Photographers talk about photography. Wannabes talk about cameras.
A rant on the difference between talking about gear and talking about photography
I went to a photography event last week here in New York. Organized by one of the biggest camera stores in the city (the one that has two letters), sponsored by a four-letter brand you almost certainly know. I showed up, got in line.
About 350 people. Nobody with a camera on their neck at the line.
Inside: a house with models, continuous lighting, a queue to shoot them. Photographers holding 70-200mm lenses in a room barely 100 sqft. I watched for a bit and genuinely wasn't sure what I was supposed to do either. Should I photograph these people?
On a corridor, someone told me: “Leica M!”
I had the M7. He, a Q3. The conversation drifted into millimeters, summicron, summiluxes, comparing specs like stupid teenagers compare dick sizes at a public restroom, with discretion, but noticing who has the best. The kind of talk that happens when there’s nothing left to say about photography.
I left the event and on the bus back home, I kept thinking: why does nobody asks what paintbrush Michelangelo used?
Because…
Real photographers are the writers of light
I heard this in a recent conversation and it stayed with me. The photographer is the writer of light. The camera is the pen. You don’t ask about the pen brand when someone writes well.
When photography is the conversation, the camera is a tool. When the camera is the conversation, photography isn't.
The obsession with gear isn’t new (and not exclusive to photography, musical instruments also suffer a lot from it), but it got amplified by a system that profits from it because digital cameras run on firmware. Firmware ages, and Apple did the world a favor to release new models every year, influencing the whole industry to copy it.
Wiith that, every annual release turns what you bought into last year’s model. The stores and brands know exactly what they’re doing, and the people who fall for it aren’t naive. They’re victims of a cycle built with precision.
How we got here
After thinking around it, I think I followed the thread to its roots.
Around the 2010s, an idea started spreading: understanding the history of photography was a waste of time. Videos needed to be shorter. Who had time to study references?
There's even a book called “The Anxious Generation", that I super recommend, where Jonatan Haidt talks about something called "the great rewiring", relating to teenagers who are the first wave of being a victim of what I wrote in the beforementioned paragraph.
Twenty(ish) years later, now in 2026, we’re seeing the results.
A whole generation without roots, without a past, without any grounding in painting or photojournalism, anxious for posting what they captured, one that treats using a slow shutter to blur move as a life hack learned from an Instagram Reel, when it’s actually something that happens naturally once you understand the exposure triangle during the first hour of a real photography class.
EnGaGeMenT is the fucking word of that madness.
A Brazilian photographer who is a teacher for 40 years told me that his new students are having blurry photos because they take the photo and instantly pull the camera to see the photo they took in the LCD, when used in 1/30th of a sec, that act would blur the shot.
Did you pay attention in what I just wrote? People are getting blurry pictures because their muscular memory makes them swipe the camera to see the photos they just took. They photograph with the viewfinder and instantly go to the LCD, shaking the camera while still shooting.
Then came the second layer: "photography is art, so everything is valid, respect my opinion". You couldn’t criticize anything. The argument was bulletproof. The misguided notion of unrestricted creative freedom crept into artistic discourse.
And then the third: “Learn photography without the physics/math jargon. Straight to the point, no fluff.”
An entire generation got convinced that technique, culture and references were the fluff!!!!
The result? No references, no room for criticism (this one kills me). Photographers using flash by trial and error, no idea what to do with more than two lights in a studio, or where to meter in a silhuette street situation. What did they become? People who press buttons.
What separates the two?
An experienced Brazilian photographer and guru, friend of mine, Renato Rocha Miranda, told me he once worked as an assistant to Márcio Scavone during Rio Carnival. One of the fifty greatest portrait photographers in the world (according to Hasselblad). On the day they went out, Renato left his gear at home. He just wanted to watch Scavone work.
He realized that experienced photographers see the image before lifting the camera, like TENS OF SECONDS BEFORE. Last week, walking past a street fair, I spotted two nuns crossing at a crosswalk, each holding a hot dog. I ran ahead of them, dialed in exposure and pre-focus before reaching my position. The photo existed in my head before it existed on film, now it's latent in an emulsion waiting to be developed.
The time it takes you to realize a photo is about to happen is exactly the time you have to make it. That only comes from references, study, and time.
No shortcuts.
References don’t mean knowing everything. They mean having accumulated enough to calibrate what works. I made a photo of a pizzeria in Hoboken that a friend compared to Hopper’s Nighthawks. I didn’t know Hopper. I went and looked, felt the weight of it, and understood I needed to absorb more photographic culture, because references are the most direct way to understand what works and what doesn’t, and I think this post is the ultimate summary of that mindset, inside my mind.
I think that I took a while to realize hat because although studying culture is more accessible and cheap, it's more rare, boring, and scarce. Just compare how many online photography courses will teach you the exposure triangle, versus how many will talk about culture, references, Louis Daguerre, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, the zone system, Saul Leiter, etc.
Gear has its place
Of course it matters. With time, study and work, you deserve good tools. There's an irony buried in this whole conversation: the people who end up with expensive gear are usually the ones who took photography seriously enough to buy it. And they only reach the conclusion that equipment isn't the point after years of that same dedication. So when someone with a $10,000 Leica says gear doesn't matter, the Leica itself undermines the argument. The credibility is already gone.
So regardless of what you hear (from experience people or not), GAS might hit.
If GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) hits, here's a blast-radius control tip: buying a lens makes more sense than a new body. Bodies depreciate every year through firmware updates. Lenses are optics, analog. The improvement gap between lens versions is smaller, and they hold their value far better. Each prime teaches you a way of seeing: a 35mm is one school, an 85mm is another.
“Easy to say that when you shoot Leica and have a Summilux.” I hear it bro, but a better (smarter) question would be if Michelangelo would've produced what he produced with cheap brushes, not whether he had the best ones.
Joe Dart, the highly-talented bassist for Vulfpeck, switched from his expensive touring bass to a cheap one. The logic was simple: if it breaks mid-tour, walk into any Guitar Center and replace it. Check out this amazing promo video, where Joe plays at the end…
I beg you to check it out and rethink if you’re thinking too much about equipment, while negleting culture, philosophy, references, gleries, art, just the same way a musician favors instruments rather than scales, chord progression, sheet music, etc.
What I observe
The most mediocre photography events I attend share one thing: everyone comparing bodies, sensors and megadixels.
The interesting ones? The conversation is about photographers, books, galleries, references. Cameras come up with an actual reduced exposure (ha! no pun intended).
That’s not a coincidence, and here's a good post to start with, if you want to break that paradigm, here's a post for you:
And the worst argument is that you must be jealous of the followers these fanatics have, when in reality, we pity them. We're from the era when we envied the photos, not the likes.
A couple small bits of push-back, just for fun 😊
You make reference to someone noticing your Leica and wanting to talk about it (and nothing else, the problem) and describe the interaction as, "The kind of talk that happens when there’s nothing left to say about photography." That's one interpretation, of course. You had this interaction, not me, so all I have is your limited description of it. But I can also imagine that the other person was just trying to grab hold of an easy connection with you in order to start a friendly and safe exchange. Much the same way that two strangers wearing the same sports team's gear might spot each other at a bus stop and say, "Hey, you see the game last night?" I'm just saying that, while it's possible that the person you encountered had nothing of substance to say about photography, it's also possible that they just took the obvious and easy connection for the best chance for a positive interaction with you, knowing that they probably weren't going to have an hour to chat.
Secondly, I'll just say that I don't really love this analogy: "I left the event and on the bus back home, I kept thinking: why does nobody asks what paintbrush Michelangelo used?"
Analogies are notoriously difficult because they're almost always imperfect, which makes them at least partly invalid. (You'll notice that I used one in the previous paragraph, and you might think it inapt!) There's a whole world of difference between a paintbrush and a camera or lens, even an old vintage one. In fact, camera gear is so incredibly complex and interesting that it shouldn't be a surprise that it's all people want to talk about. Some people are drawn to the craft not because they want to be like the masters of old, but because they find the gadgets really fun to play with. I think those people can be photographers too, serious ones, even if they have nothing to say about Ansel Adams (or even care to find out who he was). Respectfully, you sound a little bit gate-keepy!