3.5 billion other people uploaded a photograph to social media today. Mine was lovely, it was of my son sticking his tongue out. It made me laugh, and once i’d filtered the shit out of it, it looked pretty good. I put the coloured version on Facebook and the b&w version on Instagram. People have liked it. Pretty awesome.
Does that make me a photographer? Not really. In fact not at all. So what makes a photographer different?
There might be many answers to this, but I’d like to proffer one. It’s not technical ability, it’s not posh equipment, and it’s not the ability to shout loudest in the room (though that clearly helps).
My feeling is that it comes from the ability to create a narrative in every image they produce. Like all great artists, the single image is just the starting point for a whole series of emotions that are triggered in your brain, creating meanings that take you to a different place than you were before you started looking. Great photograraphy tells stories that go far beyond a single image.
On rare occasions I might produce some of that in my photos, but I can’t do it with consistency. Great photographers can.