Grayscale

There isn't a good reason that I don't blog anymore. I guess to some degree I feel more creatively compensated by my career path than I did by my previous, so writing here isn't the release that it used to be. But that isn't really the reason. That would have been a good reason. I don't really have a reason. I have great days here. Some of the best. And there are bad days. In fact, this is both the best session and the worst session so far. The curriculum here is the most amazing set of assignments I have ever seen. Hollywood Glamour lighting, Cosmo covers, traditional portraits, studio couple, etc. etc. It is a curriculum that has begun to help me determine what I am going to do with the rest of my life. And yet there are some problems. One, I am not entirely sure that this current instructor is the best instructor I could have for this material. I am not entirely sure that she is educating me. It is amazing to get this much out of the assignments, and yet so little out of class. And, then again, the class itself is full of very, very young people. They are nice people, but they have no desire to be educated. No responsibility, no accountability, no respect. They are driving me crazy, as well.

So, white with the shining curriculum, that which has been established and perfected for the past 60 years started by Mr. Brooks himself, continued by his son Earnest, proliferated by the past and present instructors with beautiful minds, incredible talent, and a tenacity that has earned Brooks a reputation that makes even successful photographers who didn't go to Brooks tremble in their boots at the mere mention of such a prestigious education.

And black with the overcrowded classrooms, the need for more, though possibly not as adept, instructors to man the growing class offerings for the multitudes of fresh, young, uninterested millenials that have misconceptions of grandeur in the fashion and rock and roll industries from behind the lens of the latest digital contraption but yet don't have any desire to study, learn, perfect, or understand photography as a technical skill, let alone an art form. There is no honor left in the classes, and I have a great fear that I am, yet again, arriving at my appropriate path, in the appropriate place, ten years too late.

And so, I swim in gray. Great days and bad days. Wonderful imagery that is underappreciated or swallowed by the chatter and frustrations of a classroom full of gibberish and criticism, none of which is the constructive variety. My peers are rendering the entire experience with a distasteful haze. The instructors discuss us as a group with unrelenting disappointment. We used to be a group of attainers, workers, A students. Once we were combined with the others, though, we lost our edge, our camaraderie, and most certainly our reputation. It is nearly impossible to approach a new instructor, a new session with the outlook that we might make a good impression, because they have already heard about us. And it is only getting worse. The new classes that are coming in are even more seemingly A.D.D. and it is beginning to force some of the best instructors to question their place here...to question the future of Brooks.

At this point I hang on not only for the possibility that I might represent Brooks well someday, but for the opportunity to put an encouraging face on the student body for the sake of the remaining instructors. Without them, Brooks is a web of complicated curriculum that it would take a genius to figure out on their own.