Demolition

The last part of this interview is amazing!

What do you mean by redundant photographic imagery?
The kind of pictures that come out 99 per cent of the 35 mm cameras and 21/4-square cameras has very little to do with creating and the sense of humanity which could unite individuals. People are competing to win at a game that is a loser's game. The game is to have better routine images than somebody else's routine images. If you want a prescription for routine images, you just have to go through any student's portfolio.
At a certain point, human beings creating art no longer need to be told what they're supposed to do. They may need to be told what they're going to get paid to do, but that's different from being told what they're supposed to do. The predicament of photographic education in this country seems to revolve around false rewards. It doesn't create a bunch of free people; it creates a bunch of people with a terrible burden on their backs, like the Old Man and the Sea or Sinbad the Sailor and it's a cultural commitment to an unrewarded activity. The rewards are at best nominal. Somebody said recently that the best thing a student could do was get in some shows and publish a book; but nothing about becoming a human being, nothing about having important feelings or concepts of humanity. That's the sort of thing that is bad education. I'd say be a human being first and if you happen to wind up using photography, that's good for photography.

Henry Holmes Smith

Dialogue with Photography, Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper