Leaving The Fold

“I got a bad mark for not being a Team Player!” an ex-Assembly Line Portrait Photographer says with disbelief.

“When were you ever a Team Player?” I say with a smile.

Being an Assembly Line Portrait photographer pretty much ruins you for any other kind of work.  Well, except maybe being a Security Guard.  We spend a lot of time alone.  We tend to make up our own rules. We don’t have anyone standing over our shoulder telling us what to do.

And as Dr. Ray Stantz said in Ghostbusters-You’ve never worked for the Private Sector.  They expect Results!

Assembly Line Portraits is a small world of it’s own.  We use someone else’s space, power, and people and then complain when the people don’t spent as much money as we think they should.  We complain if too many people show up.  We complain if too few people show up.  We complain about the Helpers.  We complain about the lack of Helpers.  We complain if it’s sunny or if it’s raining.  And we think we are perfectly justified in all of our complaints and the Subjects are dead wrong when they complain about US.

And at some point, most us move on.

I can count on one hand how many people I have met who are lifetime employees of an Assembly Line Portraits Company.  Most of the time, it’s The Company that goes belly up, such as American Studios, PCA, and Church Impressions.  They are often fondly remembered by their former employees, often a little too fondly, verging on a fantasy.  The others that I have met who are Lifers are just getting by, so that it appears that they have wasted their lives when they could have been doing something, oh say, productive.

Some people are like me, not too ambitious and for the most part, perfectly happy to travel around the country being a button pusher.  And I am pretty happy most of the time, despite my constant rants against The Company.

I am always surprise when Photographers leave and do other things.  One went on to install signs at Home Depot.  One is now a truck driver.  Another is a missionary in China.  One or two now sell insurance.  One or two have gone on to open their own studios, though I have no idea how successful they are.  Other than that they are still taking portraits, which is a good sign that it is working for them.

And one of our Assembly Line Portrait Photographers went on to work at one of those Assembly Line Portrait shops in a Mall.  The day will never come that I push buttons for Sears or Pennys or Studio One to One.  It’s bad enough to have kids taking Shoots away from me here, I would just go ballistic if I had to take orders from one.

It’s easy to talk yourself into believing that The Company is not just slightly incompetent, but downright evil.  Easy enough to convince yourself that anything would be better than this.  And I think most of us do spend a bit of time wandering around Monster, Career Building, and Craigslist-only to find that the only people hiring are Sears, Pennys, One on One Studios, and The Company.

There are a couple of Composite places that never called me back.  A couple of Directory places that I don’t really want to work for. And a ton of Real Studios that wouldn’t hire me on a bet, but I might like to work for.  Except, that a Real Studio would have someone standing over my shoulder, telling me what to do. . .