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Matinee: 'The Photography Center'
17 December 2022
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 479th in our series of Saturday matinees today: The Photography Center.
In this 3:14 video Luanne Ferris gives us a tour of the Photography Center in Troy, N.Y.
Ferris, the associate director of the Center, is a retired photojournalist who worked for The Record in Troy and the Albany Times-Union.
The Center has an extensive collection of historical photographs (some going back to the Civil War) but, she points out, it also has an extensive collection of the gear from cameras to darkroom equipment that illustrate the history of the medium.
"This is really a house for the history of photography," she says.
And what that we come to the end of the one-minute tour. Ferris isn't ready to let us go, though. She continues with some thoughts on photojournalism. Which is why we bookmarked this video a month ago.
With the spread of digital cameras into phones that everyone carries, "you are all, in a sense, photojournalists now."
Some of those amateur captures have won even the Pulitzer because of what they captured, she notes. Even if the image quality wasn't all it could have been.
Which sounds awesome, as we say these days, but, she is quick to point out, there is a responsibility that goes along with it:
- First, "not to use a piece of crap" to take the images
- Second, thinking about what you do with those images after you take them.
The first is clear enough. But she has to explain the second.
Photojournalists used to be disdained as cockroaches, she says, but now everyone is going around intruding on everybody else's life. So there are decisions to be made about all this content.
And in this environment where everyone is a photojournalist, they are made without the benefit of an editor. Dumping content to social media only promotes the sensational at the expense of the real story, leaving the crowd to decide what story gets told.
"Make your images the best you can and document," she sums it up, "but tell the story and make sure your story is correct."
Words of wisdom.