This image is a good example of how I keep working on ideas I have but then never do much with the resulting photos. Perhaps I am just in it for the chase. I have not done a public update of my series Photographers With(out) Their Cameras in a while now but I keep adding to it slowly. In fact, I have now photographed Ashkan here twice, with(out) two different cameras. He stopped by recently with this Nikon N8008s that I had just sold to him a couple weeks ago. I like Ashkan a lot, he is one of the many interesting and creative minds I have gotten to know via my work at Blue Moon Camera. I haven't seen him in a couple of years, so this visit inspired me to make a portrait of the man, because I am not sure when I will get another chance, and that may even be never. Not to sound dark, but portraits of those we know and care about are valuable and the opportunities to make them should never be taken for granted. Yet we often do. I often do. And I intend to get better about that. So this was part of it. While I had him for a picture I figured I might as well add to this series. And since I added to this series yet again, I figured I might as well add to the collection I have posted on here. It is a body of work that I am quietly very happy with and I hope to keep building it.

Pentacon Six TL
Kodak Ektar 100

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Photographers are the most important part of the photographic process. Hence this series eliminates the camera, or at least relegates the camera to a background element, for it is still present - very much so. But as a portrait of the photographer goes, the camera tends to get in the way of seeing the actual photographer. At least so my thinking goes. But at the same time I am really drawn to the body language of photographers, particularly their hands. Hands are an underrated tool of ours. How we hold our cameras, if we are able to, speaks volumes. Maybe it is shades of Elliott Erwitt's Handbook (an excellent book by the way if you have never perused it) working its influence on me. But I have been fascinated to a point by how photographers stand and pose in the act of image-making.

But really, these are portraits of photographers and I wanted to place the emphasis on them, not their cameras.

This in a minor way is also a counterpoint to all the photographer portraits out there where the subject is posed with their biggest lens or most expensive camera. Those miss the point... or rather, they make the wrong point.

Anyway, some loosely strung together thoughts that have evolved as I have worked on this idea.

Gabe is an aspiring photojournalist. I think elements of that show up here. Mostly it is the stance, camera ready but not up blocking the face, gaze looking down the street sizing up potential scenes and stories.

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Photographers With(out) Their Cameras.

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One last portrait, one more addition to my Photographers With(out) Their Cameras series.

And bonus, something to think about.

This was an idea... or even a philosophy I shared during my speech the other day at the Portland Art Museum. If I was to ask you, "what is it that photographers do?", how would you answer? How many here would raise their hands and say, "photographers make photographs" or some variant of that.

They take pictures.
They are image makers.
They create art.
etc
etc
etc

And it isn't that this is a wrong answer. I would raise my hand in agreement with this assessment. But what if I changed the question slightly to, "Is an image maker everything that a photographer is?" And think about the implications here for a moment because what I am driving at is that thinking that our main purpose is to create two dimensional objects is a very one dimensional way of looking at what photographers do.

It is a limiting assessment in a number of ways. It puts too much importance on the image. It takes it away from us - the living, breathing, feeling, thinking human beings behind the camera. When you look at a photo and you learn something, or feel something or are transported to some emotional state of being, is it the picture that is really doing this, or the photographer behind the creation of that photo that invested some part of him or herself into that image that you are responding to?

Right, if a picture is going to be emotionally moving it is because a photographer made it so by being moved themselves and then translating that into an image. Keep that in mind. In a way, we are not so much just image makers as we are translators for our thoughts and feelings.

But even this falls short of fully defining what a photographer is or can be. We don't have to make images to have impacts as photographers. I spent a week last summer in Turkey working with 400 Syrian refugee children on pinhole photography. I had an impact on so many of them without ever showing them a single image of my own, without ever making a single image of my own in regards to the work I was doing with them. I was still a photographer, I was still pulling from my experience and knowledge and sharing that.

So often our photos get held up as our trophies. "Look what I did.... look what I am." But we are more than those photos and we have much more as photographers to offer than these two dimensional squares and rectangles (and yes, the occasional circle). Remember, the most valuable thing we have to offer the world isn't our latest picture... it is ourselves: our knowledge, our passion, our imaginations and creativity, our wisdom... and on.

Don't define yourself as a photographer in this one dimensional fallacy that all you are is a producer of photos.

You are more than that. Be more than that.

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Another excerpt from Photographers With(out) Their Cameras. Not too many of these left, this series is winding to a halt... til I make more.

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