Shooting Wide Open

Giulia Bianchi

MATTER, a crowdfunded journalism project still in the inception stages, has become a bit of a lightning rod for the debate about crowdfunded vs trust-funded journalism.

Stephen Morse responds to the concept behind Matter with “Why I will not donate to this Kickstarter campaign that purports to save journalism and why you shouldn’t either“:

In their Hollywood-quality trailer pitch, they say “Nobody’s built to produce this stuff.” Actually, people are built to produce this stuff. Many of them. From Mother Jones to The New Yorker to The New York Times to the aforementioned startups to the publications that these dudes previously worked for.

Anyone who would ever consider financing these self-proclaimed top notch journalists (in return for T-shirts, cupcakes, and whatever other junk they are offering) to write cool stories about saving the planet, shouldn’t. Your money would be better invested in projects that can actually have long-term financial viability and longevity. Buy a subscription to one of the other legacy magazines already out there that produce way more content.

He certainly has a point that endeavors like Matter shouldn’t replace legacy publications, but he makes the mistake of thinking the two are mutually exclusive. The world is surely big enough for both the Times and Matter.

A rebuttal from the people behind Matter popped up, and Chris Unitt also chimed in with an interesting point on getting money from funders vs audience:

The thing that I especially like about this idea is that artists and arts organisations could take the effort they currently put into impressing/building relationships with funders and instead lavish that attention on their audiences and communities. What would they do if they didn’t have to spend time on funding applications, evaluations, meetings and other assorted hoop-jumping activities?

I wonder if an organisation’s ability to raise funds in this way might be a measure of the kind of relationship they have with their audiences.

This is really the bottom line. Before the social media explosion, to receive direct funding from your audience, you would need to broadcast from an established channel, which means either print or TV, both of which ironically requires significant financial resources to begin with. Now those channels do not need to be part of the equation, but you have to have an engaged audience. It’s too early to tell whether crowdsourced or citizen journalism has staying power, but my hunch is that it is.

I think this is much better without any explanation, but if you must know: Tofugu & Naruhodo & Waseda University. He-gassen alright. As sad as it makes me to see that an idea of mine turned out to be hundreds of years old, to end with a narrative finale:

Lisa Hamilton’s Real Rural popped up in my Facebook feed. It’s a nice presentation of photos that sometimes integrates audio into the design in a non-disruptive, natural way.

Steven Siegel

Steven Siegel has a set of photos of NYC in the ’70s that is a great little time capsule. It’s interesting only in the way that street photography can be, and it’s more interesting years later. The street photography (even the mediocre stuff) of our time will probably be far more interesting twenty years from now than it is now. But maybe that’s true of all photography?

At any rate, it reminds me of this quote:

A photograph by definition is a reproduction rather than an original, a reproduction that carries and confronts us directly with an actual chemical trace of a human being in a particular place at a particular time. If we pause to think about that for a moment, we must admit that this is awesome, but it is an awesomeness of a totally different order to the painterly wonders of a Holbein or a Rembrandt.

- Gerry Badger

Takes a while to build, but then it’s good (starting around 1:30).

(Bonus round)

Alexi Hobbs

Love the fragmentary stuff.

Simon Kossoff

I’ve had a bunch of stuff by Simon Kossoff on my drive for the longest time. Very nice! My favorite flat, graphic style that fills the frame.

The great thing about photography is that you have all these rules which are generally quite correct, but they can be broken and the picture works and you don’t know why it works, and the picture doesn’t work and you don’t know why. And you thank God because otherwise why would you want to be a photographer? I have a pretty good idea of how to make a good picture but of course I’m always going to be thrown because pictures will come up from nowhere about nothing, and that suddenly works and I won’t understand why. So this is why I keep doing pictures – to try and understand it. If the photography is the simplest medium, it is also the most difficult, and that’s what makes it interesting.

- Martin Parr

Parr on Parr is a neat little book consisting of one long interview with Martin Parr. I saw it on one of Blake’s end of the year lists and it’s a good ‘un. He talks about something all viewers should keep in mind:

One of the things I have learned is that we are surrounded by propaganda. We see advertisements, we see the editorial magazine, which are often propaganda too. Look at travel pages for example.

I don’t exclude myself. Even the family album is a very good example of propaganda, because the family album is basically a thread of lies: people always photograph children and babies and all smiling and happy whereas babies often cry but it would not be apropriate to photograph a crying baby. You photograph weddings automatically but you never see a photograph of a funeral in a family album. So it’s a very good example of propaganda.

Of course what I try and do is not so much anti-propaganda because I too contribute to that but to see things as I see them, honestly – not that I believe honesty in photography – and of couse I’m a part of that propaganda machine. So this is why also I think independent photography still has a role to play in our cultural history; we need to have an honest and direct interpretation to counter all the lies that are being thrust at us constantly.

As you know, I’ve shot at Stanford’s volunteer radio station KZSU quite a bit over the years. Virtually all my first lessons in photography came from shooting bands there, and it’s where I also picked up my interest in sound.

Starting tonight we’re putting on an entire 24 hours (midnight to midnight all Sunday) of live local noise bands in what we’ve always lovingly called the Day of Noise. This is the 10th time we’ve done this and the second time I’ve been lucky enough to catch it. I’m hauling down a bunch of cameras to document the thing and many friends will be pitching in to try to pull off putting on a different artist every hour. We’ll be broadcasting alternately from two rooms.

You can always listen online and you can find us in iTunes radio. But this year, we’re also trying to be ambitious by videostreaming the entire thing via Ustream (the player will update when we go live). It’s going to be epic! And knowing KZSU, it’ll also be hectic and chaotic, which is just what my cameras like…

Day of Noise on Ustream