Everyone's a Photographer

Everyone's a photographer these days. Thanks, digital cameras.

Everywhere you go there's a woman crooking her head and awkwardly angling her body to take a picture of a sticker, graffiti on a light pole, or a puddle. Or there's some guy stooping next to a sleeping homeless person, trying to get the perfect shot.

They go home, these photographers, these documentarians of urban decay, and select out of the hundreds the one or two pictures that aren't terrible. Next, they fiddle with them in Photoshop.

From there the pictures go up on Facebook because the photographer never reads the fine print--they're not lawyers! They're artists!--or maybe they just don't care about their copyright; that's such a capitalist social construction anyhow. Then all their friends comment on how pretty the picture is. Maybe they say something about the composition's depth and profundity or use some of the bullshit theoretical language they heard in college.

After receiving enough praise to temporarily fill the void that is their core, they send the pictures out to small college and indie magazines that have an interest in publishing such things.

At these fine establishments, editors with voids of their own sift through the submissions. After several lengthy meetings at which no doubt even more bullshit theoretical language--whatever Frenchified post-Marxist nonsense is currently in fashion--is used and names of obscure academics and artists are dropped, a few of the “pieces” are selected for publication: a shadow on the crumbling sidewalk, some graffiti on a wall, a homeless guy eating, a cloud reflected in a puddle reflected in a mirror reflected in a store window.

After notifying the photographer, the editor sends the pictures to the guy who does the layout. He thinks he's the shit. He probably has a several piercings on his face and a tattoo that the girls who've contracted herpes from him think shows his sensitive side. Perhaps he's working on a theory of the internet that incorporates Martin Heidegger's ideas on technology. He's a philosopher, this layout guy. But he's practical enough to report back to the editors because their resolution is too low for printing.

The editors inform the photographer. This artist, perhaps over coffee in some a trendy neighborhood, whips out his iBook or iSomething-That's-Constructed-By-Slaves-Under-Conditions-So-Terrible-That-Even-China-Complains-About-Them, opens the picture, saves it in a different file format that takes up more disk space, and sends it back to the editor. A couple of tables over, an editor's iPhone beeps. He puts down his own fair trade beverage to check his email. Satisfied, he forwards the picture to the layout guy.

The layout guy pauses summarizing his thesis to a wide eyed undergraduate he's trying to lay to check his own iPhone. He writes back to the editor that the picture's resolution doesn't change when you make the file size bigger.

The editor forwards the message to the artist. The temporary seal on the void breaks. Thoughts of suicide, revenge, rejection and so on fill the photographer's head. Maybe he takes an extra dose of the chemicals his mental health provider prescribed him. Maybe he channels these feelings into something he thinks is positive, like going out to find more homeless people to photograph--after changing the camera settings to a higher dpi. Maybe he gives up and does the world a favor by killing himself.

What he doesn't know, however, is that published or not, all the people that would have seen his picture have seen it already.