Critiques and comments

When I started out in photography, the internet didn’t exist. In fact, it would be several years before it would even be a thing. Photography was done on film and you either developed your own or had to send it off and wait for the film to return to even see if you got anything decent. This means the only real feedback you could get was from people you knew and could see your prints. Often, this was family and friends. Unless you belonged to a photography club, taking photography classes, or other such groups you didn’t get any real critiques and the comments were typically nice words from your family and circle of friends. The challenge was purely on you and your thoughts to improve your skills.

Then came along the internet, and our circle expanded to people we would exchange ideas and comments with that we would frequently never meet in person. This led to an exchange of ideas and concepts that may be new to us. Improving and gathering new information was at the tip of our fingertips. The first photography-sharing site I ever used was Flickr. I could interact with photographers from around the world.

We come to today, Flickr is still around but has taken somewhat of a backseat to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. So many photographers go through their photographic life not wanting to hear the thoughts and opinions of others. Other times, photographers express their thoughts and ideas in hateful and condescending ways, which drowns out those who truly wish to help others with progressing and offering a different way of looking at our photographs. It is much like car alarms, we hear them, so often we ignore them.

I’m of the opinion that we need to get back to listening to others around us. I’m of the opinion we need to get back to really viewing, not only our own photographs, but also those of others. How do we rise above the noise? How do we express our ideas and grow without hearing how others view our work? Do we care or do we just blindly create?