A Guest Author Piece By Martin Beckett
Peoples “take” on photography can be complex and often bewildering to those of us who practice the dark art on a daily basis as professional photographers. The recent emergence of our endeavour from the realms of unfathomable technology,chemistry and slight of hand has left us floating on the surface of a digital tsunami - where the public consume their surroundings in a promiscuity of image capture -leaving us all with photo-lag and new and surprising prejudices. It used to be the case that the most frequent question I would receive when being introduced as a practitioner would be about snapping naked ladies(the English are most odd about nudity) but now its “ooh you must be worried now that everyone can do it…”
Strange it had never occurred to me that so many people thought that my talent lay in the ability to make a camera work- something much less complex than driving a car- rather than years of learning lighting,composition, technique and allied issues. But the democratization of photography which has led to this huge profligate mass of imagery doesn’t worry me at all Of course it stands to reason because of sheer weight of numbers that some of the images will be of interest, but that’s fine I have my own take on the world,my own ways of shooting ,I will always come up with a different result and most importantly I can do it to order ! Any amateur cook can come up with great food-every now and then- but not day in day out- and they will never reach the highs of the great chefs. (To stretch this metaphor to its limits it can also be said that oddly the invention of the microwave didn’t stop any great chefs from cooking but their appearances on TV have!).
In fact i am delighted that there is so much interest in photography, eventually things will calm down and people wont feel it to be a prerequisite of being awake to photograph everything that moves and email the results to each other.Hopefully photography and its appreciation will increasingly become a mainstream subject at school level leading to a greater understanding and use of the medium .Any dislike I may have of the new technology stems more from its ability to disguise the failings of the photographer, dumbing down images and make the bland universal. Photography is a visceral thing of alchemy and paper, celluloid and acid it is a thing wrought from nature ,capturing light and wringing meaning from it.Whereas the digital world has plunged us into the the land of the geek where the ordinary is imbued with lashings of MSG to create false flavours and hopes. It has made many bad photographers average ,but it has also made many great photographers average too! There is a digital “look” which is hard to avoid but it is possible to make great work with digital equipment-its just not as easy- the upside ,which is instant viewing of your image ,is less valuable to those who know what its going to be like anyway, and the downside which is poor highlights and the distinct “margarine”taste can be worked around. But what we need to focus on is the beauty and strength an image can achieve and not let ourselves be numbed by the huge quantity of bland ersatz photographs we are surrounded by each day.
A truly great image can be created with anything from a pin hole camera through to a $10,000 phallic symbol but they are rare and precious things and come around infrequently. If I managed to take 12 photographs in my life that i am totally happy with I will be more than satisfied -and that will be in 50 years (hopefully) of shooting - so far I think I am happy with about 8 -so I am quite pleased with myself ! Obviously its within my own remit to decide on the suitability of my own work for my pantheon of fame ,and I am not going to beat myself up about it, but it does achieve two things. Firstly it holds me to a standard, its easy to be lazy and not push yourself forward,to stop changing ,looking and adapting -secondly it is vital at a time when the average is increasingly acceptable both to the general public and our client groups to make a plimsoll line of achievement to cling to.
These two images were shot in the same session of the coast on the borders of Kenya and Tanzania, and now grace the advertising for an airline, but one i like and the other annoys me! the top image” sail” has a great sense of movement and time the texture of the sail is magical and it gives a real sense of travelling ,yet i find it irritating. It lacks the composition to match its forward motion it has two clumsy lineal lines ,which don’t work, and there is not enough space to complement so many strong shapes.In essence the balance is wrong! Why its irritating is that i nearly won this race but fell at the last ! When you are shooting action like this your mind is whirring ,thinking one step ahead, trying to look out new ways of pushing that bit further and you are so concentrated that you are almost somewhere else. (I photographed a famous England footballer once and he told me that he never noticed the weather he was playing in be it rain or snow because he was so focused on the task in hand he was outside such matters).And of course the equipment you are using becomes and extension of yourself ,used unthinking but sometimes the whole process works and sometimes its a near miss and this to me is a near miss. 
The “feet” picture though I love, its got the simplicity and the great composition that the other image doesn’t .Even the shadow falling across the feet adds depth for me and the textures of the wood and the water are so important.But its the plastic sandal that is the focal point both of the image and the story, it has pathos and says so much about where we are and how we place our own terms and materials in contrast to the natural world. the timelessness of hewn wood and water are counterpointed by the plastic clad foot, both modern and old fashioned at the same time. All the best tales are simply told and for me this image tells me that, as with so many things, less is more.
I have run out of coffee - fancy buying me one? Tags: ability, basis, camera, capture, car, case, chemistry, composition, cook, course, day, democratization, emergence, endeavour, England, English, everyone, hand, imagery, interest, invention, Kenya, lighting, mass, metaphor, microwave, ooh, out, photography, practice, practitioner, promiscuity, question, result, sail, sense, something, surface, Take, talent, Tanzania, technique, technology, then, thing, tsunami, weight, work, world
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