Shoot Like An Amateur...

...advertised no book or photography course ever. Not in the past hundred years anyway. The word amateur has become shorthand for one who dabbles, piddles about and thereby possesses little real skill. Obviously if their skills were up to snuff someone would be willing to pay them for what they do, and they would no longer be an amateur. Thus, no matter what field of endeavour we might be talking about, one of the highest compliments we can pay is to say that someone is a real pro. Conversely it's a dig against someone to call them an amateur, or their work amateurish.

Shot like an amateur. In my life as a professional wedding and portrait
photographer when would I ever have the chance to do something like this? 

Would it come as a surprise then to learn that there was a time when if you wanted to be taken seriously as a photographer being an amateur was considered the ideal? In the 19th century amateur photographers were widely seen as the people who were pushing the new medium forward, driving the technology, promoting it as an expressive medium to be taken seriously, one of the beaux-arts on par with painting and sculpture. The earliest professionals with their crass commercial motives weren't often considered allies in the struggle for recognition.

Noble perhaps, but not entirely fair. In photography's earliest years being a photographer could mean one of two things - either you were a member of the landed gentry and had the money and leisure to take up the expensive, difficult and time consuming discipline that photography was at that time, or you made it your trade. If you were drawn to the magic that was and is photography and weren't born to the privileged classes becoming a professional was your only choice. 

Nelson's Column, an image by photographic pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, grandson of the 2nd Earl of
Ilchester, heir of Lacock Abbey where many of the interior scenes were shot for the Harry Potter movies. 

The situation changed as advances in photography over the following decades saw a continual decline in the level of privilege it required until eventually there was a camera in virtually every middle class home. As the Twentieth Century dawned, taking a serious interest in photography for the love of it no longer required titled ancestry. Photographers like Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz oversaw the transition of the painterly romanticism that characterized the work of the leading photographers of the previous century to the modern approach of photographers such as Paul Strand and Ansel Adams that made no apologies for photography's unique realism. Different though their approach had become, this new breed of photographer could in a sense trace a direct lineage back to the amateur elite of photography's early days. Somewhere along the way however even these leading lights of the idea of photography as art started making a living at it. Even these greats, icons in many ways of photography for the love of it, were by definition professional photographers. At the same time, as cameras came to outnumber electric toasters in households everywhere, nearly everyone had become in at least some sense an amateur photographer. The reversal of status was now complete.

In the heady day following photography's introduction there were those hoping to find in it a way a way to cash in. Once it became established, and ever since, it's been is a love of photography that by and large leads people to take it up as a profession. Anyone who looks at photography as an easy way to make a few bucks is either a scheister or sadly misinformed. At the same time, depending on how far you're willing to stretch definitions, the 344 selfies that constitute my daughter's camera roll might be considered a fairly typical amateur portfolio these days. When the term amateur photographer could mean anybody who takes a picture that isn't a professional, no wonder everybody wants to Shoot Like A Pro.

Here's the thing though, I've been a pro and I'll tell you gladly I'm grateful not to be shooting like that anymore. Not that it was a bad gig, and I even did some work I'm still proud of, but it's not what I got into photography for. I've spoken to any number of working professionals over the years who've admitted they've lost nearly all interest in doing photography outside of work. It's almost always a love of photography and the idea of being able to do it all the time instead of working that leads people to profession in the first place. I sensed myself heading down that same path myself a few years back. It took a while, but it all came back. The problem wasn't that I was tired of photography, it's that I spent too much time shooting like a pro. The only reason I still care enough to sit down and write about it every week is that I set that aside to once again shoot like an amateur.

 Of course I use the term amateur more in its 19th century sense here with all the connotations of passion and dedication that go along with it. I don't mean it entirely the same way though. That tinge of snobbish elitism can be left in the past, as can any notion that being a professional takes any less passion and dedication. Though I'm happy with the role photography now plays in my life I know first hand what life is like on the other side of the aisle and still admire the work of many pros. There are even some working professionals I still envy a little. Not the ones doing up wedding albums, or making the same soggy lump you find in a fast food burger container look like something appetizing or even getting field side access at professional sporting events. They're the ones who manage to make enough publishing books, selling prints and doing workshops to allow them to go on shooting like amateurs. Uncompromisingly skilled, fiercely dedicated, unwaveringly passionate amateurs.