Thanks to my colleague Stacie Turner for reminding me of this most eloquent (and excellent) thought:

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

Following up his great talk at the 2006 TED conference, on How Schools Kill Creativity (which I blogged about last year), Sir Ken Robinson returns this year to once again challenge our fundamental assumptions about education:

Original available on the TED website.

I came across an image today (linked via Digg by someone I follow on Twitter), that struck me as both timely and profound.

In a day and age where media bombards us from all sides with information, misinformation, disinformation, and constant attempts to influence our behaviour, it seems we have to be just as cautious about the “kid friendly” material.

It’s just a drawing with some captions in it … that highlights perfectly one of the main reasons why I so strongly dislike so many Disney movies:

“What Disney Movies Teach About Women”

We all like to be liked. It’s part of the human condition. It makes us feel good when we know somebody else likes us.

But being liked isn’t everything.

I attend a number of networking groups every week, where we get to know other businesspeople and the goods and services they have to offer. On the principle that “people do business with people they know, like and trust”, these groups encourage us to meet with each other one-to-one, outside of the formal group setting, over lunch or a cup of coffee, and get to know each other better. A good idea, if you ask me.

Recently, in meeting with some of these people over a cup of joe and an apple danish, it was made known to me that some people in the meetings are … disturbed … by the photographs that I bring and share, particularly by the fact that a number of them are of boys without shirts on.

Now that clearly doesn’t bother me, and I understand that, whatever their reasons, some people object to my photographs. Which is fine, to each his own, as the old saying goes.

Which brings me back to the idea of being liked.

Life should not be a popularity contest, and neither should art.

It’s been asserted that being an artist is one of the most profoundly selfish things a person can do. I’m inclined to agree, at least in this case. I make the photographs that I make, because they’re the kind of photographs that I want to look at, that I want to hang on my walls, and that I want to make more of. The only person that I’m aiming to please when I pick up the camera is myself.

That may seem, on it’s surface, to contravene one of the fundamental principles of running a business, which states that it’s the client that needs to be pleased, but I think you’ll find, on deeper inspection, that this is, in fact, not the case.

Every good businessperson knows that their product or service is not always the right one, at the right time, for every person they come in contact with. Trying to be everything to everyone is among the surest ways of putting yourself out of business. You can never please everyone, no matter how hard you try.

Every good businessperson also knows that in order to succeed, you have to have a “Unique Selling Proposition” - something that sets you apart from every other business that’s out there.

For the artist, that “Unique Selling Proposition” is built right in - it’s your selfish desire to make things that please you. Your target market is the other people that are out there who share your aesthetic enough to want to pay you for the enjoyment that your work brings into their lives.

My selfish desire to make photographs that I like, is what makes my photographs different from those of all the other photographers out there. The desire of some other photographers to make only those photographs that will “satisfy” the most people, and won’t offend anyone, is why their work is basically indistinguishable from the work of all the other photographers out there that hold the same attitude. By “selfishly” pleasing myself, I ensure that I have something unique to offer others.

A wise man once told me that if my art isn’t offending someone, I’m not doing it right. In fact, there are certain people I don’t ever want as fans, including the likes of Pat Robertson, James Dobson, people who want to ban Jock Sturges’ and Sally Mann’s books, or indeed anybody who wants to ban anybody’s books. I don’t really care what those people think about my work, because I have no respect for them whatsoever.

Which brings me, once again, back around to being liked.

When it comes right down to it, the most important person I need to be liked by is … me. What does it matter if anybody else likes my photographs, if I don’t like them? What does it matter if anybody else likes me, if I don’t like me?

In a recent blog post titled “Breaking Out of Being Broke”, Randy Gage reminded me of an anecdote about one of my favorite authors.

In 1964, Ayn Rand published a book titled The Virtue of Selfishness. When asked why she chose a word that would offend so many people, her reply was “For the reason that makes you afraid of it.”

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” - William Hutchinson Murray (oft mis-attributed to J. W. v. Goethe)

Check out the boldness of this boy (and his parents!). A boy, wearing a pink sundress to school, risking ridicule and hazing from his peers, because he feels it’s important to announce to the world that he likes pink? That’s bold.

I think that far too often we as businesspeople (and particularly those of us in the arts) underestimate the value of being so bold. We’ve been practicing a “play it safe” mentality for so long, that it’s become a habit.

We’ve forgotten that great things are not accomplished by people who play it safe.

The United States wasn’t founded by people who were playing it safe. The light bulb, the microchip, the automobile, the refrigerator, franchising, cell phones, the Sistine Chapel, the great dome of the cathedral in Florence, the Eiffel Tower — none of these things were created by people who were playing it safe. They all risked, they all went where noone had gone before, they all ventured where there was no road and left a trail for the rest to follow. For all of these things to come into being, boldness was required.

I know firsthand how difficult and frightening it is to be so bold. We pour a lot of our heart and soul into our work, and when we show it to the world, it feels like we’re exposing our deepest thoughts and fears on an easel for all to see, shouting all of our secret anxieties from the rooftops. It makes us vulnerable. It’s painful when people make vitriolic comments. It’s depressing when we get a lukewarm response. Even constructively critical pointers from people who sincerely want to help us improve our craft can be painful.

As a schoolchild I experienced the torture of being the teased one: the recipient of jeers like “Dumbo” because my ears stuck out, the bookworm in a classroom full of jocks, the one who was easy to beat up on because I was smaller and less physically strong than many of my peers, the one who would rather visit the library than than go to the keger.

To this day, memories of the sting from those emotional and physical bruises remain with me. Sometimes it makes it difficult for me to talk about what my photography really means to me. Sometimes it causes me to not make a photograph that I really want to make, that I believe would be beautiful and uplifting and maybe even inspiring, because some aspect of it might be unpopular and I don’t want to experience the discomfort of ridicule and persecution that I may have to face if I were to show it publicly.

I’ve allowed my fear of ridicule to undermine my willingness to be fully self-expressed in my business, to inhibit my boldness. I know I’m not the only one.

The simple truth is that without boldness, we as small business people simply cannot succeed. Take a look at the boldness you’ve already shown: You’ve decided to start a business. You’ve “hung out your shingle”. You’ve started a website or a blog about your business. You’ve posted on Twitter or FaceBook about your business. You’ve approached your friends and neighbors about becoming clients. You’ve approached total strangers about becoming clients. You’ve joined a Chamber of Commerce, or BNI, or other business networking organization.

If you’re anything like me, most (if not all) of these things required you to be bold, to step outside of your comfort zone, to do something that you were, at first, afraid to do.

In order to make our businesses as successful as they can be, we have to be willing to take that boldness even further, and make what we offer to our clients truly unique and full expressions of our true selves, as Michael Port and Napoleon Hill encourage us to do, in their respective books, Book Yourself Solid and Think and Grow Rich.

Particularly inspiring to me in this regard was a passage from the article about the boy and the pink sundress, where the mother writes:

I warned Sam carefully that if he wore it, he would probably get teased. He was undeterred, adamant about wearing the dress; clearly, avoiding teasing was a lower priority for Sam than simply being himself. I could see that standing up for his choices in a relatively safe and supportive environment was a useful life lesson. And it occurred to me that having confidence—being proud of who he is, even if he’s different from other kids—is the best defense against the inevitable ridicule.

What a powerful lesson! What if we could all learn to make the avoidance of teasing a lower priority than simply being ourselves? What if being proud of who we, even if we’re different from other kids, really is the best defense against the inevitable ridicule? How powerful would that make us as businesspeople, as creatives, as human beings?

“If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.” - Seth Godin, The Dip

Well, I’m gonna steal a page out of that little boy’s book, and wear my pink frilly dress to school. This scares the living daylights out of me, because in the following statements I risk alienating a lot of potential clients. Many of you won’t like what I have to say, but I have to say it, because it’s a fundamental part of who I am and how I do what I do. So … here goes nuthin’:

I got my first camera when I was six years old. The little Kodak Pocket-Instamatic with “normal” and “telephoto” settings was a Christmas gift from my mother, and I’ve been addicted to photo gadgetry ever since. It became a hobby/distraction/side-line thing for me while I pursued other interests in aviation and computer science.

In 1991, I first encountered the photographs of a man named Jock Sturges. I was fascinated by his imagery, not just because he had the boldness to publish books (over half a dozen now) filled with stunningly beautiful photographs of naked people including children and teenagers, but far more importantly because I, as a complete stranger to these people, could look at their photographs and feel like I knew them personally. He, and the people in his photographs, had the boldness to be who they really are, and to show it to the whole world.

I’ve since had the honor of studying with Jock, and am coming to understand how and why he makes these images, and I am all the more inspired for it. His dedication to craftsmanship, and his deep and undying respect for the people with whom he works is nothing short of magnificent to me.

My photographs want to be like his when they grow up.

Yup. That’s right. I want to photograph you nude. And your family. Yes, even your kids.

Now don’t take that the wrong way. Just because I want to photograph you with no clothes on, doesn’t mean I will, if you don’t want to. I want my photographs to be like Jock’s, and that means having the utmost respect for the people that I photograph. If you don’t want to be photographed nude, that’s perfectly fine. Most of my clients choose not to be nude for their photographs, and that’s OK with me. More important to me is that I’m photographing the real you — the beautiful and interesting person that you are inside … which is precisely why, even if you choose not to be photographed nude, I’ll still want you to have it as an option to consider (and I mean really, seriously consider, not just dismiss out of hand because the idea rejects the commonly advertized “reality”).

“So,” I hear you asking, “If photographing the real me is most important, why does he want me to be naked? I don’t have to be naked to be myself!”

Very true. You don’t have to be naked to be yourself, but it helps. Here’s why I think so:

“What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?” - Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

I want to photograph people nude because to me the human body, displayed with dignity and respect, is among the most magnificent and beautiful things in the universe. I hate the idea we’ve been indoctrinated with that says “clothes make the man”. It’s not our clothes that makes us pretty, or hip, or smart, or worthwhile human beings. It’s precisely the other way around. That, and the ubiquitous corporate logos that are stamped all over clothing these days do nothing but distract from the beauty and interestingness of the person wearing them, making photographs of people look more like photographs of fashion, or fashion rejects. When you make the clothes generic, or remove them entirely, you can allow the person’s character to emerge into the photograph.

I want to photograph people nude because I want them to feel beautiful, just the way they are.

I was fortunate to grow up in an environment where I was exposed to nudity in many different forms: As a kid, I was allowed to run around the house and yard naked whenever I wanted. I was never chastised or scolded if I saw my mother naked. She would “drag” me to art galleries filled with paintings and sculptures of naked Greek gods and Christian saints and Venetian women. When visiting my grandparents over summer vacation people of all shapes and sizes and ages would be naked at the beach.

Exposure, at a young age, to the wide variety shapes that humans come in taught me respect for, and acceptance of, my own body and those of others. I never had to “play doctor” to find out what girls looked like “down there”. I never felt uncomfortable or embarrassed about being seen naked (e.g. while changing in the locker room after gym class), nor, to my knowledge, did any of my friends (of either gender) from my grandparents’ village.

I want to offer people the opportunity to feel what it’s like to break free of the stifling body image stereotypes that pervade our media; to give them the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be photographed nude with respect and dignity.

I want them to know that there’s at least one person in the world that thinks they’re interesting and beautiful and worthwhile enough to invest the time and effort in, that is required to produce a finely crafted photograph of them.

I want to photograph families like Bernard Landon does, whose clients uninhibitedly celebrate their beauty and togetherness.

I want to work with people who think like this woman, and these women (featured in Glamour magazine!), who have discovered that they don’t have to look just like Barbie, or fit into a size-zero dress to be beautiful — that their outer beauty is a reflection caused by their inner beauty, and that many of the things which our culture calls their “flaws” are the things that make them individually and uniquely beautiful. (Which raises an interesting question: Can you feel good enough about yourself to want to be photographed nude? If not, why not? Think about it!)

I want to photograph people nude because I feel that there are few things that reproduce as beautifully on film as human skin.

And I want to photograph people nude just because I want to.

How’s that for bold?

“If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

A few days ago, I read the story of Billy Miller, an American soldier who, while deployed in Afghanistan, was arrested on charges of possessing child pornography for having pictures of his niece in a one-piece swimsuit!!!

I am outraged. I am incensed. I am furious.

I despise pornography, in all it’s forms, and especially child porn. I think it’s disgusting, debasing, and disrespectful. If consenting adults want to participate in the making of such filth, that’s fine by me, but I want no part of it. I won’t make it, and I won’t watch it.

This hysteria and paranoia over pictures of kids, however, has gone too effing far!!! Pull your heads out, people! Nudity is not the same thing as pornography!!!!! The demonization of nudity is both irrational and counterproductive. Such an attitude teaches our young people to feel fear and embarrassment about their bodies, at a time in their lives when they desperately need to learn to respect themselves. It’s stupid.

Think about this for a minute:

How do we judge other cultures? How do we decide how “advanced” they are or were? How do we know what we know about how they lived and what their societies were like? Take the Greeks and the Romans as examples. How do we know what we know about them, their culture, their way of life? What did they leave behind for us to know them by?

Art. The artifacts created by their artists, artisans and craftsmen. Paintings, mosaics, carvings, statues, poems, plays, literature, music.

What does it say about our culture, when the creation of such things is forcibly stifled? Aren’t we supposed to be a society that values freedom?

Over the last two weeks, several people I know have experienced the trauma of having their Flickr or FaceBook accounts terminated, or individual images removed, because their photographs included something that is perfectly acceptable in their local culture: naked people, some of whom are children.

In defense of Flickr and FaceBook, their terms of service include prohibitions and controls on images depicting nudity. They do this partly because they want to attract as many people as possible to their services, so they want to be sensitive about offending people. Thus, they put policies in place about keeping some things out of the open-to-the-public areas, but allowing them in private, invite-only areas. I’m perfectly fine with that. As a libertarian, I respect their right to run their business the way they want to. Those servers are theirs, that software was created by them, and they have the right to control how and to whom they give access to it.

For more examples of this kind of prosecutorial zeal, involving many different facets of everyday life, see Harvey Silverglate’s book Three Felonies a Day.

Images involving naked children, however, are a different story. In a society where parents can be imprisoned or have their children forcibly removed from them simply because the person at the 1-hour photo lab doesn’t like that they have snapshots of the toddler in the tub (as in the case of Lisa and A.J. Demaree), or running through the garden sprinkler in their undies, or for an art class assignment (as in the case of Toni Marie Angeli), it’s no longer an issue of what the service providers want. It’s an issue of over-zealous prosecutors using laws with rubber-band meanings as a cudgel to punish people for behaving, not in ways that are legitimately harmful to others, but merely in ways that they don’t approve of.

The service providers, in an effort to avoid being accused of harboring “kiddie porn”, delete anything that might even remotely resemble such filth, and end up banning totally innocent and benign images, “just in case”. Understandably, they don’t want to face having to defend themselves in court. Even if the images are found to be legal, the cost in time and money to defend them in court is so astronomically high, that they’d go bankrupt.

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or politics, but it is not the path to knowledge.” - Carl Sagan

This is how a small but vocal minority abuse the authority of government to force their prudish views about nudity on everybody, including those in their own country who don’t share those views, and even people in foreign lands where their laws have no jurisdiction.

The internet is a world-wide phenomenon. People from all different lands and cultures can use it to communicate with each other.

People from Europe find it difficult to understand why Americans seem to think that the female breast is something obscene. People from southeast Asia and South America and Africa wonder why they have to flag photographs of their kids frolicking in the river as “Not Safe For Work”.

What does it say about our society, when we allow our judicial system to be used as a threat to prevent people from freely sharing their culture with the world; when we allow a small minority of zealots to wield the police and the courts as weapons against others who would say something they don’t like?

How many photographers, painters, poets, songwriters, playwrights, sculptors, authors and musicians never expressed what was truly in their hearts, because they were afraid of going to jail for it? How many beautiful, inspiring, uplifting, informative, challenging ideas were never made into photographs, sculptures, paintings, books, poems and songs, because the artists didn’t have the financial wherewithal to defend themselves against the tax-funded court system?

Art is supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to make us uncomfortable. It’s supposed to challenge our ideas. It’s supposed to make us think. It’s supposed to hold a mirror up to our culture and show us the silly, nonsensical things we do by sheer force of habit.

Do we really want to limit the pool of ideas in art to those that will not offend anyone, just because some people are narrow-minded and squeamish?

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson

Ten generations from now, when people look back on us the way we look back on ancient Rome and make judgements about the morality and ethics of our society, what conclusions must they draw from the art we’ve left behind? Will they be able to see that we were a people who actually believed in and lived by the tenets of freedom and liberty set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, or will they only see the hypocrisy that our modern courts’ interpretations of those ideas have become?

It’s time to end the hysteria, and do what the founders of our nation did: Use our rational minds.

I saw this posted on Twitter, and thought to myself “That can’t be right”. Then a quick Google search confirmed it from multiple sources. I’m about to lose one of my biggest competitors. Kiddie Kandids is no more. It seems that even the biggest of photography chains can underprice itself out of existence.

Truthfully, what I do and what Kiddie Kandids (and so many of the other chain-store photography studios) do is very, very different. Their target market is very different from mine. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the “viewing public” will see us as competitors, however indirect, because both they and I specialize in making portraits of children.

What can you, as a consumer, take away from the demise of this business? One simple rule: Beware the lowest price.

Many, if not most, chain-store photo studios do not set their prices based on a job-costing model. They aim to offer the lowest price to the customer, and cover their overhead operating expenses with volume, leading to a get-them-in-and-get-them-out cookie-cutter approach. Those affiliated with department stores will often go even further, using a loss-leader model where they’ll charge you less than it costs them to make the pictures, to get you into the store, where you’ll buy things from other departments - things that are highly profitable for them. I remember reading about a study done some years ago (sorry, I can’t find the reference to it offhand - if you have a link, or a counterexample, please email me) that claimed that customers who bought the least expensive portrait package from Sears Portrait Studio, ended up leaving the store with something like $400- worth of goods from other departments.

Please remember, when you’re shopping around for a portrait photographer, that you really do get what you pay for.

Who would you rather have making photographs of your kids:

The guy (or gal) making minimum wage at the department store, whose primary purpose is to get you back out on the sales floor as quickly as possible, or the dedicated artist whose sole purpose for being in business is to focus their time and energy exclusively on you for the duration of your stay with them?

The one plops your kids down on the “X”, says “say cheese”, and lets you choose from several notebook-size or smaller pictures that look like every other portrait of every other person you’ve ever seen, or the one who goes out of his (or her) way to photograph the unique individual that each of your kids is, and produces a beautifully crafted photograph worthy of a place of honor over the mantlepiece or the sofa, that you’ll want to hand down to future generations of your family?

One will cost you significantly more money than the other, and there is a time and a place for both (and everything in between). As a wise consumer, it is up to you to decide where on that trade-off continuum you want to buy, and that requires knowing what you’re getting for your money, not just in pieces of paper with pictures on them, but also in the level of dedication to craftsmanship and service that your photographer invests in their making.

As the new school year gets into full swing, the thoughts of many of my friends, neighbors and clients shift out of summer mode, and into thoughts about how to get the kids to school, make sure their homework gets done, balancing after-school activities, playtime, TV, videogames, and all the other things that modern parents have to deal with.

President Obama recently proposed some changes he would make to the government’s school program.

Sara Bennett, a mother, professional educator, and author of The Case Against Homework presents her thoughts on the matter.

Some exerpts:

For their physical well being and their mental health, students need fewer worksheets, less time sitting at a desk, and more time actively solving problems and exploring.

What are the costs of all of this extra time? …
When will teachers find the time for the many learning opportunities (continuing education hours) that we expect them to achieve? …
How shall families carve out family time with their children with less and less flexibility? If we value the family, shouldn’t we protect family time?

I care about learning: I have three young sons in school and I am an educator. It is clear to me that learning does not only happen at school. Some of the most salient learning experiences come through exploration and adventure.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Sometimes, I come across something that’s just beautiful and inspiring, and I have to share:

http://www.connectionmovie.com/