2024 05 31
On the move, somewhere in rural Illinois or Indiana. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
Recently, I was in Atlanta working on a big, challenging commercial photography project. The shoot was only one day, however, there was quite a lot of prep work involved, as we only had a limited amount of time to execute the creative ask and it was in the complicated environment of shooting on an actual airplane, on the tarmac of one of the world’s busiest airports, for a beverage company that demands its beverages look beautiful. Run-on-sentences aside, the challenge of photographing talent in the tight environment of an actual airplane, then lighting it to make it look both authentic and beautiful, is a real one!
In the nights leading up to the production, I would venture up to the rooftop bar and restaurant of my hotel, which had an amazing vantage point of the airport below, and I would watch a steady stream of planes for hours without getting bored. You check an app on your phone to see a line of planes and where they are arriving from; then, sure enough, they appear in front of you in real life and casually touch down and taxi to their gate. It’s a never ending flow of people, coming and going, on complicated machines our airline producer told us cost $800 million each.
In this moment it hit me: photographers are going the way of the airline pilot. My mind juxtaposed that scene in Catch Me If You Can, where DiCaprio is posing as a pilot during the glory days of commercial air travel with the image of a massively successful commercial photographer in the not-too-long-ago days when they owned buildings, had staffs, and pulled in millions of dollars a year in commissions. These days, both professions are vastly different, however, I fear the commercial photographer is still on a steady and unavoidable decent path towards total commodification. It’s business, afterall.
The camera we used on this project (Fuji GFX100ii) is a marvel of technology, and I can’t help but to compare it to the tool of the modern commercial airline pilot. Sure, some skill is involved in its usage, but really this $10,000 camera is doing heavy lifting in this work relationship.
I think this is partly why I’m finding myself turning more towards the artistic side of photography these days. I don’t want to find myself in a uniform, holding a McDonalds sack and a rolling camera bag, waiting at the gate for the studio doors to open and let out the previous commercial photography shoot so that I can enter the building and calmly and mechanically execute my task of pushing the button and ensuring the files are flowing to the computer. I’m an artsit, dammit! I have opinions! I have ideas! I have vision!
I refuse be commoditized.
-Clayton
