I don’t know about anyone else out there but I am being completely driven insane by the constant begging emails I receive from various business ventures, charities and people wanting me to buy viagra or other sex aids (which might be fine if you’re a guy) that manage to slip past my spam detector.
With most I can easily dismiss the contents and justify my lack of interest in all manners of snake oil cures, spiritual insurance for the afterlife or any kind of belief that it is easy to make money from those get rich quick schemes. But there is a new and more insidious phenomenon happening in my inbox where regardless of where I am sitting at the time I just really wish to scream out ‘NO MORE’
And this takes the form of the begging letter from a photographic colleague pleading for me to send them money so they can complete their project on… ‘A personal look at something that I have always been interested in because I have some vague family connection or identity issue and I know if you give me the money then I will become rich and famous, or even more so, while you, the one foolish enough to give me the money will struggle even more to pay your bills and be constantly fighting eviction, while I am laughing all the way to the bank!’
I have had enough of this rubbish. Why should I give someone money that I don’t have, to do something they want, that has no interest for me what-so-ever because they have an identity crisis happening that needs to be explored?
I know some people would applaud such a course of action, implying that the person seeking the funding is giving it all they have to make a project happen. My response? Its just more annoying rubbish I have to weed out of my personal email folder that I don’t wish to deal with. Do I look or sound like a charitable institution? And if I was would I give people money to engage in a middle class activity such as navel gazing while each day several species of animal goes EXTINCT or several hundred thousand children DIE of PREVENTABLE diseases?
If you don’t have the money to produce a project go away and get a crap job for twenty years, save real hard and then fulfil your dream. Work by the sweat of your brow for little money and salt it away like everyone else on the planet whose borderline narcissistic personality disorder has not turned towards grabbing a digital camera and making legions of so called friends and colleagues endure well written but frankly cardboard tasting literary attempts to justify why one can’t possibly go out and get a job where one might get their hands dirty but one needs to do their photographic project.
Using MY money!
You know I don’t mind living like a bag lady until one day when I can present work without pressuring others to either invest in it or engage in it. I have self funded all of my projects and I don’t like to take money from people without good reason…like an exchange of goods or services.
Does this new source of begging email ring rotten in your ears? Does it smack of incentives for a new generation, who I believe should, as part of all basic photographic training, work for six months in an elderly persons nursing home before they ever pick up a camera? Is the whole structure of crowd sourcing for middle class brats?
Or am I just anachronistic in my beliefs? I am feeling very like Eleanor Rigby at the moment…
Lisa Hogben Photojournalist 
Lisa, if you ever get an email like that from my mailbox…ignore it. Its definitely a phising ploy because I would never send such an email. As for working in a nursing home, my mother spent the last months of her life in one and being a carer for the elderly is too important a job to be left to people who are only there for life experience.
Hey Xpat, sorry to hear about your Mum. I agree that looking after our elders in one of the most important things on earth but I believe that people interested in photography should work in nursing homes simply to learn humility…
The begging emails I am talking about are the ones where people want me to give them money in one of those crowd sourcing arrangements which are meant to be the new form of fund raising on the internet. I have received about ten requests from various photographers this year alone, via those ‘help me raise money for my worthy project’ sites.
What has got on my wick is the last one which has been sent to me by a very middle class person who wants to explore their family heritage. I mean I don’t even mind reading some of the proposals for some of them, but they are always sent by such earnest people and they are always about the bloody photographers identity.
My gripe is perhaps they should develop their own identities through hard work rather than asking me for a handout….