It?s all about me

It’s all about me

Anyone who writes articles or blogs will realise but it’s all about them. Of course, it’s the same with pictures – every picture we take reflects our own likes and dislikes, our prejudices and preferences.
I keep going back to the late Roger Hicks’ pieces in Amateur Photographer. They reflect his experience as a writer, as a photographer, and as a human being. In that sense, they’re all about him: but he’s always rather in the background. Every one of them is a careful analysis of a single picture and he’s incredibly wide-ranging in the material he draws on.

Often, there’s something about the technical side of the picture, the depth of field or the shutter speed, and how this was essential to the overall effect that the picture creates. Always, the piece is literate and humane: Hicks treats every human being with the same respect, and uses language in the way that would draw the approval of any English teacher. He gives details of the historical context of the picture, of what it might have meant that the time that it was taken and what it means now. He reflects on why the photograph might have been taken and the resources needed to produce it.

There is usually something about the composition of the image, and there’s often a comment about how it fits into the work that the photographer was produced over a period of time. In the article in front of me now, he writes ‘it is recursive: the photographer takes the pictures, and the pictures influence the photographer.’

You can produce a checklist of these things that Roger Hicks seemed to put into every article with the appearance of effortless grace, but writing something in the same way, covering all of these points is far, far harder. The many writers who have filled the last page of Amateur Photographer since Roger Hicks died have generally failed abysmally. One or two of them have come close to the high standard that the set. But many of them seemed to have got lost in a well of their own experience.

Hicks had been a professional write for most of his adult life, and an AP columnist for a good while before the start of the Final Analysis column that excites my admiration so much. His writing is never less than competent, and he and his wife, Frances Schultz, take the credit for numerous photographic books where they were contracted to provide text as part of a publisher’s series of themed volumes. His AP columns were the ultimate product of many years’ accumulation of knowledge and understanding, and they often achieve wisdom, I believe.

The nature of a blog is that it starts from the writer’s experience: and I have no other way to see the world but from where I stand and threw my eyes. That doesn’t mean that I have to become fixated on my own experience or feelings, unless they of the subject of the blog. I hope that by setting out what I see as the extreme professionalism of Roger Hicks’ writing I shall remind myself of what I need to do, and possibly suggest a better way for the terminally self-involved (if they ever read other people’s blogs).