Monday, June 8, 2009

Young Pro Photographer Nick Loomis Poses Questions About His Photography Career On The New York Times Photoblog Lens


Should you become a documentary film maker instead of a still photographer?

Photo © John Brown All Rights Reserved

In case you missed it, young pro photographer Nicholas Loomis blogged for Lens, the photojournalism blog of The New York Times on June 5th, 2009.

He wrote an essay, Finding Different Paths that's a good read for anyone interested in photojournalism as a career.

START

Name: Nick Loomis
Sex: Male
Age: 26
Occupation: Photographer

Or at least I was until August, when I quit my first photojournalism job at a newspaper in Illinois before I came to New York. I gave up the title and now I don’t really know what I am or what I’ll become, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never be a “photographer” again. I’ll probably have some vague euphemism like “multimedia journalist” or “interactive correspondent” stamped on my business cards, that is, if I’m lucky enough to have business cards.

Will it be enough to be a good photographer anymore? Is it more important to become what online advocates call “versatile” and what detractors call “a mile wide and an inch deep”, to get a job?

What happened to the path I was going to follow?

I used to want to be James Nachtwey or Eugene Richards, photographers who made names for themselves by documenting the human condition across the world. But print publications are shrinking in size and there are fewer of them.

That leaves the new path blazed by all-in-one multimedia journalists (a path that’s visible because of the deeper footprints they’ve left from carrying so much extra equipment). I abandoned the old path and chose this one. Now I think I want to be Michael Kamber or Travis Fox.

Please continue reading here

Andy Levin was a contributing photographer at Life Magazine and is the founder and editorial director of 100 Eyes, an online photography magazine.

He offered Loomis the following photographic nugget:

"The trick is to know yourself, and not try and “be” anyone else….if you don’t know who you are then how can you possibly create work that really means anything to anyone else? All of the photographers that you mention operate out of a personal space, if they admit so or not, that goes back to their own identities. If you look at the photographers who jump out they never define themselves by what someone else has already done or is doing: Koudelka, Robert Frank, William Klein, Richard Avedon, Gilles Peress, these people are creating their own space in a very unique way. What do you understand better than everyone else? If you can answer that then you are on your way…"

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