On Insincerity

This is a rant.

It was caused by the umpteenth self-promotional, vertically shot from above video made toting a smartphone, in which, after the hideous opening — ‘hey guys’ — the main, and only, character promotes a personal achievement while pretending merely to ‘share a — God forbid — thought’.

I usually try to be factual in my writing, stating my case in a clear and concise manner, always focusing on the merits of an issue and never blaming a person or a category.

But.

My firm belief is that, when we join a community — musicians, sportsmen, writers and, of course, photographers — we must, must, not should, respect its ethos. This means, in particular, refraining from trivialising what lies at the core of that community: its values, its language, and also its different ways of doing things. This is why I — plainly and simply — dislike, from the depths of my heart, the flood of poorly taken photos and videos that have invaded the various content-sharing platforms available on the internet.

I am not talking about composition, exposure, sharpness, ‘the moment’ and so on — the rant is not about quality or lack of skill — because what unsettles me is the lack of sincerity.

Unless a photo is meant to be sold to a client, in which case it must be good, there are no good or bad photos out there. Each photo is a step in a personal journey, and all that matters is that what we shoot today is better than what we did yesterday and worse than what we will do tomorrow. But each photo, irrespective of its ‘value’, is an act of sincerity, and the act of sharing it means, in fact, sharing a part of oneself.

I cannot provide exact figures or statistically sound data, but it is my understanding that a large majority of the photo and video content — I cannot call them photographs and videos — made available online is simply sloppy: not as a deliberate way of breaking the rules and experimenting with something different, but merely sloppy and self-centred, because it reflects the insincere attitude of those who shot it.

Are these people part of the photographic community at large? One may rightly say that what they do is not ‘proper photography’ and that ‘real photographers’ are a different breed.

That attitude, however, reminds me of the contempt that the Greeks had for foreigners, whom they called ‘barbarians’ because they sounded as if they were stuttering when they spoke. ‘Barbarians’ may stutter but, as the late Roman Empire learned the hard way, they eventually won.

So, what should we do — if, in the first place, we are supposed to do anything?

I am afraid that there is nothing we can do, least of all simply stop giving a damn about these by-products of attention economy. We certainly cannot stop people from producing them, but at least we can try not to supporting them through views and click.

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