Inspiration, Joy, or Simulated Fun

Increasingly frequently, as I scroll through Instagram reels when I’m meant to be working, two young white American men pop up. I don’t know their names, or the name of the page that posts them. I assume they’re photographers, but I don’t know this. Every short snippet is one of the two men making some glib, ragebait comment about cameras or photography, and the other doubling down on it, while both smirk like idiots. It’s filmed in the familiar ‘podcast’ style, both holding unnecessary microphones, reclining against a carefully curated backdrop as they try desperately not to look into the camera.

I hate them.

And I hate that I hate them, becuase this is exactly what they want. Even writing this is letting them win. Their content is so transparently designed to enrage and infuriate that it’s not even worth saying. So I don’t engage with it, I barely watch it before scrolling past. But Instagram has decided that no, actually, I do want to see them. So it keeps showing me more of these reels.

I could be describing any number of probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of Instagram accounts here. Photography social media is the pits. It is overwhelmingly dominated by these earnest, smug brotographers who think that the camera brand that they own should dictate their personality and that everyone else is a shit photographer except maybe the one or two that they like and yes Ansel Adams is overrated. I find no inspiration on social media. Indeed I actually find it quite off-putting: if calling myself a photographer means associating myself with these dolts, then no thank you.

A big part of what I find so cringeworthy about this corner of the internet is the relentless focus on ‘gear’. Camera companies hand out free cameras to photographers to talk about them on social media. Wannabe influencers are so desperate for the validation of being given freebies that they relentlessly shill for these companies for free anyway, in the hope of being thrown some scraps. All of it is just a relentless stream of pointless wasteful consumerism that achieves nothing for anyone except the shareholders at the big camera companies. They need to sell you on the idea that all you need to do is spend some money in order to feel the inspiration that you’ve been lacking to take that one great shot (because they’re never going to tell you that actually maybe you’re just not that good and it doesn’t matter what lens or camera you use to take a picture of someone sitting at a cafe because you’re not Koudelka and nobody cares).

All of this is to say that I found the inspiration I was looking for by spending money on something I didn’t need. I own perhaps six or seven 35mm film cameras, all of which I love in their own way, and none of which see enough use. But when I saw a good deal on a Nikon F4 on eBay, something stuck in my head, and I couldn’t get it out. So I bought it. It represents nothing that I thought I liked about film cameras - I love the sleek simplicity of things like the OM series from Olympus. I didn’t think I wanted a massive heavy lump with an almost illegible bleeding LCD screen and a databack that I won’t use, and with autofocus that is so noisy you’ll scare off animals half a kilometre away.

It helps that I first used the camera properly while travelling around Ireland with my partner. I treated it like a big cumbersome point and shoot, and I had a whale of a time. Which is to say that, really, the camera had nothing to do with it. It never really does. What I was enjoying was driving around new places, seeing interesting things and sharing the experience with my partner. Sometimes I took pictures. The camera that I took those pictures with didn’t get in the way of the rest of the experience, and so I ‘enjoyed’ using it, and attach positive associations to it.

The emotional value that we attach to photographs is often great - whether it’s ‘great’ photography, or just snapshots of our lives that hold personal value. The camera is a conduit that we take the pictures through, and so the temptation to transfer emotional value to the camera is great. But it also feels stupid. I would not have had any less of a great time had I forgotten to pack a camera altogether and had only taken pictures on my phone. But I attach no such emotional value to my phone, and I would guess that most of the folks on TikTok foaming at the mouth over the latest Sony a-whatever don’t either. We pick and choose the things that we think make us feel good, romaticising our relationships with the tools we use for photography to fill the hollow void that capitalism scrapes out of us so it has something to sell to us.

It’s all so stupid.

As a post-script: the F4 has a dodgy meter, and the shutter doesn’t seem to work properly at high shutter speeds. It’s probably not financially sensible to try to repair it. But I will. Because it came with me on a nice holiday and now I have nice memories of it and don’t want to get rid of it just yet.