The Company and The Information Policy

March 18, 2011 by The Photographer

“You know that The Company has an Information Policy.” My slightly round supervisor says in his soft Southern drawl. “You’re not allowed to portray anyone in an identifiable manner. When you talked about that Photographer who wanted to sue everyone, I knew exactly who you were talking about.”

“Hmm, really?” I say. Before he can reply, his phone rings and the opening bars of The A-Team theme fill the room. He presses a button on his phone and then proceeds to talk in Borg-like fashion using the Bluetooth device not yet surgically implanted, but never missing from his right ear.

A few years back a book called A Million Little Pieces made big news as it was supposed to be a real life memoir, and yet it turned out that James Frey couldn’t help but making it a bit more interesting by making a good deal of it up. So now it is standard practice for all Memoirs to have a disclaimer saying, to one degree or another, this is the truth but it is not a legal transcript of events, it’s just the way I remember it.

This blog/memoir is based on my experiences as an Assembly Line Portrait Photographer. Names have been changed, characters combined, and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events.

Anyone who knows me and The Company will readily recognize many of the Photographers, Passers, and PreSellers who routinely inhabit these pages. The former Big Boss who had the brilliant idea to drag The Company kicking and screaming into the 21th Century is gone-but many of his really bad ideas are still with us. Before The Big Boss was fired my Boss got a call from him one day demanding to know who was blogging about him. Ah the price of fame.

On a good day Assembly Line Portraits gets about 50 hits-which ranks it just above Homer’s website which had tumble weeds blowing across it’s screen. A small percentage of these hits are from people looking for pictures of actual assembly lines-sorry to disappoint. A small handful are Twitter buddies and a few others from facebook, Digg, and StumbleUpon. Which leaves one or two people from The Company who stop by for a look once in a while. Hi guys.

A recent news story talks about a blogger that he has to pay $60,000 for blowing the whistle on someone. A little farther down the page is a story about how blogging improves productivity. Another is about a couple making real money from their blog. There are several pages of new stories about bloggers-not really surprising since it seems that everyone who has access to a computer now has a blog.

The first Company I worked for is the long defunct American Studios. It had the standard three inch thick notebook filled with lighting diagrams, posing sequences, sample portraits, and tricks on how to get kids to smile. Every page of this book was stamped Confidential as if they were CIA documents that needed to be protected from al-Qaeda. Many of my current Company’s documents are also marked For Your Eyes Only. Need I say that we are not exactly manufacturing Uranium-248 here?

Many Photographers get their start by working at an Assembly Line Portraits Company, the pay is usually crap, but you get to shoot a lot of portraits and hone your skills on someone else’s customers. Then you can go out into the real world and start shooting your own portraits. This remains the dream of many people who have been working for Assembly Line Portrait Companies for twenty years. It’s always easier to work for someone else and complain than it is to go out and rustle up work on your own.

But this is not an anti-employer blog, The Company is not the star, just another cast member who keeps doing baffling things I feel the need to comment on. I would like The Company to do a few things differently, but I also know that they are not interested in the ideas of it’s employees. I’ve worked for several Companies who were proud of their Open Door Policy-and they had an open door, but kept a firm grip on their closed minds.

There are no Forums on The Company website, no place for Photographers or Passers to share their ideas and offer up their opinions-except when we work together. There’s a reason for that, The Company doesn’t want to hear any of our opinions-none of The Companies I have worked for want to hear what the front line employees who actually work with the customers have to say. This is one of the things that makes Undercover Boss so appealing, the Boss has to nod and be silence while some bottom rung employee tells him stupid the CEO is.

When I first started writing I would write short pieces about my slightly insane family. A natural first topic. Divorce, insanity, alcohol abuse, and other fairly common, yet personally fascinating items where there for the picking. My sister went ballistic when she read these stories and threatened to sue-this despite the fact that I was 13 at the time and unlikely to land on the New York Times Bestseller List anytime soon. There is something scary about the written word and the idea that it is being writing about YOU.

I can be a bit harsh at times and even in my personal dealings I have had fellow Assembly Line Portrait Photographers accuse me of character assassination-which seemed a little over the top. I was just trying to show him how to take better portraits and maybe it did make him appear a bit ignorant, but ignorance is the place we all have to start from. Some of us can’t handle criticism, positive or otherwise.

The Big Boss did not contact me and tell me to stop blogging about him and his dead boring meetings. The Supervisor did not tell me to stop blogging about The Company and it’s endless assortment of odd and wonderful employees and management. None of The Companies from the Past have stepped forward to raise any objections. I think at least one person I work with didn’t like the way she way portrayed, but then, she is always ready to fly off the handle at a moment’s notice.

Just another day in the life of an Assembly Line Portrait Photographer.