For all the talk by tech gurus of how the internet will be so awesome in the future that we may as well graft our brain directly into it, I haven’t heard a convincing answer to one simple question: how in the world are we going to deal with the health effects of huge portions of the population staring at a computer screen for long periods of time, especially if it’s a habit picked up in youth? The prospect of staring at it for a lifetime doesn’t bode well in a profession where sight is your main asset.
For the past week I’ve been taking a break from the computer because I’ve begun to get a queasy headache every time I worked on the computer for more than 15 minutes. I’m going to try to do the best I can to minimize computer time, but the cost of printing and not being in a gallery heavy city leave the computer as the most practical option. (I’m looking forward to writing blog posts in the park though!) I knew that the actual shooting would be only the tip of the iceberg of making a photograph, but I’m overwhelmed nonetheless. I’m hoping computer interfaces become more intuitive and involve larger ranges of motion. So much communication takes place online now that I’m ready to learn the Dvorak or Colemak keyboard layout instead of continuing with QWERTY as it is.
In the vein of getting away from the computer, prints from Leonard Freed’s Black in White America are being shown at the Silverstein Gallery in NYC until June 13th, and I wish I could see it in person. If you are in NYC between now and then, you’d better go! I discovered Freed’s work about a year ago via Magnum and managed to find a cheap secondhand copy of the book in pretty good condition. Beats me why anyone would want to get rid of this book. It’s a book that makes me want to drink in prints til “my belly erupts like a volcano” (in words I overheard today), to grab a camera and go, even if it happens to be 1am in the morning – a sure sign in any instance that there’s something worth learning on those pages.
Actually, I can see why someone would want to get rid of this book. It is not for the sharpness or bokeh or grainless creaminess fetishists. Many of the prints are dark, grainy, blurry, but there’s a liveliness here that makes all those technical details irrelevent. I had trouble choosing photos that represented this liveliness – he doesn’t make iconic images like Winogrand or Frank, but the total effect of the book feels very personal and memorable.
I suppose that black and white street style has been learned by thousands and copied ad nauseum by now, but there’s just so much life in the photos that I can’t resist them anyway.
I don’t know if Obama’s advisors are especially good for this sort of thing, or whether in the 8 years Bush sat in office, using social networking has become par for the course for everyone, but the White House’s photostream is fascinating. Pete Souza’s documented everything from meetings with foreign dignitaries, a glimpse of the Situation Room, little moments with family and what happens when the president wants to order in a burger joint. Most of the photos are candid in the true sense and they’re obviously slowing releasing photos from a few sessions, but there are a few real gems in there. It does look like the more photogenic candidate won, doesn’t it?
It makes me want to watch the West Wing start to finish, especially that campaign season – Alan Alda’s great in it. Come to think of it, those writers got it pretty right – minority candidate who isn’t taken seriously in the beginning wins after going against a moderate Republican!
“In order for technical progress to happen, capital must be moved away from established businesses and into risky new technologies. This only happens, if the established businesses start to reject capital, because they start to produce cheaper. In other words: The rate, at which we develop new technologies derives from the rate at which older technologies are devaluated.”
“I see people who don’t have any photographic background at all setting their cameras on auto and using multi segment metering to solve many difficult problems. Their pictures may not be as good as a skilled professional and they may not be able to produce under any and all conditions. But, they’re good enough for most people.”
“The barriers for entry to this market have been virtually removed. Pro photographers must raise their game. It’s slowly happen with logo design, it’s happening with magazines. What you’re going to find is your non-specific ‘filler’ or ‘scenery’ shots will have to compete with the millions of amateurs.”
“People release generic stuff for free and the value (cost) of those generic things go down. This is the same way things are going in the software industry, generic is free but you still have to hire people to make the generic specific to your needs.”
“Pros can take orders to do shots that aren’t available elsewhere, and charge accordingly. Software developers do this a lot – making alternatives for software for niche markets, or adding modules to existing Open Source software to connect with little-used other systems.”
These are extracts of comments on a rather simplistic article (Why Photographers Hate Creative Commons) on license misuse in photography. Some of the later comments are a lot more interesting than the article itself. Probably nothing new, but together they sum up many of the perspectives on the blurring of the lines between pro and amateur in many fields. (Proof in and of itself of the wisdom of crowds?) “Good enough,” generic, cheap, low barrier to entry… you get the idea.
Sometimes the shots we miss are the ones we remember:
This is a picture I did not take of the most optimistic homeless man in America, spare changing at the Fox News-sponsored “Tea Party” in Atlanta on April 15th, rattling his empty cup as hundreds passed-by and grimaced at the sight of him approaching, trying to avoid meeting his smiling face, clenching their car keys and homemade signs about Taxes, about how the government is taking too much of their money, while a man stands in front of them with an empty cup and full smile, saying “there’s no good crowd or bad crowd — we’re all one, baby” while they hustle past as fast as they can, to catch a glimpse of their hero Sean Hannity, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with hands over their hearts while singing God Bless America.
Leo Frabrizio photographs various degrees of development. His Dream World series was the most visually memorable for me, but Golden City captures the process of various lands being converted from natural areas into boxy developments in a linear sequence, which is the most simple arrangement but also the one that has the most impact.
Early in the wee hours this morning, a factual data oriented search engine cum calculator called Wolfram Alpha launched. (You can read an initial review on TechCrunch.) Instead of pointing you to webpages with information as Google does, it collates selected facts in its database and presents it to you in a page of charts and numbers. It’s mostly geared toward mathy or sciency topics. For example, you can search for a string of DNA by entering a sequence of basepairs and you can quickly see a payment plan for a mortgage with specified interest rates, but you can’t get any band fan sites or things of that ilk.
I do wonder if this will throw an inadvertant monkey wrench into math and science education. I can imagine science teachers throwing up their hands as their students use Wolfram Alpha to solve problems they would normally have to think out or solve by hand. But maybe this is what people said about the calculator. Maybe this will enable the teaching of a higher level of problem solving.
The question that comes to my mind is what you’re supposed to do with this data. Can we extract those graphs and charts easily? Google has been working on a similar app called Google Squared which returns your results in a spreadsheet. This is less visually impressive, but seems to be a more powerful if you actually want to use or manipulate the data for your own purposes.
Google is no doubt working on semantic web apps already, and I suspect they’ll swallow up the good bits of Wolfram Alpha (or any new web and info related thing that isn’t utterly groundbreaking) and implement it themselves very quickly. I can easily see a new Google tab containing exactly what WA offers. Competing with all the info on the web with curated data stored in your own databases seems to be a losing proposition. So far WA looks like an encyclopedia and calculator rolled up into one and made interactive, which is very impressive, but surely there are more interesting things to be done with the idea of the semantic web.
During a bout of chain-watching those oh so addictive TED Talks, I saw this talk by Clay Shirky (who, incidentally, I mentioned a previous post on a similar topic) about the imminent decline of institutions:
The Long Tail
He talks about the power law distribution, which maps to the distribution of any given type of work by a large number of people, and the 80/20 rule (aka Pareto’s Principle), which states that 20% of people contribute about 80% of the work in any given instance. Institutions hire out of that top 20% (these are the professionals) to maximize what they can get out of their employees, but because of limiting costs, they essentially ignore the 20% of possible contributions from the long tail, some of which could be very valuable.
His example is photos of Iraq on Flickr, but this applies to anything that the web has now opened up for anyone – for example, open source projects like Linux, or journalistic blogging. Referring to Judith Miller, he says:
The shield law, as much as we want it – we want a class of professional truth tellers – is becoming increasingly incoherent because the institution is becoming incoherent. There are people in the states tying themselves into knots trying to figure out whether bloggers are journalists. The answer to that question is it doesn’t matter. Because that’s not the right question.
Journalism was an answer to an even more important question, which is how will society be informed, how will they will share ideas and opinions? And if there’s an answer to that happens outside the framework of professional journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class.
The advantage of crowd sourcing is that people can make an one-off contribution of value – it allows you to mobilize the long tail, all that amateur knowledge and effort, without the concomitant costs of doing it in an institutional framework and perhaps ultimately more importantly, without the need to devote time, money and energy to institutional self-preservation, a goal that is not relevant to the cause or purpose of the organization. Before the net, it was very difficult to gather these sorts of contributions, but Shirky believes this is the way we will eventually go. He predicts
50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage, and the more those groups forgo traditional institutional imperatives like deciding in advance what’s going to happen or the profit motive, the more leverage they’ll get. And institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be.
The Physical Workplace
I’m not sure that making plans plans is a bad thing or that profit will ever cease to be a potent motivator, but I do think that information monopolies will soon be a thing of the past. However, if information itself no longer brings in as much of a premium, what do we charge for? How do we assign value and distribute compensation in the new system? We still haven’t figured out a way to pay non-professionals in the long tail, hence why most crowd-sourced contributions are made for free and gotten for free or relatively ittle, but it’s interesting to think of a system in which fewer people have a primary means of making a living and instead many capitalize on a variety of skills to make a living.
The most interesting question for me is, in this model, is a workplace where employees gather as necessary as it is now? In many fields, the internet would be the gathering place and there would be less overhead costs. This would do away with our insane habit of building a private living space as well as a workplace for everyone. It’s a crazy way of living – you pay a lot of money to maintain a space you do not live in for most of your waking hours.
Unless you have a stay at home spouse, during the time you are gone, nobody else can use that space, and it becomes a glorified storage closet for your possessions, of which we have more than ever. Everyone has a ton of stuff, everyone wants their own place, nobody wants to live with their parents, so these days we need more space per person than ever before. If more people could work from home, or if we rethought the concept of a separate workplace, competition for space would decrease and eventually the cost of space would decrease. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but that is my idea.
Competitive Rates
That said, we’re still far from anything like this. I attended a panel talk (Covering the Economic Crisis) featuring Diana Henriques Sr Financial Writer at The New York Times, Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal, Steven Pearlstein, Business Columnist for The Washington Post, and Stephen Shepard, Former Editor in Chief of Business Week. The topic was the failure of our news outlets to cover the build up to the financial crisis in a critical or predictive way in any sustained or widespread fashion. An audience member asked about the blogosphere and Henriques pointed out that unless you pay for work, you will never get the best people in a competitive economy.
I’m not sure that this is true for one-off long-tail type contributions any more, or that it needs to be true. You need to pay someone a competitive rate if you want them to work full time on a project in an economic climate when people are struggling, but if middle America didn’t have to spend most of their time worrying about barely getting, it makes sense that they could turn their efforts to something else. This is after all, the reason behind the relative success of agrarian over hunter-gather societies. Granted, the vast majority will watch more TV or go on vacation, but I’d like to think that a small percentage of them would devote time to useful projects.
At any rate, it was an interesting talk, and I believe it was recorded for the purposes of internet sharing. Hopefully I’ll be able to provide a link in the future, so you can see for yourself the moment when Murray turned to Henriques and joked, “Rupert has been talking about you guys lately…”
There’s a great quote by Walker Evans at the end of Amy Stein’s conversation with Steven Ahlgren: “Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
That makes me think about all the TED Talks I’ve been watching. They are manna for the geeky at heart. Whether you agree with the speaker or not, there is always something to think about, an idea – that’s what makes them inspirational. In fact, it’s the same thing that makes good art inspirational. But more on this later.
I also ran across this quote by Eugene Smith: “You can’t photograph if you’re not in love.”
I assume he’s not talking about romantic love but passion for the medium and for your subject.
John Lehr
I’ve quoted from the following article before, but it’s a good time to quote a bigger chunk of it – Bill Jay interviews David Hurn on subject matter (PDF) and Hurn says:
You are not a photographer because you are interested in photography. Many people are interested in photography in some nebulous way; they might be interested in the seemingly glamorous lives of top fashion or war photographers; or in the acquisition and admiration of beautiful functional machines, the cameras; or in the arcane ritual of the darkroom processes; or in the persona which they could adopt if only they took pictures like… whoever. But these interests, no matter how personally enjoyable they might be, never lead to the person becoming a photographer.
The reason is that photography is only a tool, a vehicle, for expressing or transmitting a passion in something else. It is not the end result.
The reason for a young photographer’s confusion is that most teachers, classes, workshops, books, whatever, imply that how the picture is made, what techniques were employed, why it looks different and artistic, is more important than the subject matter. Yet the photographer is, primarily, a subject-selector. Much as it might offend the artistically inclined, the history of photography is primarily the history of subject matter. So a photographer’s first decision is what to photograph.
What is the alternative to an emphasis on subject matter? It is a frantic grasping for instant gratification which all too often leads to works displaying visual pyrotechnics but of dubious depth and resonance. Photographers become pressured into a search for different-ness, a quest for newness which usually mean an unusual technique.
There is another problem here. If the images are not rooted in “the thing itself,” to use Edward Weston’s term, then the photographer has not learned anything about the real world. He/she can only justify the images by reference to self: “This is how I felt.” Before long, this leads to incredibly convoluted psychoanalysis in a futile effort to justify the most banal, superficial work.
Mind you, I have no objection to anyone using photography for personal therapy. That seems a valid use of medium. I guess what we are saying is that these images will have an audience of only one. Rarely will they have any resonance or value to a larger audience.
Hurn seems to be very wrong about the popular viability of solipsistic “this is how I felt” photography (and video, blogs, etc), which is rampant on social networking sites like Flickr. While those photographers do not become professionals, some of them certainly have an audience. Never underestimate our own narcissism!
Today I just have a question: how does a photographer become a better editor of his or her own work?
It’s a tricky skill to learn, especially for someone starting out without a strong network of working photographers. You can learn almost anything technical by searching online, but editing is not a skill you can really pick up since portolios and features contain only the finished edit, without much hint of the working process.
I am finding it very difficult, as I suppose many people must, to edit from an ongoing project in a timely manner. I don’t know which instinct to trust – the immediate reaction, or the delayed reaction after, say, two weeks have passed, or, the very delayed reaction after months or years have passed. I’m looking forward to getting back to school and sharing contact sheets with people.
Just caught onto the world of European board games... which may be definitive proof that Americans are not interested in thinking...05:31:01 PM February 01, 2012
Whereas Kodak has so far failed to adapt adequately, Fujifilm has transformed itself into a solidly profitable business, with a market capitalisation, even after a rough year, of some $12.6 billion to Kodak’s $220m. Why did these two firms fare so differently? Both saw change coming. Larry Matteson, a former Kodak executive who now teaches [...]
If you haven’t seen this interview, block out an hour and a half to see it now. I transcribed (and lightly edited) a great deal of it, because it was great (not the least because Chase Jarvis references one of my favorite Errol Morris films, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control). Originally I was just [...]
What is economic growth for, anyway? It’s for expanding our choices and making life better. Is it really so surprising that, as we grow wealthier as a society, more and more of our young people, when the amazing resources of the modern university are put at their disposal, choose to use them learning something satisfying [...]
Arturo Soto There are probably more than 10,000 articles about how unwise and un-blog-attractive it is to apologize for not posting frequently enough to your blog. (“Don’t keep hamsters if you can’t remember to feed them”?) It is the blog version of saying, “I’ve really let myself go.” Supposing that I have, it seems that [...]
This is what Hans Rosling says of global development in the documentary I linked to earlier. I want to dig a little deeper into this issue. I’d say that most of the photo world has done a fairly terrible job of making this point. All the images of development are somehow read as “look at [...]
