If you wanted to raise hell on a photography forum just pop that question in there and see what happens. And the reason this question will make a forum explode is because it touches something very deep.
I mean, you can draw as much as you want and you would not call yourself a painter, right? Or you can build a table or a bed here and there, and you would still not be a carpenter. But somehow there seem to be a different approach on photography. A lot of people who hold a camera for more than a few weeks define themselves as photographers (or amateur photographers).
Some resort to income as the core definition of ‘professional photographer’ – if you make money from your photography, you are by definition a ‘professional photographer’. While I agree that profession needs to be supported by income, this definition does not define who is ‘A Photographer‘.
Ken Van Sickle has a very interesting take on this:
What a great photographer does is, they are consistently able to make something in a style that’s personal to themselves. My pictures don’t depend on extreme sharpness. They depend on the composition and on the subject and on the way I see it
And Ken Van Sickle does not cut technology any slack, au contraire:
Technology doesn’t change the way photography is. It just — it makes it available to more people, which means there’s going to be much, much more really terrible pictures taken or pictures that are totally dependent on subject, which is all, all right.
What are your thoughts? Who is A Photographer in this photography immersed world?
[What makes a photographer when everyone is taking pictures via reddit]
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