visual literacy / chipmunks
28 Oct
The discovery of Vivian Maier seems to have brought up this idea of the artist who works in obscurity, undiscovered not because of a lack of talent. The internet makes these discoveries easier, it’s true, but I wonder if the long tail of the internet doesn’t also make it easier for non-career artists to get a work or two out occasionally. Maybe not though. I wonder if so-called “high art,” and especially art that lasts, will always remain the realm of career artists, or whether at some point a small portion of what we see in museums will be one-offs.
It’s hard for me to talk about the net in a negative way, partly because I’m young enough that I don’t have any established interests at stake in any old models, but mostly because the net is what hooked me to photography. Not to mention, it’s just a technology of communication. It’s people who decide what to do with it, to use it for good or for cheese. Any praise or criticism of the net is really praise or criticism of people’s actions and intent.
I do believe it’s raised visual literacy. The learning curve is so much steeper with film, what with the extra note-taking you have to do to make technical progress and the time lag between taking and seeing a photo. Nowadays if you don’t understand some technical thing or can’t get your camera to work, there are hundreds of people who can answer your questions from a dozen different perspectives in the span of a day. All that stuff you’ve heard before. The bottom line for me is that this facilitates learning. How can you not get excited about that? Say what you will about the work on social sites and the problems with display, but you can’t browse these places and not see that people are picking up, trying out techniques, and others are learning from them. The chatter on my radio station mailing list recently turned to using the net to learn musical instruments – how the tons of Youtube tutorials out there are making it much easier to learn by watching than by parsing a tab.
You could say that this makes everyone think they can make money off photography or results in an unholy orgy of kittens and sunsets, but there’s this from APE:
APE: haven’t there always been a huge group of people who wish some day to make their living as a photographer and it’s just that we can see them all now thanks to the internet?
SM: Yes, and how many of those people are doing something about it verses how many are just talking? Words without action. Photography is a field that’s competitive in numbers only. When you look at the percentage of photographers who truly take the advice that you really need to develop a vision, that’s maybe 10% of all the photographers selling out there. So, there may be a lot of prosumers coming into the market but a small percentage will actually be successful.
APE: When you say photography is competitive in numbers only. What does that mean?
SM: It means that there are tons of people hanging out the shingle with the title photographer attached. However when you look, the number of photographers who understand the vision selling equation and have taken the time and effort to build a deep body of work based around a specific style and then have created the sales trails needed to competitively market their work, the competition is slim. So, while there are many, many photographers a very small percentage are actually prepared to compete.
Maybe there are a lot of people who think they can make a buck off photography, but that’s an indication of how powerful and deep-seated our attachment to visuals is. And c’mon, there have been and always will be a lot of people who think they can make a quick buck off everything. (Otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible to make a living off “How to Make Yourself a Millionaire in a Week” books!) For most, I think the net is a starting point to learn about photography, not as aspiring professionals but as consumers of visuals. In my opinion, the best way to get people interested in photography is to get them interested in taking photos and socializing with other people in the context of photography. And I mean actually encourages rather than simply make it possible for people to interact with instead of passively view the work of other photographers.
We don’t all pop out of the womb able to deconstruct images and use them to communicate ideas or emotions – gotta start somewhere. Unless you’re Szarkowski’s or Robert Frank’s kid, I think we all go through the phase where we’re obsessed with photographing everything we see and use words like “creamy bokeh” while learning the technical aspects before becoming more discriminating about what we want to look at. That phase is just public now. But so what? It’s not like anyone’s forcing you to navigate to those pages and stare at babies in cute animal hats til you weep. And if you like babies, sunsets and kittens, then all the better for you! Enjoy your orgy! Flickr certainly seems to know what it is and revel in it – recall that (discontinued?) photo tag-you’re-it feature on the blog in which they ask featured users: “Kittens, babies, sunsets or flowers? Pick one.”
Of course, you knew I was talking about Flickr, which, by the way, has launched a new Galleries function that allows users to collect and, more importantly, display photos by others in way more oriented toward public viewing (as opposed to private collecting) than their old Favorites function. </walking billboard ad> It’s an interesting idea – is it the equivalent of encouraging people to publicly curate? You can assemble things that are somewhat edifying, like T-Rex or crank out Star Wars Chipmunk to amuse and delight.
I really think there’s no reason not to embrace the net. In class, I’m reading about Stieglitz and his distinction between the professional photographers who are just out to make money and the true artists, about museum curators as elite taste makers, and about photography’s slow acceptance into the art world. One thing that occurs to me is that if we aren’t interested in how the general public uses and perceives photography, if we keep putting down supposedly low brow incarnations of photography, how can we possibly expect the majority of the public to look at the art photography that we find interesting or to increase funding for the arts? Why is it that arts funding is not a priority in this country? What do the arts offer the average person by his own reckoning, rather than what an artist, curator or critic tells him he should get out of it?
