Gear Acquisition Syndrome is a standing joke in the photographic community. It describes photographers who are constantly buying new gear instead of spending their time actually taking photographs.
Well, I think it’s time to stop sneering and start accepting.
For a start, how many of us like cameras – how they look, how they feel in the hands and how they work? There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had from handling and admiring these physical objects. And it’s not true to say that camera gear is designed solely to be used and not admired. Even photographers who mock GAS would have to admit this much.
So I think it’s time to push back. We might all be serious, committed photographers but it doesn’t devalue our work to admit that we like cameras. I’ve bought plenty of cameras and other gear just because I wanted it, even if it’s often to be proved wrong, because it was a temporary ‘itch’ that was over as soon as I scratched it or because I like handling it more than I like using it.
That doesn’t matter. I’m not going to beat myself up about it. I’ve decided it goes with the territory. Call it a vice, call it a weakness, call it what you like, it goes alongside my love of creative imaging and I think to try to separate these two aspects of my photographic personality is not just pointless but damaging.
The fact is, I have become absolutely convinced that I take better photographs with cameras that I love using. And since taking photographs is really the thing I’m obsessed with, I’m happy to indulge any little vices or gear fetishes that keep me engaged.
You see I don’t think it’s as simple as saying you’re either a gear nerd or a ‘real’ photographer, and if you insist it is that simple then you’re perhaps exposing some inner snobbery or austerity fetish rather than saying anything useful.
In any other field, no-one would be so judgemental. Professional drivers love cars, painters love specific canvases, boards and paint, celebrity chefs will only work with particular skillets, knives or mandolins. You become attuned to the tools of your trade and the objects that you use, the way they feel in your hands, the way they respond to your touch, the times you’ve spent with them and the things you’ve achieved with them. When a piece of equipment, or a tool, or a mechanical device is ‘right’, there’s a resonance that releases something inside you.
So if you’re one of those photographers who can regard cameras and lenses as sterile surgical instruments with no other value than what they do, then good luck to you. I think in the short space of time it’s taken me to get this down in words, it’s become even more clear to me that creativity is a transient, delicate, body-and-mind thing that you can’t separate out as a purely intellectual activity.
We interact with the world not just with our reason, but with our eyes, our fingers, our hands. And if you keep looking for cameras that ‘connect’ with you in a way that others don’t, and even if you’re just buying gear to fill a hole or a gap in your life or your vision to keep that flickering flame of creativity going, then that doesn’t make you a gear nerd.
Of course, you may actually BE a gear nerd for whom none of that makes any sense. But welcome on board anyway.