I believe that our primary community is the community of living photographers, masters, teachers, and students. If we do not join together, no one will join us in our major purpose. This purpose is basically to protect photography from further serious impairment.
Teachers, above all, stand between the student and all opinion managers who insolently do damage to the medium. These managers, from all walks of life sophisticated and glib, are utterly lacking in important human motivation. Photography under their patronage is set to piddling tasks.
Such disrespect invites irrational attacks on this half-understood language. Photography’s most important forms (those created and put in use by every generation’s contemporary masters) in large part remain unseen, misinterpreted or sheerly neglected—even by teachers of photography. This also erodes the art and contributes to a degree of student naivete that is unforgiveable today in any other medium. Young photographers are easily victimized by inferior but widely published standards.
Personal exchange (of ideas, pictures, practice and results) between
teachers and master photographers is limited far more by the income of
both groups than absence of desire to meet and talk. Isolation of teachers from one another also cripples photography. Contact between these individuals will help us understand the maverick and otherwise obstinate photographer who, alone, will show us how to abandon some of photography’s most pointless stereotypes.
Unfortunately, teachers are humanly imperfect and must take the
blame that arises from their imperfections. For a generation, photography has been directed at human beings in quantity. At the same time, it suffers from a handicap no living language merits: it has been taught with almost utter ineptness. I think that most of us will understand this from the following analogy; touch typing, in similar circumstances, would be taught under the name of English Literature. English composition, likewise, would concern itself with width of margins, neatness of erasures, and placement of commas without regard for meaning. One cannot teach a language from a position based mainly on applied technology. To reach an art’s history or
aesthetics from this viewpoint is laughable. Only in photography has it been tolerated. Yet ignorance cuts both ways and here the teacher must bleed.
Students of the top-ranking teachers of photography today are coming into notice and their influence is now felt in colleges, universities, and institutes where they conduct classes. This, alone, marks a major advance in the teaching of the art.
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