A Laugh and Some Reflection by David Anthony Williams

Intro by Skip Cohen

Most of us have sort of a love-hate relationship with Facebook, but here's a point from the love side of the equation: Facebook is the mortar that holds the bricks of friendship together. 

David Anthony Williams and I go back to my early WPPI days. I left WPPI 17 years ago. David was living in Toronto and is now in Australia, but we're able to keep in touch, even a call now and then thanks to FB. There are so many people I'm able to keep in touch with and it makes the world a tiny place. With just a couple of clicks I can catch up to my "knucklehead" friends all over the world.

Yes, David is a knucklehead. Knucklehead is a word my Dad used to use a lot, but I really picked it up from the King of the expression, Tony Corbell. In its raw form, not preceded by any four-letter adjectives, it's an expression of respect, gratitude, admiration and love reserved for good friends who make you laugh, think a little harder and raise the bar on the quality of life...that's David.

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by David Anthony Williams

I was perusing two entries on FB from Awkward Family Photos and Bad Album Cover Collective just the other day. Apart from both cringing and laughing my head off – it occurred to me that all the bad album covers and many (if not most) of the awkward family portraits were done by what would have been regarded as professional photographers.
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It's a rather confronting thing when you think that a lot of people scoff at professional photography or don't think it's worth paying out good money for.  It doesn't matter that these portraits were done in Sears or similar - they were still regarded by most of the public as professional portraits. Two things come out of this to me:

1. We think being a professional photographer automatically makes us higher up the photographic food chain than everyone else.
2. The public - in good faith - sought out what they saw as a professional photographer and basically had a picture made in cane chair with too much uncontrolled light. In addition, they were presented with a result where their expressions were often substandard to say the least.

No matter that it was the fast food end of the professional photography industry – it was still professional photography to them.

The fact that these images are up on FB in these humorous sites tells us that these were often the "best" choices out of a bad selection. We can blame it on difficult subjects - or we can say the photography skills were lacking in all areas – or just accept that it was made to an economic expectation and a position in the industry. That this is out there  makes me wonder how much of the decline in people seeking professional photography is (in a small part) to do with substandard offerings like this – firmly displayed on grandma's mantlepiece – and now shared out there now for public amusement.

Many of us have made a good living from promotional sittings – it was a valid way to keep things ticking over…..but sometimes this evolved to formula posing, props, and safe easy lighting. We were making a budget product to serve a customer we didn’t think would spend.

Those of us doing our absolute best to produce first class work, probably wouldn’t include ourselves in the budget in-store – or very low budget group---So why does this matter to us?

We all too readily blame increased technology - but somewhere in there there was this raft of low-quality work - purported to be by professionals - often pushed as FREE sittings with small print disclaimers. Just maybe we ended up shooting ourselves in the collective foot.

So here’s the thing:

Our professional organizations have always done a truly GREAT JOB of awards competitions...we get trophies, ribbons and plaques to put up on our studio walls...we earn the respect of our peers for our achievements. We hold ourselves to high standards – and we get a solid connection with high-quality photography every year.

BUT I can't help thinking, in all of this, the most important people – our future customers – are absent from this process. Where would we be if our industry as a whole were promoting our awards directly to the consumer instead of just ourselves? We can’t leave it to our local newspapers anymore – many have shut down.

We know who we are and how good we are – but do our future customers know?