“Pro photographer” / Onepinkhippo on Flickr

Getting Past “Pro Photography”

…and getting back to taking good pictures.

It’s hard to learn about photography without catching at least a whiff of some conversation about “professional photography”—and, boy, are we interested in “going pro.” So many of us want to know what equipment the pros use, what certifications or degrees are required to be professional, how long it takes, how an amateur knows when they’ve “made it,” the list goes on and on. Oftentimes people want to know so much about photography as a profession that it’s a little harder to find deep information about taking pictures. A trove of knowledge is hidden away in endless web forum battles, on archived Geocities pages, and on photography web guru blogs; but that knowledge is often hidden in the language of how pros get the job done. But every time I see a supposed professional talk about what it takes to be a professional, I lose interest in their advice and I lose respect for the person giving it. I’m not sure why, but it seems like a matter of virtue: why would anyone claim to be a professional who knows the secret to becoming a professional? It all smells of snake oil and ego to me, and I’ll tell you why: it doesn’t seem very useful to talk about professionalism in the first place.

For a long time, I wasn’t even sure what people meant by “professional” and, in a way, I’m still not sure: the word has many uses after all, and it’s easy to equivocate between them.We can say a professional is someone who is (regularly) paid to complete some task—a hired hand. We can say a professional is someone who conducts herself according to certain standards to complete some task. The implication is that we are impressed with her demeanor, or we are put off by how “cold” her demeanor is. We can say that a professional is someone extremely skilled at what she does: a person with expertise. We can, perhaps lastly, say professionals are just those people who have completed certifications and have reached codified milestones that separate amateurs from professionals. For example, the Japanese Go Association (Nihon Ki-in) holds tournaments that decide who becomes a professional Go player and who remains an amateur—other professional Go associations have their own processes. That is, there’s a credentialing process Go players can go through when they want to become professionals, and that gives them access to new play spaces, circles of friends, tournaments, and notoriety in their community. The word “professional” has a specific meaning for them: it’s an institution, a club, and a set of obligations.

But it’s not clear what photographers mean when they talk about the profession, professionals, or professionalism. They could be referring to the photographer’s demeanor, standards of quality, expertise, or even their participation in organizations that support professional photographers. None of these, however, is essential for determining who is a professional and who isn’t. A person without these traits can still be considered a professional; we would just say they are hard to work with, aren’t very good at their job, or even “unprofessional” (because English is a strange language). Conversely, a person can have the demeanor, the standards, the expertise, memberships in several professional organizations, and still not get called a professional. Perhaps professional photographers are just those people who have taken pictures for several paying clients. But what stops any schmoe from buying a camera and charging strangers for bad pictures? Every month or so I see new wedding photos pop up on Facebook and Twitter: most of them are terrible, and almost all of them were expensive. The schmoes who take these pictures still billed themselves as professional photographers and their clients (my friends) think of these schmoes as professional photographers—even if they take bad pictures. So if a person calls herself a “professional photographer,” it doesn’t tell us anything for certain beside “I’m a person with a camera who will take your money and (perhaps) give you something in return.” That’s not a lot of information at all. But wait: isn’t it possible for a professional to work for free?

Now suppose someone wants to figure out how to become a professional. She may ask, “How many pictures do I need to take? What equipment must I buy? How many clients do I need? How many hours do I need to work on my picture taking…before I can call myself a pro?” These questions are all difficult to answer: even if we do know how to distinguish amateurs from professionals, it would still be hard to say when a person counts as a professional. If I told our budding photographer, “You aren’t a professional until you take on 15 clients,” she could ask, “Why 15? How did you come up with that number? Why can’t I just call myself a professional after 5?” Indeed, why can’t she? What’s to stop her from calling herself a professional before she even owns a camera? Not much at all. Once we try to answer these kinds of questions, we are left with Sorites-style problems: “How many grains of sand make up a pile of sand?” It’s not exactly clear how many do, and any number we could give would seem arbitrary. I think these questions, in our present case, are a waste of time precisely because any answer we give would be arbitrary, misleading, or unhelpful.

Wouldn’t we be better off thinking about how to make the pictures we want to make and how to sell those pictures to people who want to buy them? If we truly care about doing photography, shouldn’t we ask questions about how to do photography? If a person wants to take pictures of weddings for money, they could ask, “How do I find people who will pay me to take pictures of their wedding? What pictures do people expect to receive when they hire a photographer for their wedding? What’s a fair price to charge? How do I take pictures of the bride and groom when everyone else has a camera with a flash? How do I expose the bride and groom so that I don’t underexpose the tux or over expose the dress? How do I get the wedding party to loosen up when I’m taking pictures of them?” These seem like appropriate questions for a budding photographer to ask if they want to learn how to get better at what they do or learn to get paid to do what they do. The funny bit is that none of the answers to these questions require that we even use the word “professional.”

So let’s leave the p-word behind us, dump the snake oil down the toilet, and go take some pictures.