After reading a recent post titled “Wear Good Shoes: Advice to young photographers” on Magnum’s blog, I came away feeling more pissed off than helped. The usual suggestions were spewed left and right: “follow your heart, ignore the trends.” “Read a lot.” “Don’t read a lot.” “Study other photographers work.” “Don’t look at other photographer’s work.” “Photograph who you are.” “Forget about being a photographer.” “Don’t go to school!” “Go to school!” This type of filler, which is about as masturbatory as I’ve ever seen Magnum get, belongs in the pages of a glorified catalog like Shutterbug. In fact, before I go on check out this article by Malcolm Gladwell titled “A gift or hard graft?” (via the wonderful Mrs.Dean).

While I understand that the “advice” question, when posed to a large group of artists or not, is about as helpful as the “equipment” question, I couldn’t help but think that every photographer on the list was responding without context.

I hope by now most of us realize that; A) the global financial situation is going to get much worse before it gets any better and; B) this basically means worse times for emerging artists who already had it pretty bad to begin with. Galleries are closing, shows are being cancelled, and collectors are holding back (not really a change for emerging photographers). All in all, the times suck! But that is my point: Where is the acknowledgment that, as Gladwell points out in his article, “talent [or career success] is actually a complicated combination of ability, opportunity and utterly arbitrary advantage.” How do these factors come into play when giving advice to photographers? Why are they not weighted against our current situation? I would be more interested in hearing what these photographers think an emerging artist should do in our current global climate (without advising us to enter competitions; sorry, an $80 entry fee is not appealing). To take it even further, none of them even touch on what position gender plays (surprise, surprise) in entering the industry (commercial, fine art, documentary, etc). With such a large amount of women graduating from art schools every year, the issue is as much of a factor for female artists today as it always has been.

While all of this, my argument that is, may seem a bit obvious or even bitter, I’m simply pointing out that advice is not universal and the worst possible guidance is always devoid of a context. I wish I could give you more than that, but like you, I’m still searching for reason myself.

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