This Christmas Duckrabbit Does Not Want Your Donations

Is this what photography on the web is going to come down to?

Nearly every week we see a new venture centered on photography asking for support, more often than not financial. Support for photography projects where there is no notion of a wider audience then the few who spend little more than a minute each day quickly flicking through on-line galleries.

It’s a form of charity, but one without shame.

Charity that centers on the idea of the importance of photography as a conductor of change, but then places no emphasis on how the impact of the photography should be measured. Success rarely goes beyond aesthetics and maybe a couple of hyped awards that will do nothing for your career, just make everyone around you jealous.

I am being asked to support privileged kids who have spent $40000 plus dollars a year going through college. Before you decide to fund them ask them if they have a car (and a trust fund). If they do, suggest they sell it and use the money to fund their trip. Better still suggest they sell it and give the money to MSF.

I am being asked to to support photographers who message me on FACEBOOK to ask for contacts in Ethiopia because they want to ‘photograph malnutrition’. Wankers.

To support photographers who have their cameras stolen whilst grave digging for awards in Africa. Mentalists.

To support photographers who will end up offering their pictures to charities for free. Charities that won’t be able to use them anyway because the fetishization of suffering through aesthetic is a turn off to audiences.

To support photographers who set up editorial committees to judge which projects to fund but have no clear values. Where ‘merit’ is judged on aesthetic values, rather then a sense of empowering local photographers who might have a voice, a role to play in the future governance of their own countries. The kind of vital role that we know photography, and increasingly video does plays.

You won’t find a donate button on duckrabbit. But fine, if you insist on sending us money we will get pissed and with any change buy IAMNOTASUPERSTARPHOTOGRAPHER a coke.

In the meantime, you know who you are. Stop writing to me to fund your dream of winning a world press award and getting laid at Visa, Festival of Shanty Towns.

Fuck you.

(Of course there are lots of wonderful photographers out doing great work and getting it seen, tonight I am just fed up of people with cash asking for more with no good reason)