don’t want to be a photographer is because I don’t want to be like the photographers above who stand around while a man lays injured in front of them. I learned early in my freshman year that there was a clear line of ethics that photographers are always standing on. The decision to take a photo or intervene in one’s surroundings is always looming in the mind of a photographer — do I help or do I take a picture so that others can be spurred on to do something about it later? It seems like common sense, but having it drilled into you over the course of 4 years really makes me not want to take up the camera as my line of profession.
Of course, I understand that not all photography work is as life-threatening as the one above, but even still I really don’t want to ever be caught in a situation like this where I find myself pausing even for the briefest of moments to decide whether taking a picture is more important than helping a fellow man.
If you haven’t already, you should read the “Hema and Kaushik” section of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (actually, I recommend reading the entire book anyway.) The concluding story of that section, and imo the best-written one, is about a photographer struggling with the conflict you describe.
As a journalism major, I understand a little bit about where you’re coming from. While a career in journalism/editing would grant me the tremendous privilege of crafting and communicating information to people, I’ve found that in the process of landing the scoop/story, you end up delivering a lot of tripe instead of truth. The “hidden” corporate agenda, the implicit commercialism, and the fuzzy divide between advertising and story content made me think twice about pursuing such an ethically compromosing career.
While my superiors continually pushed us j-schoolers to write accurate stories, none of them advocated writing what is true, or what even really matters.
Sure, a lot of journalists get to write important things for society’s benefit and well-being, but I don’t like journalism itself enough to do everything that comes before that. Can I really see myself tailoring a story to fulfill an advertiser’s needs? Can I really see myself sensationalizing a trivial issue to divert the public’s attention from what really counts? Can I really see myself interrupting people’s lives and interfering with their privacy for the sake of a quote? Probably not. Firstly, I don’t have the balls, and secondly, it’d take motivation that I don’t have in order to grow them.
Here’s to telling the stories we want to tell.
(I’m sorry for letting what was supposed to be a 4-line comment, max, mushroom into epic proportions.)
humm interstting.. i agree..
i like this psot
Just saw this video and thought of this post : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2DqOElWoss