You have to decide. If you’re indecisive, you may get into trouble.
For instance: you could be a fashion photographer, or you could be a sports photographer. Everybody gets that. Fashion photographers shoot fashion and sports photographers shoot sport. Fashion photo- graphers also shoot sports fashions, but fashionable sports are almost only shot by sports photographers.
There are documentary photographers, too.They shoot in documentary style, and often, but not always, something that is like life itself. Actually, it could be as arranged as anything too – and the beholder seldom knows – but it is documentary, and anything documentary is almost completely true. That’s why it’s so good.
Mikael Jansson is a fashion photographer. How true is that?!
For instance, you wonder if he himself knows how true it is. Fashion-fiction, is there such a thing? Does documentary fashion photography exist?
It’s probably street fashion. Street Mood.
Of course, by-the-by, one sometimes wonders if Micke Jansson takes holiday snaps, and if he and his wife and kids have a holiday album. Why shouldn’t they?
You know, the kind in which one adds captions to the prints: ”Check out mum’s tan – and look at that portion of moussaka. Yum!!”
Who’d want to be a full-time holiday photographer?
There are wedding photographers too, but there aren’t that many of them and they aren’t spoken about much. Sometimes pe- ople make films about them.They’re often quite saddening.
Then of course there’s Lennart Nilsson, who can send a camera into your cerebellum and prove that you can only stay upright if your cerebrum communicates with your parabellum.There are spermatozoa that are so small and fast that not even Messi could keep up with them, according to Nilsson.
What other kinds are there? Help me out, here.
X-Ray photographers, of course.They photograph 400 metastases in someone’s lung, but someone else gets to walk into room 6 to deliver the news that the concer- ned party has four weeks left to live.
Underwater photographers!You know, like National Geographic onTV, a guy in a cage 60 feet under water, taking pictures of white sharks attacking.
War photographers. Hospital photograph- ers. Every autopsy must be documented.
Paparazzis. Mamarazzis.
There are also photographers of stills. I’m thinking about calling Mikael Jansson
up. Does he think he’s a fashion photographer? What else does the think he is?
”Hi, Mike, it’s Johan Croneman.” ”Hi, Johan, how’s it going?” ”Fine, thanks, I’ve just start writing stills. In future, I shall only be writing in colour.” ”Really? Wow, that’s exciting,” says Mike. ”Yeah, I got sick of documentary writing, not to mention underwater scribbling, it’s so limiting.” ”Any other ideas?” Asks Mike. ”Yeah, funeral reporting is getting shit-hot. It’s in a comple- tely different focus. Imagine that in colour!”
”I see,” says Mikael Jansson.
Mikael Jansson has photographed pretty much every celeb in the world. Sometimes he’s been tremendously well paid to do so. Other times, he just did it for fun. Does that make him a celebrity photographer?
Does he call James Newell Osterberg to say ”Hi, it’s Mike Jansson, I’ve got a nicey- cutesy little dress here in my studio; do you feel like dropping by to play?”
”Sure,” says James Newell Osterberg, and drops in.
I’d actually never show up on a shoot that would be noticed worldwide, and maybe even a bit beyond, and what’s more, in a dress.
Basically, only Iggy Pop would.
But I wish I dared to. And that Mikael Jansson wanted to shoot me in one of Mum’s 1950s dresses. A pale, flabby, somewhat out-of-shape 56-year-old; you can see almost every little wrinkle. I’d also like to be holding a football. And wear clogs. In the background, you’d see Mick Jagger drop- ping off his football pools at the local bookie.
And then, you know, you’ve got six months, three weeks, four days, eight hours, four minutes and 26 seconds to decide: is this a sports image, a fashion image, a bloody piece of art or just a lucky shot with a bit of a crap focus on Mick?
Got you thinking, didn’t it. Johan Croneman