Students of mine, take note: this article in Business Insider was written by the man who serves as General Counsel to the National Press Photographers' Association.
If you're out looking for Christmas gifts, there are two places in town where you can find prints and posters of mine. My 'Garage Doors of Hamilton' poster (pictured at right) is available at Mixed Media (James & Cannon) and at the James North Studio at 328 James St North. Also at the James North Studio is a collection of framed prints from my series, 'A Very Hamilton Christmas,' photos of the inimitable window displays created by merchants in our city.
Images from the 'Very Hamilton Christmas' series after the jump ...
There are a lot of things I love about Elizabeth, and the crazy stuff we did last night with three of our kids and a couple friends, inside the storied walls of Whitehern Historic House and Garden, made me remember more than a couple of those lovable things about her. Liz is putting on a Nutcracker-themed programme at Whitehern to coincide with the annual performance of The Nutcracker at Hamilton Place (guests can attend the programme and then walk down the block to attend the ballet). And she, of course, conceived the idea of re-creating the story of the ballet inside Whitehern, using our children, photographing it, and using the photos in her PowerPoint presentation for the programme. Who wouldn't think of that? And it was, perhaps, a bit ambitious. But it was a ton of fun and the images, while not my best work, are at least passable and often quite touching.
Images after the jump.
This post is mainly for my students ...
In his 1835 book Democracy in America, Alexis de Toqueville is exploring the differences between American and French society when he formulates the very useful theory of how civil society grants special status to those who are practitioners of the "secret sciences". Specifically, de Toqueville is arguing that the role of the priesthood in traditional French society had been replicated in American democratic society, except that for the early Americans it was the lawyers who practiced the rarified art, the secret science. The secret science and its practitioners are valued and protected because they are necessary to the daily functioning of society and because the product or service they produce is not replacable by the work of non-specialists, by those who have not trained and been admitted into this elite group. The other obvious example from our society would be physicians.
And, of course, photographers. Until about ten years ago.
Okay, maybe that's a bit hyperbolic, but bear with me. And anyway de Toqueville was not praising the practitioners of the secret sciences - certainly he recognises that both of the groups he was looking at encouraged people to fearfully doubt their own competence and to grant more than was in fact due to the abilities and stature of the elite. His point, though, was that the democratisation process does not dismantle all forms of inequality and that in particular there are ways in which the training and knowledge required for a profession makes the practitioners of that profession unequal to others, in that respect. Democratisation does not make everyone an equal practitoner of every art.
I suppose it's because of the "digital revolution" - that is, the easy availability of low-cost, high-quality digital cameras, and the trend toward understanding "Photoshop" to be a simple verb, rather than a complex and thorny piece of software - I suppose it's because of that revolution that professional photographers now have to deal with "clients" who approach the prospective work already thinking that what they are going to pay for the work, if anything, should reflect the fact that they themselves, or maybe their niece or nephew or brother-in-law, also has a digital camera and could probably do for free what they want to hire me to do, work for which I will charge.
More after the jump ...
