Forget the degree.

I have always thought of a degree in photography as being about as worthwhile a concept as a doctorate in professional wrestling. Either can teach you technique but neither has significant bearing on your chances of success.

A friend’s commitment to the school of hard knocks when it comes to making your way in photography got me thinking. Are not most of our great commercial and fashion photographers graduates of the same school, having started as grips and photographers’ assistants?

Look at the curriculum for any photography education culminating in a degree and chances are that :

• It will be taught by an old guy no one has heard of with many credentials after his name. He’s teaching because he failed to make money in his field of purported expertise.
• It will pride itself on requiring the student “….to devote substantial time to traditional darkroom work”. Using film. But of course. The mystery of the antique.

The first point is obvious. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

The second is the primary reason why you should run, not walk, from such a course of study, and is a requirement imposed by the dated and unsuccessful on their modern charges. It’s not too far to go to say that this is a crime, because it will significantly hurt the student’s chances of success.

Current curricula extracts.

The high fallutin’ reasons put forward for this ‘darkroom experience’ idiocy is that the student will learn to understand the photographic process from first principles. Or some such rot.

Given that the only thing you can hope to learn in a classroom is technique, then the rational approach in the modern, fast paced and hyper competitive world is one which focuses on the best and fastest tools out there. No student messing about with chemicals and safety lights can hope to learn a fraction of that which the one with a decent DSLR and a computer running Lightroom or Photoshop will. While the first is still worrying about putting up the blinds and locking the door, the second has looked at fifty images in twelve variations each and learned mightily from the iterative process. At the end of just one day’s work Student Number One has maybe produced one image which he is still waiting on to dry. Number Two has some six hundred to choose from. Which is going to learn more?

Xanadu. Four variations – forty seconds.
5D, 24mm, f/6.7, 1/125, ISO400, processed in Lightroom

So go to class and learn technique but if that involves ‘traditional darkroom work’ or ‘traditional media’ run like hell. And if you believe that traditional darkroom work will make you a better photographer then I can only ask why you didn’t try a horse and buggy before learning to drive?

As for learning to see, no classroom will ever teach you that.