“Learn the rules of photography, then learn how to break them.” That doesn’t work for me.
I was never a good student. I didn’t want to be told what to learn. Copying & blindly reciting answers from a blackboard never felt right. I needed to understand the why. The how. The where.
But my teachers didn’t have time for that and I felt ushered out.
For the years that followed, bent over bicycles in a workshop that smelled of oil and rubber, I realised something. While everyone rushed to replace broken parts, I slowed down, stepped back and observed.
Why did the derailleur break? Studying the systems involved, I sought out the cracks, and their causes, then I found solutions.
My managers at the time wanted speed; “get the customer in & out quickly, and move onto the next.”
But the customers wanted answers, so I kept siding with the customers.
That tension, between the person who wants the quick fix and the one who needs to understand, has followed me my entire life.
It is, I’ve come to realise, why I teach photography the way I do.
Why I say, “Do NOT learn the rules of photography!”
(re)discover your eye
There is a moment in early childhood, before school, before evaluation, before the creeping awareness of being watched and judged, when a child looks at something ordinary and finds it extraordinary. A shadow on a wall. Grass in the backyard. The way light moves through a glass of water. They don’t ask whether it’s worth noticing. They just notice.
That noticing is creativity in its most honest form, and almost all of us have it in the beginning.
Then we are taught to produce. To perform. To make things that are correct, that follow the rules, that will be graded and found adequate.
And slowly, so slowly that we barely feel it happening, that original instinct gets quieter. We stop trusting what our eye tells us. We start looking for permission.
“We all arrive in the world knowing how to see. Then, one by one, we’re taught to look away.”
I picked up photography almost by accident, well, exactly by accident. And then, somehow, I got published before I’d learned a single rule. Which told me something important: the eye was already there. It had always been there.
The trouble with most photography education is that it begins in the wrong place. It begins with rules. The rule of thirds. The histogram. The correct exposure. Again, do NOT learn the rules of photography!
These are not wrong, exactly but they are answers to questions that most beginners haven’t yet thought to ask. And when you hand someone an answer before they’ve felt the weight of the question, you don’t teach them. You just give them something to recite.
What then, if we're not to learn the rules of photography?
What we do, what I have always tried to do, is begin at the beginning. Not with your camera. With your eye. With your why.
What moves you? Not what should move you. What actually stops you, mid-stride, and makes you want to hold that moment still?
That is where a photograph begins.
In our classes, there are no wrong answers. There are no rules to break, because we haven’t offered any rules to follow. There is only the ongoing, genuinely difficult practice of paying attention to the world, to yourself, to the gap between what you felt and what the image actually shows.
“The gap between what you felt and what the image shows is not a judgment. It’s a map.”
We are not trying to make photographers who can monetise their craft, though some will. We are not filling camera clubs with technically proficient competitors. We are trying to return something that was always yours – a fluency in your own perception, a trust in what you notice, a record of the world as you specifically have moved through it.
Time is the key
Because here is what happens, if you stay with it long enough: you stop taking photographs and start making them.
You see something, and you move, and the image you make is true. Not always technically perfect. But true.
Often people don’t realise it’s happened until they look at the image later and feel, instead of pride, something closer to recognition.
“Yes. That’s exactly what I saw.”
And one day, years from now, decades maybe, the people you love will gather around those photographs. They’ll want to know what you saw. They’ll want to know how the light fell on a particular Tuesday in a particular year. They’ll want proof that you were there, fully present, paying attention.
A great photograph is that proof. Not of technical skill. Proof that you were alive, and awake, and that you looked, really looked at and embraced the world in front of you.
That is why I teach photography. That is the only reason I ever needed.
Want help to (re)discover your eye?
“A great photograph is that proof. Not of technical skill. Proof that you were alive, and awake, and that you looked, really looked at and embraced the world in front of you.”
Yes! Wonderfully written Steve
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