One question I especially hate being asked is: “How much is the camera you use?”
Not “What camera is it?” Not “Why do you use that one?” Not even “What do you like about it?” Those can lead somewhere interesting. But the price question usually lands with all the grace of a brick through a window.
Because the moment the conversation starts with cost, the photograph is already in danger of disappearing.
The image could have tension, wit, tenderness, absurdity, loneliness, or that rare little shock of real life revealing itself for half a second. But instead of looking at any of that, we jump straight to the market value of the object that happened to be in my hands. It is such a wonderfully modern reflex: faced with something human, we ask for the invoice.
And yes, cameras matter. I am not going to do that fake-pure artist routine where tools are irrelevant and we all become saints with shutters. Tools matter. They affect how you move, how you frame, how quickly you react, how visible you are, how much trust you place in the machine. But the price of the camera tells you almost nothing about the quality of the photograph. It mostly tells you how easy it is for people to confuse cost with vision.
That is the part that irritates me.
The question often carries a hidden theory: if the camera is expensive enough, maybe the image is partly purchased. As if photographs were luxury goods produced automatically by premium machinery. As if the hard part were not seeing, waiting, choosing, failing, missing, returning, and developing an eye over years of paying attention. No, apparently the secret is just financial pain with a leather strap.
Street photography is especially brutal with this illusion. The street does not care what your camera costs. It will still give you bad timing, ugly light, cluttered backgrounds, awkward distances, blocked frames, and all the indifferent chaos it can throw at you. An expensive camera does not grant wisdom. It just gives your mistakes higher manufacturing standards.
What annoys me most is that the question reduces photography to consumption. It turns a way of seeing into a shopping category. The real story is almost never the price of the tool. The real story is why I stopped there, why I waited, why I included one person and excluded another, why I chose black and white, why that tiny gesture mattered, why that moment deserved not to vanish unnoticed.
So when someone asks me what my camera costs, I can answer with a number. But the more honest answer is that the expensive part was never the camera. The expensive part was time: the years of looking, doubting, missing, learning, and slowly becoming less blind.
Technical: Yashita Mat 124G + Ilford FP4.
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