Game Over Dick - Practical Photography Magazine

This is going to be a bit of a long post so take a seat and bear with me. It’ll be worth it. Well for me anyway.

 

At the start of this year another London based photographer left a message on my Facebook page, something along the lines of “you stole my photo”, the photo in question was this one, of Hainault station. Up until he made contact with me I did not know of him or his work. I’m going to keep him anonymous so let’s just refer to him as Dick as I think the name fits perfectly.

 

So Dick, he decided that there is no way on earth that two photographers can take the same photo independently. Apparently what he sees no one else can. He then decided to go through all my underground shots one by one and list every station that I had been to that he had also visited. He totally ignored the fact that if you look at any photographers work who has shot on the underground they have near enough the same shots and covered the same stations, but that did not fit into the story he wanted to tell. He himself has many shots in his stream that have been done before him by other photographers.

 

He went on to slander me at great length on both his Facebook page and Flickr account and link back to my work (I had to contact Flickr and ask them to remove his post which they kindly did). If I ignored him, "I was guilty as I was not defending myself". If I did argue my side "the lady was protesting too much". He even went on to claim “I must have a guilty conscious and could not sleep” as I answered one of his attacks at 2am in the morning. I hardly ever go to bed before three. I’m a night owl but then again that would not fit into the narrative he wanted to tell.

 

When I pointed out that my work speaks for itself and that I had four times the number of followers then him at the time his response was something along the lines of just because you get people voting for you on x-factor it does not make you a good singer. I did not have the vision or the technical skills to produce a photo like that. “You’re just a populist photographer”, was his response when I said both Time Out and Londonist use my photos frequently, overlooking the fact that he submits his work to them as well, they just never use it. He went on and on but I’m not going to bore you with his vitriol.

 

It’s at that point I stopped trying to defend myself and thought ok let’s see if I can prove him wrong. I started submitting my work to photography magazines and competitions. So this year I have

 

Won one photo competition and come runner up in three others.

Was the first photographer to be profiled when Time Out started a series on London photographers.

Got a photo printed in the Time Out magazine as well as them using loads of my photos in their gallery.

Started teaching photography.

And now I’m in Practical Photography magazine having “that” photo reviewed.

 

I also have one photo in December’s issue of PhotoPlus magazine, two photos in the Digital Camera magazine in January and another photo in PhotoPlus again at some point next year. Not bad for someone with no talent or vision. So I will take this moment to personally thank Dick for coming into my life. Before him I was just happy to mull along doing my own thing but he gave me the incentive to put myself out there.

 

I originally started this out as an open letter to Dick but then decided he would probably have some excuse or hate filled response to anything I had to say so decided not to. I’m going to leave him to stew in his own bitterness.

 

So, the moral of the story is, don’t waste time arguing with stupidity just go out and prove it wrong.

 

Thank you for reading.

Done