Mentoring young photographers

Phil Clarke-Hill

It goes without saying that the business is now unrecognisable from the one that I entered in the early 1990s. Then, the structure was relatively linear and there was a clear defining path to an editorial career. Now, every photographer has to be a brand and use social media to shout their wares and tout their abilities. It isn’t even clear what editorial or documentary photography actually is anymore.

I’ve talked before about a ‘bleed’ from the art world and as previous postings on this site seem to indicate, a good deal of photographic education now wraps itself in talk of ‘practice’ and pseudo academic language.

As an editorial photographer and one that works in a documentary tradition, I’m actually delighted that new ways of seeing are being utilised but I’ve always tried to make work that is simple and engaging. I firmly believe that if you’re photographing people in (often) difficult situations you have a duty to be clear and straightforward and that your work should be similar. Your work should be about the subject and not about you.

It’s hardly surprising then that there’s a good deal of confusion about how to progress within the business – or more crucially how to make pictures that won’t fade with current fashions but have a longevity that speaks to an audience with simplicity and crucially, I think, a beauty.

In the past, when I was stuck visually or with an issue of editing, I could ask older, wiser members of my agency for help and advice. That old agency structure has now by and large fallen (in some ways a positive step) and it often leaves people working in a vacuum.

Photography – documentary photography, photojournalism – whatever you call it, is analogous to its written cousin. It is fundamentally a craft that has elements that are worth learning. I’ve always thought that if you are trying to communicate with an audience by showing them the world (perhaps with a view to changing/challenging their opinions) your work must be clear and simple. That isn’t to say dull, but it must be engaging and understandable. There are so many images now and so many photographers producing them. If everyone’s a photographer then you have to make sure that even if your Tweeted voice isn’t the loudest, the work that you produce is the absolute best it can be.

Over the last decade I’ve had dozens and dozens of young (and some not so young) photographers writing to me to ask if they can assist me or just get feedback on their work. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but if someone sends me a half decent email I‘ve always responded and if I’m in the UK, often arranged to meet.

Phil Clarke-Hill emailed me several years ago to ask my honest opinion of his images. We met up several times and it was clear that although he had talent and a strong desire to shoot, he wasn’t as focussed as he could be and his way of shooting was too loose. Some of his frames had a picture in them desperately trying to get out.

I had him shoot some exercises, I lent him an old lens. I set him a project to work on. I made him change where he stood. I made him look up some photographers that I really admired and crucially explained why I thought their images worked and still work. Moreover, I made him aware of authors that wrote beautiful reportage. I’m convinced that there is a symbiosis within all journalism and in the best practitioners there is an erudition, a refinement, a clear, simple way of communicating a story to an audience that transcends the medium.

Phil listened and really engaged. He started to make pictures that were clearer and that said what he wanted them to say – images that could be read visually. Two years later, he’s in a very different place. He’s shooting assignments for good magazines and specialising in South America – especially Brazil. He regularly emails and sends me stuff and asks advice about the things that don’t often get discussed – travel, visas, logistics, pitching – essentially, being a professional. He’s just about to make a book and has an exhibition soon. It’s surprised me how much I’ve enjoyed the process myself – seeing someone benefit from my experiences and (many) mistakes.

Someone else that I’ve worked with over the last couple of years is the young Bangladeshi photographer Farzana Hossen. I taught a workshop in Chittagong four years ago for the Pathshala Institute for a group of local and visiting Norwegian young photojournalists.

Farzana, it was clear, was an exceptional photographer with an inherent and classical visual sense and she was full of questions – not about ‘how’ but ‘why’. The series that she was working on, about her own family, was both mature and subtle. Her next work about violence against women in Cairo was more straightforward visually but much more complicated to shoot. We spoke over email and ‘phone about the logistics and dangers of the work (during the 2013 demonstrations) and I did my best to advise on fixers and contacts for her work. Later that year when she came to London I helped edit her project on acid attack survivors that won her the Ian Parry Award.

Currently, I’m working with a photographer in New Delhi (where I’m still partly based) and another in the UK. What’s really interesting for me, is that I feel the process has invigorated my own work. I have a new book out next year and I can honestly say that some of that work was influenced as much by working with (and learning from) several younger photographers. It may be clichéd but it’s true that it’s been enormously gratifying to be able to help someone and pass on what (limited) knowledge I have.

My mentoring isn’t intended to be a competitor to a University course – many of which I’ve guest lectured at – I see it as guidance for people who are actually trying to work in an industry that is both confusing and constantly moving.

Stuart Freedman is a Freelance Photojournalist and Mentor who points out that his degree is in Politics rather than photography. His website is https://www.stuartfreedman.com/mentoring/

 Phil Clarke-Hill

Theoretical Photography & The Big Bang Theory


Like most professional photographic organisations, The BPPA has a strange relationship with photographic education. On one hand many of our members visit courses on a regular basis and quite a few fill roles as members of industrial liaison groups. On the other hand we find it impossible to whole-heartedly recommend more than one or two courses anywhere in the country.  We readily acknowledge that there are many lecturers and tutors that try hard to prepare their students for entry to the profession but  it appears that there are relatively few that come close to succeeding.
Professional photographers talk about this topic a lot – mostly bemoaning the state of photographic education and even when it is pointed out to them that not all those studying photography want to become photographers they are still highly critical of the status quo. Anecdotes about students who don’t know their “apertures from their elbows” abound and entire cohorts are dismissed because of this. Many courses aren’t concerned with training for the craft of photography but it isn’t always clear that the undergraduates signed up for those courses realise this.
Members of The Board of our association have become quite disillusioned by the long-running trend towards “academisation” or “academic drift” even within courses whose principle purpose is to produce graduates capable of working in the photographic industry. The world of academe understands intellectualisation and it understands research based methodologies. It doesn’t understand or, more importantly, respect craft, skill or talent.
What we are scared of is a pecking order of tutors, lecturers and professors developing where those who talk intellectual nonsense about photography using terminology compatible with the way that higher education perpetuates itself are placed at the top and those whose goal is to equip students with real world skills are looked down upon or relegated to support roles. We know that photography – and press photography in particular – has a vocabulary all of its own with liberal usage of slang, acronyms and technical jargon but the way that academics use language is either intentionally or unintentionally excluding the profession from taking an active part in education.
If you’ve never watched the US sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” you’ve missed out on one of the best bits of television to come out of America in many years. It also serves as a good analogy for what is happening to arts education in general and to photographic education specifically.
At the top of the tree we find Dr Sheldon Cooper – a theoretical physicist whose intellectual arrogance allows him to look down on all other areas of research and education. Next on the ladder we have Dr Rajesh Koothrappali – another theoretical physicist whose work is less well respected and nowhere near as trendy. Moving down the list we have an experimental physicist Dr Leonard Hofstader who actually gets his hands dirty in the lab and Dr Am Farrah Fowler who is a neuroscientist. Getting nearer to the bottom of the tree we have Dr Bernadette Rostenkowski who has sold out and works in the real world in research with a large pharmaceutical corporation and poor old Howard Wolowitz who ‘only’ has an MA and is an engineer and an astronaut. There are several other characters including the pivotal non-scientist Penny but for the purposes of the comparison we have enough players.
You could easily build a table with direct comparisons from the world of Big Bang Theory to the world of photographic education in the UK. At the top there are the Sheldons – thinkers who write papers, have big thoughts about the nature of photography but who, on the whole, don’t take real pictures – or at least ones that matter. There are the Leonards – practitioners who cannot make a living outside of academe who occasionally have something interesting to contribute to the bigger picture and there are the Howards that actually contribute something concrete but whose achievements don’t cut much ice within the education system. You can slot the other characters in for yourself.
Everyone wants to look down on the Bernadettes – highly trained and highly qualified and actually earning a living from a real world application of those skills – but they prefer to ignore or dismiss them instead. A big mistake and a very silly and divisive attitude. I’m not going to stretch the analogy any further by shoehorning the other key characters into it but, if you are a Big Bang fan, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a go.
Unfortunately there is one problem with this comparison. The Big Bang Theory is really funny. Academic drift in UK photography education isn’t.
There seems to be a tendency within arts education that exists to make sure that it continues to exist: a self-perpetuating and self-interested core whose sole purpose appears to be to create a world where the words spoken and written about the art are more important than the art itself.
Good news of sorts – we are not alone. The concept of academic drift is well recognised and well documented.
Dr Jonathan Harwood is Emeritus Professor of History of Science & Technology at the University of Manchester and he wrote a very interesting paper entitled “Understanding Academic Drift: On the Institutional Dynamics of Higher Technical and Professional Education” in which he identified a trend in higher education whereby knowledge which is intended to be useful gradually loses close ties to practice while becoming more tightly integrated with one or other body of scientific knowledge. One of his key conclusions was that as teachers search for status in the academic hierarchy there is a tendency to mimic colleagues with perceived (or actual) higher status and that choice of language (dense ‘academic’ jargon, etc) is one obvious way to achieve this.
It is clear that this tendency to become part of the system has spread from Dr Harwood’s initial research areas of agriculture, engineering, medicine and management sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries into arts and photographic education in the 21st.
Theoretical photography has grown and flourished inside the academic world whilst it appears that nobody from our industry was watching. It employs a vocabulary so opaque that you have to study with the masters of the game to understand it and by then you are part of the game. You have become part of theoretical photography and if you dare to become the little boy who calls out the Emperor’s New Clothes as a sham then you are dismissed as not having sufficient intellectual capacity to ‘get it’.
There are those who inhabit the arts establishment who are complicit in the game too and all of the time those of us who practice and love photography are being nudged out of what should be a series of inclusive discussions. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if they went off to play their game and left us to get on with doing the job but there are two serious side effects that cannot be allowed to continue.
The first is the effect on those young people spending a small fortune studying photography with the intention of making it their career. Many (or even most) of them are being taught by people with no real understanding of, or regard for, the industry and whose primary motivation is to further their own careers as academics.
The second is the way that Government defers to academic opinion rather than that of professionals. In an industry like ours where practitioners are, by the very nature of the job, individuals it is so much easier to consult with a learned professor than it is to talk to photographers. All too often this results in a skewed view of what is happening, what needs to happen and how to get from one position to the other.
Dialogue is almost certainly the answer but how do working photographers get inside the walls of academe to get it started and how do we persuade academics to put aside their opaque vocabulary? Could it be that we need intermediaries and interpreters? The answer might be that those lecturers inside the system who haven’t bought into the academic drift yet could act as a bridge.
As an association whose mission is to promote and inspire the highest ethical, technical and creative standards from within our industry we would like to extend an invitation to meet, talk and see if we can do something to stop theoretical photography mimicking theoretical physics.
Acknowledgement:
Dr Jonathan Harwood https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11024-010-9156-9