10 Things (+1) I Can't Stand About Photography Today
Someone once told me photography died the day everyone became a photographer. I didn't buy it. But also I am not blind. There are things that piss me off. And I am going to share them with you.
Every year the list of things eroding this medium gets longer, and I'm done pretending I don't notice.This isn't a balanced take. This isn't "both sides." This is the list.
10. Stop Calling It Photography
An algorithm typing a prompt is not photography. It never was. Etymologically, technically, philosophically: NO.
Photography means writing with light. There is no light here. There is no world in front of a lens, no decisive fraction of a second, no body standing in the rain waiting for something to happen. What we have is a different medium entirely, and it deserves its own name. Call it syntography. Call it synthetic imaging. Call it whatever you want but please, just stop calling it photography, because it isn't, and every time we blur that line we insult the thing photographers actually do: show up. We have seen even recently with the Italian Festival of Photography, they mixed photographs and AI generated images, They create the misunderstanding, and maybe that is made on purpose.
9. Brilliant YouTubers, Mediocre Photographers
Some of the most-watched photography channels on the internet are run by people whose actual pictures are forgettable. Great on camera. Great at pacing a video. Great at choosing the best audio and light on the videos. And yet, mediocre, sometimes worse, behind the lens. And the algorithm rewards them for it, because explaining photography photogenically has become more profitable than practicing it. The audience learns technique from people who never mastered vision. That's not a small problem. That's the whole pipeline, corrupted at the source. I am happy with my Youtube channel where not everything is perfect, indeed is pretty far to be it, and yet it looks fresh and genuine. Do you know why? Because I am honest in what I do.
8. The Consumerist Mindset Eating This Art Form
New camera. New lens. New "must-have" accessory. New body every eighteen months because the sensor gained two megapixels nobody needed. Photography has been colonized by consumerism, and consumerism always wins the same way: it convinces you the gear is the bottleneck. It isn't. It was never the bottleneck. Buying your way to a better eye is the biggest lie this industry sells, and you keep buying it, literally. I am showing that is possible to make photography, yes also that photography published on international magazines and even getting a cover, with cameras released in 2014 or 2015.
7. Brand Tribes, Fighting Over Nothing
The eternal fight Canon versus Nikon. Fuji versus everyone. Leica owners looking down at both. Grown adults, arguing online about plastic and glass as if it were football, as if the sensor inside your camera says anything about the photographer holding it. It doesn't. Nobody has ever looked at a great photograph and asked what mount it was shot on. Nobody ever will. A good photographer is able to make a great photo with…everything. Most of the cameras are now equipped with Sony sensor, I can recognize that it changes the experience depending by the design of the camera. And again, I am still working with old DSLR cameras.
6. Festivals and Awards That Charge You to Lose
Pay to submit. Pay to be considered. Pay again if you want your name on the shortlist page. An entire economy has been built around photographers' hunger for validation, and it runs on entry fees, not on merit. Some of these "awards" exist for one reason only: to collect submission money from people desperate enough to believe a badge will change their career. It won't. It rarely even changes their portfolio. Pay to pay theirbills. Pay to keep them alive. Pay to make them rich. They are nothing in photography, I know some of them, believe me, and yet they are so desperate to ask your money. Wake up!
5. The Moralists and the Snobs, Attacking Street Photography From Both Sides
Oh, I met several of them recently in a controversy raised up from 2 monkeys on a internet magazine I wrote. On one side: people who treat street photography as something illegal, something creepy, something a "weirdo" does with a camera in public. It isn't illegal. In most of the world, it never has been. On the other side: the snobs who use the word "snapshot" as an insult, as if spontaneity were a flaw and not the entire engine of the genre. Street photography sits at the center of photographic history, Cartier-Bresson, Levitt, Meyerowitz, Moriyama, the male chovinist pig Winogrand, and the snapshot aesthetic they're mocking has shaped how nearly every genre of photography looks today, whether editorial, documentary, or fashion. Attack the medium that gave you your visual language. Sure. Go ahead. So we know how much ignorant you are. Street Photograophy is central in the history of photography and these moralists and snobs are just exposing themselves.
4. The Pose Disguised as Documentation
Someone stops. Someone arranges themselves, or arranges the frame, or waits for the "spontaneous" gesture to happen on cue. Then it gets captioned like a document, like something that simply occurred and was witnessed. It wasn't. Staged is staged. Directed is directed. There's nothing wrong with eithe, some of the greatest images in this medium were built, not caught. What's wrong is calling a construction a document. What's wrong is borrowing the authority of "this really happened" for something that was engineered to look like it did. Documentary photography survives on trust. Every staged frame passed off as real spends that trust down to zero. And I am saying that with the awareness I am also a portrait photographer…but…you know what I mean…
3. Photography That Doesn't Want to Be Photography Anymore
Open enough portfolios today and you stop seeing photographs. You see composites. And you see design exercises wearing a photograph's clothes: skies replaced, skin smoothed into plastic, three exposures blended into something that never existed in front of any lens, anywhere, ever. Call it digital art. Call it design. Call it whatever it actually is. I call it desktop publishing. But stop filing it under photography and then acting insulted when someone asks where the photograph went. It didn't survive the process. It was never meant to. It is fake. And I hate the fake.
2. The System's PR Department, Wearing a Photographer's Vest
Give a photographer a byline and a paycheck, and watch how fast some of them start shooting the story the system already wanted told. Safe angles. Safe subjects. Safe conclusions that never once threaten the narrative feeding the outlet, the sponsor, the institution. Photography (art in general I’d say) was supposed to be a critical eye pointed at power, not a press release with better lighting. A photographer who never says anything the system wouldn't approve of isn't a voice. He's staff. And please note also that there is a fake antagonism, in order to give the idea we are living in democracy. I hate also that. And I immediately recognized that too. It is just the system building false rebels in order to make it dirtier.
1. Photography Emptied of Its Own Reason for Existing
The whole point of this medium was always the world, going into it, standing in it, letting it change how you see. Now the world has become a means to an end, and the end is a post. The experience itself barely matters anymore; what matters is the proof it happened, uploaded, captioned, gone in a scroll, never actually looked at again by anyone, including the person who made it. That's not photography losing its market. That's photography losing its soul. And of everything on this list, that's the one that should worry you the most. Beware also because the world appears to be smaller than in the past because of this super connected era. Now we can see Halloween or the Mexican Dia de Muertos even in Rome. Everything became of the entire world. And that affects our photography. The sense of the place used to be important. We should contribute to that. Not everyone photographing the same. The same events, the same topics, the same subjects.
To conclude
Ten things. I could have written thirty. Photography isn't dying, but a lot of what gets called photography today deserves to. Which one hit hardest? Tell me where you disagree or…agree.
***EDIT***
Oh, I forgot…there is another thing I really can’t stand: photographers who use artificial intelligence to create graphics for their ads or for their YouTube video thumbnails. They make me sick, and I’m immediately wary of them. Besides, how much does it cost to make one using Canva? What we’re seeing, moreover, is frankly ridiculous: they all look somewhat alike, a bit like those shitty generated images.
