For 2025 I’ve retired the #thursdaythoughts theme. While searching for a new one to replace it. the current theme is temporarily going to be (and may end up as) Anything Can Happen Day. This is what Thursdays were called on TV’s Mickey Mouse Club, which is where I stole the idea!
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”—– Ralph Waldo Emerson“The reason why we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” —Steven Furtick:
Nerd Score conducted a survey of more than 2,500 Americans and found that 59% of the people they asked regularly use photo editors before posting images online. They further found that “The number one reason for editing photos was insecurity.”
According to Web MD, insecurity is a feeling of inadequacy (not being good enough) and uncertainty. It produces anxiety about your goals, relationships, and ability to handle certain situations.
To put these finding in perspective, I tried to discover what percentage of the population were either an amateur or professional photographer and that proved challenging with some surveys counting everyone who owned a smartphone* as a “photographer.” If you apply common sense, horse sense or any other kind of sense, I expect the percentage of those surveyed, that any of us would consider to be a photographer would be quite small. I think this throws their “insecurity” statement out the window, at least as far as photographers are concerned. That doesn’t mean there aren’t times in our lives when we might be challenged to capture something we may be less than comfortable doing, for instance…
Photographing Outside Your Comfort Zone
When I was an student at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, one of my professors—the legendary Jack Wilgus—gave us an assignment to photograph “people we know and people we didn’t know.” At that time I wasn’t a people photographer—that was to come much later—but while I enjoyed the first part of the assignment, even making a nice portrait of my 90-year old neighbors, the thought of photographing strangers terrified me.
I gave it a try during a time when I was working in Washington DC by photographing people who were interacting with one another in Lafayette Square, a park that’s across the street from the White House. On June 22, 2020, protestors attempted to tear down the statue of Andrew Jackson that sits at the center of the square and following that incident, Lafayette Square was closed to the public, so I couldn’t do that today.
An interesting (or not) side note about was that the series of images I photographed of the people I knew was made using a 6×6 square, medium format Mamiya C-33 and 80mm f/2.8 Sekor lens. On the other hand, I photographed all of the people I didn’t know using a Minolta SR-1 35mm SLR and 135mm Rokkor f/3.5 lens. All of the images in both series were shot on Kodak Tri-X black and white film. I can readily find any of those images from that original series of photographs and if I do, I can post them here if anyone is interested.
I recently made the above image, shot on film, in Parker, Colorado’s O’Brien Park as an homage to one of those Lafayette Square photographs but this one has a different and, to me, a sadder mood. The image is slightly cropped but is otherwise as it came off The Darkroom‘s scanner. No editing. I didn’t get any closer with my Canon AE-1 and 50mm lens because I didn’t want to impose my presence on the people being pictured. This is probably the main reason I’m not a street photographer but I greatly admire practitioners of that art form.
My video Why Film, Why Now is available on my YouTube channel, Joe Farace’s Videos, featuring a look at a my reasons and philosophy about why I’m a film photographer.
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