What do you think of when I tell you I am professional photographer? Do images of scantily clan young women pop into your mind? Or maybe someone hanging out of a helicopter as a herd of wilder beast thunder below. Or maybe one of those tortured artistic types with gigantic prints hanging on the wall behind them as they talk about the hard years it took them to get to the top? Or maybe you know someone who makes a living taking photos, that is, someone that just gets by taking photos for a living. I’m one of those.
I started out at Wal-Mart, which was an eyeopener in itself, Wal-Mart is a whole other universe where the laws of time and labor don’t exist. One of the countless people that work in Wal-Mart, but not for Wal-Mart, I traveled from store to store setting up my Micky Mouse portrait studio and taking pictures of cheapskates that wanted a hundred and ten portraits for $4.95. Mostly these were baby pictures, and it didn’t take long for me to develop and good and solid hatred of the parents of little babies. The kids themselves were often little screamers, but you could deal with that, parents are just fucking assholes. Those aren’t cute pictures. That’s not their real smile. I don’t like that. I just want the special. And so on and so forth.
The mill work of this kind of photography doesn’t exactly attract the best talent for the job and there is a lot of turnover, though not as much as I first thought there would be. There are a few hardy souls that have been doing this grunt work for years, some of them even claim to make a decent living doing it. PCA is quite simply a presence of evil on the earth.
I lasted about a year at the screaming kids and dumbass parents stand in Wal-Mart. Of course, it wasn’t just the customers that you were fighting with, it was all those modern day representatives of Adolf Hitler, the Store Manger. These pea brains don’t want you in their store. As every square inch of floor space in a Wal-Mart is expected to make X number of dollars a second, having a traveling portrait studio take up ten by six feet is simply stealing money from their pockets and they never minded telling you as much.
The idiots that run PCA were always nice a cheerful and never worth damn if you needed something, like say, film for your camera.
Now all that being said, the two weeks I spend in training hell and the following three months of nonstop shooting during the Christmas rush taught me everything I needed to know to be a discount photographer. I can now crank out portraits that look just like every Wal-Mart, Sears, Target, One on One, Church Directory, K-Mart, or just about anyone else you will find shooting portraits in the back rooms of grocery stores or bowling alleys around the country. This is not really all that good a thing, but it is what these companies want. Oh, some of them are big on the whole Contemporary Photography thing, but they have drilled the route and standard into every head that works for them.
Of course, that is just what I do to make money.
When I have the odd hour or two to do as I wish, I work on my Art.
There is a certain satisfaction in creating these images. There is a feeling of doing what I was meant to do, and not just what I have to do.
My art work is not all that special, sad to say, nothing new or shocking or very original. Just things I have picked up over the years and managed to paste together. I have sold very few of these images, maybe if I put my whole effort into it things would be better. But then it would be a bit like, hmm, work.
Photography is one of the few things in life that make me even a little bit happy. It’s all a bit hard though and depressing. Maybe I could get a better job somewhere, maybe someone needs a mid forties fellow who has wasted the better part of his life and wants to start over. I always wanted to be a fashion photographer, or a new products photographer, or one of those people that shots the rich and the famous lounging around their zillion dollar homes.
Ok, I never wanted any of that, but I would be willing to give it a try.
In the meantime, when you go to church to have your picture taken, buy some of the damned portraits.
