Nothing changes in photography or so they say. At the age of twenty-two some forty-three years ago I joined my local Camera Club which was held in a pavilion at one of the local parks the third Thursday of the month in the evening. Having invested in a new Yachica 35mm SLR and 135 mm Tamron lens complete with bayonet mount I thought it best to widen my horizons a little, hence my decision to enrol with like minded people.
I attended each Thursday and almost immediately befriended a like kindred spirit my own age who made us the youngest members by at least twenty years. Members were encouraged to bring in prints of their own work to be critiqued by other members. My own work was always judged as being “to juvenile, over or under exposed, poorly printed, taken with the wrong lens or from the wrong position” as was anybodies else under the age of forty.
My final visit to the Camera Club was two years after I’d joined when a guest visitor announced “I have just returned from a meeting of some arty farty academy (I cannot remember the name) and it is now official, the 35 mm format and rectangular prints are dead and can no longer be called art only square pictures would be counted as art”. I never went back as this was straw that broke the camel’s back.
Forty years later I joined a camera club in Basel Switzerland where I now lived. After half an hour there I recognised the same people I’d uncounted at my hometown club forty years before all be it inhabiting different bodies. There was the equipment snob who had the very best kit money could buy, the semi-pro who never made any money but having the title he air of superiority he felt went with it and even the lighting snob who didn’t like anything at all as it was all incorrectly lit. I sat quietly at first as members submitted their work for other “more experienced” members critiqued it.
The difference being that now pictures were projected onto a screen as opposed held up on an easel however; with the exception of the words Photoshop or Lightroom as in you should have done this or that (in Photoshop or Lightroom) all the comments were the same as these made in the park pavilion forty years previously. Some of the photographs where in fact outstanding and I voiced that opinion.
The last act of the evening was the chair of the club who gave out any news to the members. One such announcement was that he’d been invited to Paris to a meeting some arty farty academy (I cannot remember the name of) and it is now official, the 35 mm format and rectangular prints are dead and can no longer be called art they were obsolete and only square pictures would be counted as art” I swear I kid you not. Now being sixty-two years of age and not twenty-two and had long since stopped caring if I upset or not I burst out laughing only to be told that I should take the words of the premier art academy in France seriously.
I explained that I had heard it all before forty years ago word for word. I then asked the “Chair” (a very serious Frenchman and self proclaimed artist) if this academy was telling us that the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Michelangelo, Rembrandt to say nothing of Renoir and Raphael obsolete? Adding that I didn’t say my own work was 1% as good as those people artists but I wasn’t going to go and delete the eleven terra bites of photographs I’d taken over the years just because some group of pompous idiots didn’t know their backsides from their elbows.
Some things change while others remain the same.