Shooting Wide Open

Ian Teh

Anna Shteynshleyger

That axe is a good symbol for the following 3 quotes about 3 different fields that are really about the same thing – digital distribution of media and a new market model:

Free is not a business model. Free is how you smash old crappy monopolies and how you force businesses who don’t give a rats ass what their consumers want to pay attention. Free is how you get some momentum so you can prove there really are better more efficient ways of doing some things.

- a photo editor

It happened first and most obviously in the music industry. From a discussion of filesharing leading to a new market model, with Radiohead, who was the first major label group to release a pay-what-you-wish album through the internet, as a case study:

“We realised that, by using the internet for the delivery of the album, we could reach 173 countries and it would cost us less than three cents a copy for distribution,” says Message. “We find ourselves out of step with the rest of the industry on this. We believe file-sharing by peer to peer should be legalised. The sharing of music where it is not for profit is a great thing for culture and music.”

The tour to support In Rainbows saw Radiohead perform to 60,000 people in San Francisco. While Message concedes that half of that audience may have downloaded the album for free, they all paid $60 for a ticket to see the band and “we get most of that money” says Message.

Message sees technologies like YouTube and peer-to-peer sharing as platforms to deepen the relationship between musician and fan. It is up to the artist then to make money out of that relationship whether it is through selling merchandise or performing live. “The artist has to be at the centre of everything and be willing to drive their own business,” says Message. “Getting signed to a label is not enough any more. It’s about partnerships now. This is entrepreneurship at its finest.”

- Working in Harmony, Irish Times

Anna Shteynshleyger

But it applies most painfully to the print media:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?”

To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did.

The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

- Clay Shirky via Winkleman

Uncertain times. My first reaction, perhaps many people’s, is that it seems dangerous not to have a back up plan. But maybe having a safety net allows us to give less than 100%.

My mother said, “You have to have something to fall back on.” She hadn’t any confidence in this. (Many years later I heard myself saying to one of my daughters, “You have to have something to fall back on.” What a shock it was to hear myself say it!) I didn’t want anything to fall back on; I knew it was dangerous to have something to fall back on.

- Dorothea Lange

Cody Cloud

Cody Cloud’s photos of the Shanghai zoo shows us what some zoos really are – confinement centers. But that isn’t all. I’ve never bought into the activist argument that zoos are unequivocally bad and the animals in them deprived of their noble natural states. That argument overlooks the fact that captive lifespans are usually longer than lifespans in the wild, not to mention the ridiculousness of presuming to know the preferences of animals without study.

I go back and forth between neutrality that asks questions and direct overt statements of intent when it comes to documentary style projects, but in this case what I like about Cloud’s photos is that some of the habitats seem depressing, but some of them look interesting. He talks briefly about this project in an interview with several photographers about location shooting over at Too Much Chocolate:

In a city 3 times the population of LA, the Shanghai Zoo was very quiet with few visitors other than the workers there. I discovered the zoo because I thought it would be very hi-tech like most of Shanghai. I quickly found out it wasn’t hi-tech at all, in fact the zoo was poorly cared for and very run down. As soon as I got there I knew I had found my location. I was so drawn to the zoo, I went back a lot because I wanted to capture all of it. I created an entire body of work involving the zoo, the state of its animals and the people in it.

Cody Cloud

To carry the tangent, it’s strange that an animal liberation argument would have such anthropomorphic overtones. Largely, the argument seems to be based on what we think animals prefer, without taking into account the enormous, continual stress of an unstable existence in which you must be constantly vigilant for serious and immediate threats to your life. That is the type of stress that shortens lifespans.

That is the sort of stress that, in my more doubting and morbid moments, I fear we will be exposed to if we let our economy, our planet, go to seed in the next fifty years and America becomes more socially unstable. Our peaceful lives are dependent on an unspoken contract – because of the rule of law, most of us can safely assume in most situations that the next stranger we meet will not beat us to a bloody pulp. This is also partly dependent on the majority of the population being able to make a steady living. For most people, if they have the means to live comfortably, there is less incentive to take risks for gain.

All this is what makes the financial crisis scary – we are at the beginning of something good, or on the edge of something really bad. We can either restructure our economic and social systems so that these crashes don’t recur, or we can return to (or try to return to) business as usual and come crashing down again, each time with less in our natural resource bank, until we come to the point where there is not enough for everyone and we will have to come to blows. It’s what’s implied in Michael Haneke’s original version of Funny Games. Did we free ourselves from natural boom/bust cycles with better agricultural technologies only to become ensnared in a different kind of boom/bust cycle? Stability is a rare privilege, isn’t it?

I can call Cormac McCarthy’s The Road apocalyptic because it is improbable, but at the same time, there is enough of a hint of the real that I can’t quite dismiss it from the back of my mind. What would life be like if the social contract were broken and every new social interaction was charged with threat? If you had to assess every stranger for trustworthiness – will they rob me blind or can I let down my guard? People live like this in some places (see Philip Gurevitch’s article, “The Life After,” about Rwanda, in the 5/4 New Yorker), so it’s hardly a horrific fantasy.

Martin Schneider

Schneider deserves a bit more space on his own. He documented industrial pollution, sometimes using special equipment to capture clouds of nitrus oxide not visible to the naked eye. At times he went beyond journalism to activism – for this photo, he projected the huge image of the skull of a cow which had been killed by pollutants above a Florida phosphate plant and photographed the whole thing. Twice interested parties tried to steal and sabotage this negative, before it was finally printed on the cover of Life magazine.

He saw photography as a means to an end, not as an end in and of itself. The subject is paramount and photography is just a tool that serves a non-photographic purpose.

Schneider does not consider himself primarily a photographer. Photography is simply work he does in the course of functioning as an environmental consultant. “I use the camera as Lewis Hine did as a sociologist to document the conditions he felt were so intolerable.” His aim is to involve concerned people throught the country to find solutions.
- from Eye of Conscience

This seems to be the direction the digital market is taking us – the professional niche for photographers who are just photographers is shrinking. You can still be a photographer who is also a journalist, a filmmaker, a concept man, a writer, but the as equipment becomes cheaper and it becomes easier and easier to learn through the net, photography without aim falls to the amateur, which I suppose has always been the case to some extent.

What’s changed is that the resources amateurs need to improve their technique and content is now free and readily accessible, so photography that is not attached to another skill, that doesn’t involve access that the average person with a day job cannot obtain, will be less and less marketable as hobbyists with time on their hands learn more and more. To me, this is a fairly good thing, since it sets professional standards higher. There will always be complaining about lost livelihoods by the old guard, by those already established in the industry, but that signals a lack of imagination about new possibilities than anything else.

This sea change is mirrored in what’s happening to photo stores and labs. Judging from a handful of the stores I’ve been in, some of these joints were kept in business mostly through the customer’s lack of choice and information. Now that the explosion of information, reviews and shops on the internet has expanded the customer’s horizons, we have no reason to stomach bad service or in some cases, outright racism. When I’m offered lower prices along with the chance to at least not be treated badly and insulted while handing over my money, I’ll take it.

I recently spoke to the owner of a local lab, who admitted that he hesitated to go digital 10 years ago, and is paying the price now. He’s a nice man with a child to support, but what can you do? Local regulars will try to support him as much as possible, but change is inevitable, and those who can adapt are rewarded. That might sound cutthroat and Darwinian, but I don’t think any of us really want a society that provides everyone a livelihood simply for existing. There has to be some measure of competence, some reward for innovation.

Photo buyers, customers have more choice now, so photographers, stores, magazines can’t get away with what they used to. This is no doubt a bad thing for those who have been treading water or who are unwilling to change, but for those who are hard-working and always willing to learn, how can any advance in technology ever be a bad thing?