I can remember the fall season of every school year at Clarksville Elementary like it was yesterday. Standing in the gross vomit colored cafeteria, wearing some ridiculously heinous floral outfit my mother picked out for me that I had fought her on the morning of, and subsequently missing my bus.
[Photo by Elsa Dorfman - Self portrait]
A stay-at-home mom would come in to collect the checks and groom everyones hair with a plastic disposable comb, getting just the right kind of static electric look for that yearly portrait of awkward beginnings.
The photographer would then call your last name and you were ushered onto the stage. While your classmates watched, you would fake a smile at the unfunny Lifetouch photographer who treated you like a pedophiliac would treat their prey. After the temporary blindness wore off, you were sent back to class and had to wait a whole more year to do it all again.
Years later, I worked as one of these photographers (not the pedophiliac kind). Our boss was an alright guy, tho he made it a point to remind the photographers of his unmatched accomplishments in the world of senior portraits ...
In the communal work room, he proudly displayed his finest work titled "Serenity" which was just a photo of ducks swimming. Regardless, he was a swell dude who treated the photogs with respect, knowing we were just looking to get some off hours use of the studio space.
In my little doge neon I would drive hours upon hours to schools and sports games with a backdrop pole cutting into my face every time I made a left hand turn. While making LESS than minimum wage, you also had to front your own gear (never do this) to be "published" in some random school yearbook.
So it was no secret - everyone hated being there
But we all had our reasons for sticking around
I for one learned how to take a mean portrait, and made a solid friend out of the deal. Also, it gave me the opportunity to shoot sports for my portfolio and take prom photos in the lobby of a HUD housing site. Neat!
I can't imagine not having the fond memories of portrait lighting diagrams, posing, figuring out how to shoot sports at 3fps (my gear really sucked), retouching, photo orders, and learning the virtue of patients.
Sadie, over at Jezebel.com writes:
According to a heartbreaking and alarming piece in The NY Times "Styles" section, the itinerant school photographer is a dying breed. Quoth the Gray Lady,
"About 5 to 10 years ago, class photos and individual student portraits were reflexive purchases for parents. Those 4-by-6 and 8-by-10 prints were the visual equivalents of the notches made on door frames to show how much Junior had grown since last year. Now, more parents are snapping their own digital pictures and declining the products of the pros. It's a situation akin to the disappearance of the formal engagement and wedding portraits, courtesy of Bachrach, that were once a staple of newspaper society pages. And, I'd argue, the world will be the poorer for it. Because the you your parents snap - relaxed, happy, candid - is a very different one from that immortalized in gaudy 8 x 10."
Where would us photographers be had we not gone through the grueling process of working (and leaving) that damn photo studio years ago? I can only hope future photographers beginning from the ground up have this left as an option to get a foot in the door and to discover their own "Serenity".
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