Haters Never Show Their Faces and Photographic Work

I've always wondered what goes through someone's mind when they decide to become a hater. Being a hater is a kind of job: you have to create fake accounts, which guarantee anonymity, and then, from those accounts, launch attacks against the object of your hatred.

In photography, this happens much more often than we think. They harbor resentment, and they get to the point of intoxication. They become so intoxicated with resentment that they actually decide to open an account, connect it to a fake email address, and dedicate all that time that, if it were spent studying photography and improving, might still yield some modest results, even if they lack any talent.

But no. In their baseness, they delude themselves into thinking that by desperately trying to bring others down, they'll gain some benefit. Perhaps even a glimpse of the spotlight, perched beneath the work of a photographer, secretly enjoying that moment of "apparent notoriety" and the illusion of having harmed the one they hate.

Back in 2013, coincidentally the year Leica hired me for a job, these haters joined forces, creating a Facebook group to organize attacks on my website and my social network group. Obviously, they've all disappeared since then, and I'm still here.

Naturally, those who expose themselves are open to mistakes and criticism. But what about hate? Hate is inherently human, but in this era it has become even more widespread, because everyone feels in constant competition. Many people think that to compete they must put others down. That way, they believe they're avoiding the effort of improving themselves.

Photography is not a competitive sport, though many think it is, and perhaps the awards and contests have given them that idea. Photography is a challenge with ourselves, because when we put our eye to the viewfinder, we are alone. We need to be alone in that precise moment in order to translate our experience, our feelings, and our ideas about the world around us into images. 

Over all these years, I've learned that ignoring them is the best thing to do. If you don't introduce yourself, if you don't show who you are and why you are right, then you don't exist, exactly like the missing avatar on your fake account.