Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

"We are starting out to make photography an everyday affair, to make the camera as convenient as the pencil."

George Eastman, the founder of Kodak.

It's doubtful the younger generation knows who George Eastman is, but it's Eastman who had the original notion to put a camera in every household in America. With the advent of the smart phone, it could be said that George Eastman's original vision is damn near complete; although it's doubtful he'll  get the proper credit for what we are witnessing in the present day. The photographic revolution is truly a global one, as photographic images are being uploaded, emailed, and posted on a daily basis. Facebook alone has over three hundred million images uploaded every day. Yet while many people are taking pictures, it can be said that, few are actually photographers, in the truer sense of the word. Putting a camera in the hands of John and Jane Q. Public, does not make them a photographer, anymore than grabbing a knife out of the kitchen drawer makes you a surgeon.

A byproduct of this phenomenon is the reckless and nonchalant approach to assigning authorship to images that don't belong to those who are posting them. This is getting to be the norm as of late. It might not seem relevant to a 15 year old teenager who is sharing "selfies" taken in the bathroom mirror, then posting them on Instagram, but for a professional photographer who makes his or her living doing photography, a photo credit is a token gesture that helps quell the all too familiar aftertaste of giving your photographs away for nothing, or at least in the proximity of next to nothing.

When your images are making there way around the Internet without compensation, and the image remains nameless, or worse yet, your watermark has been removed, it marginalizes the worth of talented photographers who've spent a lifetime dedicating themselves to photography. I know there are those who hate watermarks, but it begs the question, how do you protect your rights to ownership?

 While it might appear that just about any fool can make a picture, most photographers have gone down a long and arduous road to get to where they are now, and the chances of getting something magical dramatically increases when you ask an experienced photographer for their time. What follows is a sampling of just how bumpy the road traveled has been. This might seem belabored, but it's been an uphill battle to get to a place where I feel comfortable in my skin, however thin it may be.

My first camera was a relatively inexpensive Ricoh rangefinder camera, with a built in meter, which back in the sixties was a nice feature to have. Very few of the kids I hung out with back then had their own camera, so just the fact that I had one in my possession, I was labeled as "a photographer." It would take years before I realized that ownership alone didn't make you a photographer, and it took considerably longer to be looked at as an adequate photographer. 

Looking back, I have made huge sacrifices and spent an ungodly amount of my time and money to become the kind of photographer I had wanted to be when I first enrolled in college.  Before I ever set foot in art school though, I spent years reading photo magazines, attending weekend darkroom classes at the local camera store, and going to galleries and camera clubs with my father.  On weekends, I waited for the Detroit Free Press to arrive at our front door, so I could look at the photo essays that took up the back page. Taro Yamasaki, Manny Crisostomo, and David Turnley were all Free Press photographers who had won Pulitzer prizes in my youth. I faithfully followed their stories and studied their photographs, while flipping through the pages of the weekend paper. Their photo essays were long involved stories that required an intense commitment and dedication on the part of the photographer. Something I still admire in a good photographer.

Once I started art school, I would learn of other important photographers. Photographers who dedicated their lives to telling stories through their photographs. I also spent countless hours in the school's darkrooms, learning everything I could about making beautiful prints.  I read the boring but necessary text books, while learning the technical aspects of photography, and even survived the nearly impossible class requirement of taking the Science of Photography class my freshman year. I painfully made my way through that class, despite my awful comprehension of math, because I wanted so badly to be a photographer.

When I left school to work in the field of automotive photography, I learned from some of the most respected and revered photographers in the field. In the early eighties, there was an indentured servant-like mentality that required ridiculous hours with low pay. If you worked for a location photographer, you were required to pack up at a moment's notice and leave town for weeks at a time; working seven days a week, from sunrise to sunset.... and then some. Sleep deprivation was the norm, as you would finish up a sunset shoot, get in a grip truck, and head off to the next location that would find you three hours down the highway in some two-bit hotel in Palookaville. Once you arrived at the hotel, you'd spend another hour or so, notching and loading 8x10 film and getting the lab run tests ready for the next day. This was all done in the dark, in the wee hours of the morning, on the floor of some stinky-ass hotel bathroom that was transformed into a makeshift darkroom for a couple of hours.

For well over half of my lifetime I have lived this lifestyle, a lifestyle that has exacted a tremendous toll on my body and compromised my social life while working long hours away from my home or trapped in the studio. But the experiences cultivated from my years on the road, and the hyper-focused discipline required to light cars in the studio, have been worthwhile to me when I look back and see how much it has taught me about the lessons learned in photography. I love making pictures, and have dedicated myself to every aspect of it, both commercially and artistically.

For the last 10 years I have focused a good deal of my energy on personal work. In 2004 I began working on a unique photographic project, documenting the lives of a group of graffiti writers from southwest Detroit. It would be impossible to put in words the price I've paid for fully dedicating myself to this project, both personally and financially. In the process of taking pictures, I have been chased, assaulted, threatened, and arrested, all in the quest to take the next good photograph. I wish I could say that my experiences have been unique, in so far as the difficult process of getting to where I am now, but truth be told, this is what is expected, and is a recurrent theme for any photographer whose passion is deep enough where money becomes secondary to making meaningful photographs.

So the next time you take a screen shot of a favorite image, or nab a "liked" photograph on Facebook, or ask a photographer for a favor, remember this, it all comes at a cost.  Throw a credit our way when the situation warrants. It'll thicken our skin a bit.