The flip-side of photo clubs

From SarahWiki

This essay is a little different to the others here. I'm not going to talk about a new technique or an interesting piece of equipment. Rather, I'm going to talk about a sociological phenomenon -- the photo club -- that really doesn't seem to work for me.

At the time of writing (early summer, 2007), I don't really consider myself to be a professional or even a semi-professional photographer. To-date, I've never sold a print, I've not released stock images, I've never taken a commission and I certainly haven't 'done a wedding'. I'd say that makes me an amateur. I'm OK with that. At some point, this will probably change -- selling the occasional print seems like a natural progression, but it's not something I want to do immediately. Indeed, for legal reasons concerned with my visa status, I don't think I can actually legally do so currently so it's a moot point.

I like talking about photography. I'm interested in all aspects of photography -- I am interested in the science behind it, I love fiddling with (and chatting about) the gear, and most of all I love the less tangible art aspect of it. I'm generally quite sociable, I think, so it seems pretty sensible that I should think about joining a camera club, or hanging out online with likeminded people. A few months ago, I started doing all of this. I joined a local camera club, and started posting regularly to various groups on Flickr, and to the Luminous Landscape board.

All I can say is that this has proven to be a really bad experience. I'd say that 95% of people have been really nice toward me, but from the remaining 5% I have been on the receiving end of a level of vitriol that quite honestly took me completely by surprise. I'm not really quite sure what I've done to deserve it -- I'm pretty certain that my experience isn't typical, but my experience has been bad enough that I really don't feel like treading that particular path again. In the camera club, people were initially friendly, but rapidly became less so. I'm not sure what I did -- I'd typically turn up early to help set up the room, people seemed chatty and friendly and so on, but there was a peculiar reluctance to let me enter any photographs into the competitions. It was a very competition/salon oriented club, so not getting to show work basically made me feel rather left out. Anyway, I'd turn up with prints, then I'd get some kind of excuse like, 'Oh, sorry, you've only been in the club x weeks, we don't normally let you enter yet,' or, 'We're not running that section tonight, sorry,' when they actually were. In several months of turning up most Tuesdays, I only managed to submit three prints. One of these prints won the club competition outright, and went on to get a second in the N4C monthly 'club-of-clubs' competition. Another came third, then did extremely well in the N4C annual competition. On my last attempt to submit a print, Sliced actually, they wouldn't let me enter it, and later the same evening one of the older committee members suggested that I might prefer to join one of the other clubs in the Bay area. Needless to say, I was pretty upset by this.

Then came Flickr. I uploaded most of my more recent work, and joined a few groups, mostly related to black & white photography and medium- and large-format. I found a group specialising in digital B&W, uploaded a couple of images to its gallery, and posted on the message board to say hi. The moderator deleted my photos and commented on my post to say that my photos had been removed because they weren't digital. This was somewhat surprising, because I don't remember having shot film since about 1993, but that's by the by. I pointed out the error politely and re-uploaded my images. In response, my images were deleted again, my post was deleted, and I was banned from the group. Not very friendly, really. In other groups, I received varying levels of nastiness. Basically if I ever mentioned using high-end gear, someone or other would become abusive. Several times, it got bad enough that I left the group in question. I decided to leave it a while, then try again. Today I made a comment on a discussion about some technical aspect of interpolating image data from Bayer matrix sensors, and was immediately attacked. That was it, as far as I was concerned. I deleted my flickr account, and won't be going back.

My experience on the Luminous Landscape boards was mixed. Initially, people were OK, but when I posted about my experiments with Synthetic HDR, I was attacked really quite badly, to the extent of borderline sexual harassment. Bye bye Luminous Landscape. I was originally intending to start contributing articles to that site -- I'd had some discussions about submitting a review of the Megavision some time ago, but actually I think not. I'll stay well away from that one, I think.

I'm not sure I want to get into theorising about the reasons for this. My suspicion is that I probably triggered bad reactions in people because they initially pigeonholed me as someone well down the pecking order, then they had a cow when they later realised that their ideas about me were wrong. I was originally tempted to suspect, since the attackers were always men, that it could be that they didn't like someone female (albeit quite inadvertently) putting them in their place. I don't think that fits, though, because in the case of the photo club, the people who blocked me from submitting prints were women, and in the case of Flickr, I made a point of using a gender-neutral ID that couldn't easily be traced back to me. So I really don't think it can be that.

I wavered for a while, wondering if the whole idea of getting serious about fine art photography might just have been a bad idea that was just going to open me up to a world of pain. I thought about giving up. But then, I remembered, and was actually vociferously reminded when I discussed this with friends, that the vast majority of responses have been positive, and that I shouldn't allow a few assholes to ruin something that I love. (If you're reading this, you know who you are, and I hope you feel really big about the amount of hurt that you've caused me, and no doubt many others.)

So, I'm definitely not going to be doing photo clubs or any online equivalent thereof in the future. It just isn't worth the pain. I know that there will be people reading this who do want to be able to see my photos -- don't worry, I'll still make them available, but don't expect to see them in that kind of venue again any time soon. Or, most likely, ever.