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The casual amateur does not worry about producing art, although experts are sure that, scattered in the nation's family albums, there are enough undiscovered masterpieces to fill the National Gallery. The more earnest amateur is organized in a network of 9,000 camera clubs across the U.S. He exhibits his work in museums, at international salons, and, between times, to a captive audience of visiting neighbors. Five major camera magazines with a combined monthly circulation of 806,000 are published for him, as well as 60 camera columns syndicated in hundreds of newspapers. He has made the picture book the hit of the decade in the publishing industry.
How good is the stuff he produces?
One distinguished photographer, Robert Capa, once moodily declared: "Most of the people in this country take pictures, and most of them take better ones than I do." Amateur pictures have made history, e.g., the sinking of the Vestris (1928), the explosion of the Hindenburg (1937), the Hotel Winecoff fire (1946).
On the other hand, U.S. picture editors complain that amateurs by & large have nothing to say. Many of them seem so exhausted by achieving technical excellence that they have no imagination left to bring to their subjects. Amateurs, like professionals, have their troubles with reality. Part of the difficulty is that they often cannot see reality through all the gadgets which fill their world.
Baby Legs & Butterflies. The serious U.S. amateur does not yield even to the U.S. driver in his passion for new models and new gimmicks. Foreign cameras with exotic names (Japan's Nikon, Germany's Plaubel Makina and Sweden's Hasselblad) attract him as Jaguars and Lancias attract the motorist ($10 million worth of foreign cameras was imported into the U.S. last year). He is particularly taken with such fairly new products as baby flashbulbs, easily portable strobe lights, and stereoscopic cameras. He pores over catalogues as a gourmet surveys a menu. How can he resist such dishes as the Globetrotter Gadget Bag ("Leather-covered sponge rubber bumper for carrying against body," $42.50) ; Steineck A-B-C Camera ("Straps to the wrist . . . brilliant finder for sighting at waist level," $150); Flexing Powelites ("Portable Sunshine . . . adjust your lights to any desired position,"
$10.95-$14.95).
The camera devotee is apt to lapse into
a language all his own. Sample:
Ashcan school (gloomy photography) baby legs (short-legged tripod) butterfly (shadow beneath a subject's nose) darkroom widow (a hypo hound's wife) Dinky-Inkie (small spotlight) dynamite (strong developing fluid) high hat (low camera support for "worm's eye" pictures) lens louse (he muscles into someone else's picture) soot & whitewash (a print that has no middle tones) willy (a soft, fuzzy picture).
And so the amateur strides on, gadget bag bumping against his body, camera on his wrist, portable sunshine at his elbow, the little darkroom widow waiting at home. He lies on his belly in the snow of the Rockies, prowls the Fulton Fish Market at dawn, gets drenched in an inland lake, and hangs from ladders, chasing—with a hunter's relentless zeal—the fleeting moment, to trap it on the silver-coated strip of paper.