Thursday, June 21, 2007

The Snapper

The SNAPPER squats on one foot, squints into the noon day sun then raises a $14.95 disposable and takes the snap. The snap will show Junior and Grandma as two blurry silhouettes one with a fence post sprouting from head.

The Street Photographer does much the opposite. His camera not disposable but indispensable and probably worth thousands. His subjects not posed family members, but strangers going about their business. The SNAPPER will take twelve pictures that day - the Street Photographer one hundred twenty.

The SNAPPER will make twelve 4x6 prints from that day and they will become part of the SNAPPER family legacy, cherished and passed down to Junior then Junior-Junior then Junior-Junior-Junior and so on for generations to come.

The Street Photographer will delete one hundred eighteen pictures from that day and make one 16x20 print. The print will hang on his wall for a month then go in a stack somewhere then in a few years be shipped to China to be recycled into cat food labels.


2 comments:

jannx said...

Heh.. lmao..because it's true. The other thing is how the level of photography is going continually upward. Better shots thru technology!

Still the art isn't always part of the technology so there is a lot of snapshots. Still good shots are becoming disposable. Like Beatles tunes for diapers... it sucks doesn't it.

bONGO said...

Exactly. We got the cool tools, but so does everybody else. The bar keeps gettin raised higher and higher. I once teased a VERY professional photographer, that I'd seen Joe PointNshoot take as good a shots as some of his. He responded, "True. But can he do it EVERYtime, everyday, on schedule, on budget?"