I bought some decent kit: a quality SLR camera, a pro flashgun, rolls of black and white and colour slide film, a tripod. I read a lot of books and bought photography magazines for around two years, until I realized they'd begun to repeat themselves, which meant I'd learnt just about everything they had to teach me, about depth of field, shutter speed, lens choice, etc.
The result? I became a halfway good photographer. To this day I can take good pictures, free from the usual beginner's mistakes. I even got picked up (and eventually dumped) by a stock library who liked my work.
So why is this such a bad thing?
Because photography is awful.
No, it really is. Do you know what every photograph resembles, more than anything else in the world, more than its very subject matter?
Every photograph resembles nothing so much as every other photograph.
No, they really do. Look at a photograph. Any photograph. What does it immediately remind you of?
Every other similar photograph.
Why? Because photography only deals in cliche.
It's kind of built in to the process. There are a limited number of types of camera, each fulfilling a similar role. You can buy any one of dozens of different models of DSLR, for example, but they all do broadly the same thing: produce a digital image of a certain quality in terms of colour range, dynamic range, and detail.
Photographers may pride themselves on standing out from the crowd - but they don't. Photographers who want to make a living at it have to follow some pretty strict guidelines in terms of editorial policies and requirements. Stray too far from the brief, and some other keen young hopeful is always there, ready to step into their place, and they can't afford to forget that.
Plus, every one of us is drowning in photography - we all know what good current photography looks like, because it's plastered all over magazines and the internet almost as soon as it's done. You can't escape the paradigm of current good practice, and the aspiring pros don't want to, because it's a way up the ladder of success.
You can't escape this dilemma. It's hard wired into the whole practice of photography. If you stray too far from that, you get a little write up in some tiny arty blog followed by well deserved obscurity. Photography only deals with surfaces. It's instant, thoughtless, anti-reflective. It's so ubiquitous as to be unseen, unspeakable. (Ever read any photography criticism? Of course you haven't. Nobody reads it.)
Further down the arty ladder, the magazines are full of well meaning, excruciating advice about composition, light and shade, balance and proportion. It's a playground for the pipe smoking weird beard, a place where they can talk down to the amateur and endlessly repeat the same, awful stuff. Yes, it really will make your pictures better. But it won't make them worth looking at.
It will just make your photographs look like every other photograph.
And that is why I think that anyone who even mentions the rule of thirds should be hacked to death with a blunt axe.
But because I enjoy hypocrisy as much as anyone, I confess that I still use my camera most days. Reference shots for paintings, product shots for eBay auctions, clouds I like the look of. It's just that this isn't what I call 'photography'. It's camera as tool, producing something I can use.
The pictures are workaday, useful, disposable. Art they ain't. Not that they're hasty, or ill-considered. Those years of autodidactic camera training have not gone to waste. Every shot is as good as I can make it. But you're probably never going to see them. Because what would be the point?
There's the real world, which is beautiful.
And then there's photography, which imitates it, but only succeeds in looking like itself.
Every picture you take is a kind of lie. One thing I've noticed above all others, concerning every picture I've ever taken, is this: that what comes out at the other end of the process, whether it be a Kodachrome slide or a print from a digital file, has almost nothing to do with whatever prompted me to raise the camera to my eye and take the shot.
Cameras lie. I mean really, really lie. They lie by telling you too much, like the friend who can't tell a story for all the irrelevant details that get in the way.
They lie by straightforward lying, by telling you lies about what's right there in front of both of you. I'm looking at some landscape shots I've taken over the past week, and when I compare the memories in my head - the visual aesthetic response to something I saw out there in the world - with what came out of my camera just now, right there on the monitor, the discrepancy is so great as to make me wonder if the camera is just making stuff up.
The colours are in the ballpark, but completely wrong. The tonal range is squashed to the point where nothing looks right. And this is taking the meter readings into account and adjusting to compensate for exposures that need to be darker or lighter. It's just not right.
I return to my original, and perhaps contentious statement:
Photography is awful.
