Your Photos Suck, Do Better
A thousand pictures shouldn't be worth a single word.
They're all the same. And totally artificial. Well, somewhat at least.
So posed.
So contrived.
Some of this is necessary and some highly desirable, but it has become a monolith.
The Instagramed world is totally fake. Everyone knows this, and everyone at some level dislikes this. Yet everyone contributes partially because we like artificial, and it is not necessarily all bad.
Some of it is objectively desirable. Some. Of. It.
The other reason everyone contributes to the fakery of the perfect and staged appearance of it all is that the algorithm rewards it. Before you go all Luddite, anti-Big-Tech remember that we are the algorithm—it is responding to our desires. Don't blame it for our failures/shortcomings.
When I describe it as totally fake, I don't mean just a false impression of luxury and lifestyle perfection. That is part of it, but it is simpler than that. It is the posing for the camera itself along with the 20 takes and filters applied.
You don't look like that. Life doesn't look like that. It is as if we've chosen to have all of our photographic documentation handed over to an unholy combination of Glamour Shots and the DMV.
Think back of the interesting pictures of the past. What do they have in common including what they are not?
They have spontaneity, real-world "flaws", and time/place/circumstance uniqueness.
Once we could photograph ourselves without painfully standing still for long minutes to hours, we started taking lots of a lot more interesting shots. Yes, we still did take group photos of family and friends, but I never said that was wrong.
I just am arguing that there is SO MUCH MORE to be had than that. And generally what we do today is not so different than the seemingly somewhat awkward portrait pictures of the past—the stilted, painful, serious pose.
The partially true story is people had plain faces in those photos because they had to hold the pose so long—portrait bitch face. But it was also the case that the cultural norm was that smiling was associated with stupidity. People were making the faces that were en vogue. Yet even they allowed themselves to break this norm and show whimsy.
Compare that to today when certain expressions, hand gestures, and postures dominate the self and group portrait style. Again, nothing wrong with that per se. But for Kodak's sake, branch out.
Do you really only want to remember the party from the vantage of a photobooth? Who was sitting next to whom and what their postures were will be a novel unto itself while the highly-posed shot in front of the photowall is nothing more than the invitation list plus recommended attire.
I'm arguing for thoughtfulness, intentionality, and variety along with whimsy and open mindedness. Vague? Yes, but helpful nonetheless.
Photography is not like baking where we can follow the directions and course correct with a bit more sugar or a bit less flour until, voila!, success. It is like poetry. There really isn’t a formula.
And like good poetry, this comes from the heart. Manufactured spontaneity is not spontaneity. It is fake and it shows. Sometimes that show is still fine. Oftentimes it is pathetic. And it can never replace the purely genuine.
A big part of that genuineness is the "ugly" and awkward parts we so often try to paper over and edit out. Photos can't fully capture who we are or preserve an image of who we were. They are glimpses most effective as part of a very broad portfolio forming a diverse mosaic. This portfolio demands variety—across time, style, and vantage point.
That is one big reason we are blessed to live in an age of near-zero-marginal-cost video. Video can much better capture the moment. Notice how hard it is to distill even a very short video down to a screenshot capture. It almost never matches or expresses the content and context of the video itself.
For me a similar version of this occurs when I try to optimize (what a quixotic quest) the "key photo" in a Live photo using my iPhone. The algorithm usually does a good job itself selecting for focus and brightness. But sometimes I want something different from a "better" facial expression including less blinking to a more desirable look. Sadly, I'm sure I suck at this falling into a Glamour-Shots trap rather than allowing something beautiful I'm too blind to see.
If you are asking yourself “where is the advice implied by the title of the post”, I understand your frustration. I’m frustrated too. I don’t have it in detail because it cannot probably be described precisely.
I also am not claiming to be any better at this than you are. The best I can offer is to repeat what I said above: I'm arguing for thoughtfulness, intentionality, and variety along with whimsy and open mindedness.
Don’t take the photos you want others to want to see. That is the wrong aspiration.
Take fewer of the photos that you think others should be looking at. That is the wrong goal.
Take the photos you want to be looking at in ten years—better yet in fifty years.
