I think I've come to realize that the reason I hate it when people call me a photographer is that the label of photographer conjures up such an incredibly shitty connotation for me. But yet at the same time, I fully understand why professional photographers are forced to be such crapheads sometimes.
I'm either fortunate enough or foolish enough to have a steady job that pays the bills and then some. I don't have to be hawkish about protecting how and where the photos I take are used, because I'm in no way dependent on them to generate revenue for me to live on. I really detest seeing a photographer's watermark in photos online. To me, doing that does two things.
First off, putting a stamp in the corner of a photo says to the world that you've decided that this photo is good enough that its existence must be controlled, protected, and credited. I don't want to do that. If I take a photo, I want the people looking at it to decide if its good or not. Putting a little mark in the corner is just so desperate to me. It's the epitome of self-validation.
Second, whenever the photo is of someone performing, which I like to take photos of, it just feels like it's taking all of the credit. I can appreciate the work and talent that goes into taking great photos, but at the end of the day, if you took a photo of someone else doing what they do, it just doesn't feel right to me to put your name in the corner. What did you really do aside from show up and take pictures?
Because I don't depend on taking photos for revenue, I want to be better than this. If you want to call taking photos art, then I want to do it and I want people to enjoy it for the sake of what it is, not feel like I'm cramming it down their throats as something that should be worthy of their admiration.
But at the same time, if what I'm doing is something people think is good, I want to be known for it, which admittedly is hard when there's nothing tying my photos back to me once they're dispersed onto the interwebs. One band has used my photos for their own use, and I'm happy about it. I'm just happy that something I made was considered by the people I was taking the photo of to have accurately captured themselves to the point that they wanted it to represent them. But at the same time, no one knows I took the photo.
In a perfect world, I want to be a photographer people want to have take photos of them, but that they can't hire, because it was never about the money to begin with.
Does any of this make any sense?