During the Covid years I decided to join the RPS with a view to finding out ways to improve my photography. I also joined the Documentary group. I have documented in a previous blog that membership of such institutions needs you to get involved in order to get the full benefit of membership. I never really did that as I felt a bit disillusioned not long after I joined. I also visited the HQ in Bath a couple of times and found it to be a rather soul-less place. I was often very confused at what they considered to be exceptional photography. I accept that it is a very subjective medium, but I know what I like and I wasn’t seeing it or feeling inspired by what I saw. The final decision to leave was based on their request to racially and sexually profile me when entering a competition. Why? I couldn’t even classify myself as Male on their form.
When my membership became due in October I decided that I had had enough and informed them I was not rejoining and my reasons for this.
Saturation Point
When I started taking photos back in the mid-70s, a lot of my work was shot on the streets and was at the time considered rather unremarkable, but I enjoyed this type of photography. At that time I shot all of my images on film and film photography (through to final print), is not easy and is hard work. I always sought out the documentary photography types of work that were showing in exhibitions or in new books. It was rather scarce at the time but always worthwhile looking at the work of others. Today things have changed to the point where there is an over-saturation of work readily available 24/7 via the internet and I am not sure if that is a good thing or not. The likes of Instagram, Tik-Tok and other such repositories for photos has in my opinion over saturated the market with mundane photography that just sucks up our time viewing them. Whereas I used to have to seek out and savour the type of photography genre that I like, I now have it on tap but the quality in my opinion can be very poor. I value the hours I spent looking at the work of McCullin, Maier, Marzaroli, Murtha and Hardy etc. and would look at them all again if I could.
I don’t post many photos on-line and prefer to host my work on my website. What I see at times is some people saying “Been out with the camera today” and then dumping the contents of their memory card on-line with no objective self critique or image editing at times. I always believe less is more and that a couple of good ones is better than a load of bad ones. I would never discourage anyone from taking photos, I would however ask them to be more critical and selective of what they want the world to see.
Happy New Year everyone and I will be back in 2025
