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 at the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business, recalls writing a report in 1979 detailing, fairly accurately, how different parts of the market would switch from film to digital, starting with government reconnaissance, then professional photography and finally the mass market, all by 2010. He was only a few years out.
Both firms realised that digital photography itself would not be very profitable. “Wise businesspeople concluded that it was best not to hurry to switch from making 70 cents on the dollar on film to maybe five cents at most in digital,” says Mr Matteson. But both firms had to adapt; Kodak was slower.
…Kodak sold cheap cameras and relied on customers buying lots of expensive film. (Just as Gillette makes money on the blades, not the razors.) That model obviously does not work with digital cameras. Still, Kodak did eventually build a hefty business out of digital cameras—but it lasted only a few years before camera phones scuppered it.
Kodak also failed to read emerging markets correctly. It hoped that the new Chinese middle class would buy lots of film. They did for a short while, but then decided that digital cameras were cooler. Many leap-frogged from no camera straight to a digital one.
The article talks about the different corporate environments at the two companies as well as Kodak’s failure to diversify contributed to its eventual sinking, but at heart the problem seems to be simply that the company failed to realize what it was that consumers were really buying.
Most consumers are not after a high quality camera – they are after the shareable moment. Even when we all had physical photo albums the point was to show it to people and share memories, and that is an act that has moved online. That Kodak thought it could be a powerhouse in digital printing indicates how out of touch they are with what people want to use their technology for.
THE HUM OF A THOUSAND CHATTING MONKEYS
I came across a couple of rants (ironically online) about the pointless noise of social media and when I saw this analysis of Kodak and Fuji, I realized that Kodak fell into the same trap people fall into when they complain about how the internet has increased the proliferation of absolutely useless crap and mindless exhibitionism.
What these people don’t realize is that a tweet about the morning coffee is not really significant for its content. It’s the act that is the key – people are reaching out for a social connection, and as long as humans have this urge, social media will thrive. And it will thrive in shortform. Shorter attention spans may have something tangential to do with the rise of Twitter, but I suspect the real reason is that most people want short bursts of interaction that mimic conversation, not primarily one-sided broadcasts.
Before Web 2.0, the technology was not truly capable of enabling short real-time interactions that can be simultaneous targeted toward specific organizations and individuals yet public and therefore injected with the exciting potential of hearing a strange new voice from the back of the room. We wouldn’t make as many horror films as we do if we didn’t enjoy the buzz of this scary surprise factor. Now that tech has caught up, we are sowing our conversational oats everywhere, just like we’ve always wanted in our caveman hearts.
To focus on the content of individual messages is to miss the real draw and usefulness of Twitter: the ability to see in one place what the masses are thinking and chatting about, and that has been something we’ve been deeply interested since the beginning of it all because, lt’s face it, we are all motivated to eavesdrop on what other people are saying about us and figuring out where we stand in the social hierarchy. (Full disclosure: I favor evolutionary explanations.)
THE GIANT EAR
That the iPhone has been a boon to the mobile web is almost poetic. What you believe to be your LCD screen has a secret identity as a giant ear. What Apple has done is to put pretty packaging around what is quite possibly the most impressive eavesdropping device we’ve ever invented. (Can you believe you also hold that thing up to your ear? It’s like a conspiracy or something.) When you think about it that way, can you really blame people for becoming device-zombies? We like gossip a lot more than we like brains, I tell ya.
That Twitter doesn’t really have any competition gives it a viability that Livejournal or Moveable Type or WordPress never really had – every conversation is searchable in one place rather than over the entire scattered net. Google’s good, but not that good. And, given that each message is only 140 characters, searching Twitter feels more like overhearing conversations than doing research, which is what searching the longform net resembles. Not that there’s anything wrong with research, but let’s not kid ourselves. The existence of this post indicates which way I swing, but I can’t deny that on any given night, the number of people who prefer to sit in a cafe or bar and chat vastly outnumbers the number who sit down to hear hour-long talks.
Now, I suppose the number of people who sit in front of their TVs in fact outnumbers either of those, but then again TV production values exceed those of your average lecture or conversation (hat can we do to ensure that conversational production values will skyrocket in the next decade?) and your average working human will prefer relaxed passivity to many things in his end of day stressed out, sleep-deprived state. But that’s neither here nor there.
THE APOCALYPSE – NO, THANK YOU
The world will not end because everyone sees what your neighbor’s kid did last night on Facebook. We are not getting stupider because we’re tweeting up a storm even if our brains are changing. As far as I can see, the world still runs despite our Twitter fixation. (Ask me again in ten years.) And, generally, the best thing to do before complaining about anything other than the complainers is to ask yourself if the train has reached its last stop. Is this the endpoint technology? (The answer is always no.) Is this situation unchangeable? (Um, never, no, how could that be?)
Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and what have you – all these things are simply a nutrient-poor substitutes for normal social ingestions. We still miss Ingredient X – the eye to eye and skin to skin contact, but we’re such social creatures that even a recluse like me will trade Ingredient X for the possibility of making contact with someone out of my pre-web broadcast range. This is how we’re wired. We like social bonding and we’ll try almost anything to get more of it.
I wish I had gotten into the environmental work earlier because I think that’s a citizen’s fundamental responsibility. The channeling of creative arts in that direction has been very difficult.
Something as niche as land art, especially the newer brand of ephemeral, more performance based land art makes me wonder about the viability of using avant garde art as a means of carrying political or social messages. For the vast majority of artists, the audience is so small even with the net – how can we convince ourselves that what we do matters to the degree that we’d like it to? Perhaps that would change if our media were capable of being more interactive and experiential instead of passive. I’d imagine that a location-based performance would be much more engaging if viewers felt the heat of the place and smell the stench of fracking waste water pools (see this article in the same issue of Orion: The Colonization of Kern County), but we haven’t figured out how to do that.
We need this ability. More photographers should be interested in multi-sensory installations of their work instead of the standard print-on-wall approach. I’m less enamored of Burtynsky now that I used to be, but can you imagine how different his work would be in an installation where you felt more of what it was like to stand in front of what he stood in front of?
Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
Portia Nelson
I
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost, I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.
II
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
III
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in, it’s a habit.
My eyes are open. I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
IV
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
V
I walk down another street.
Happy 2012, everyone! May you walk down many streets and leap over deep holes.
In very early times, these basic needs provided the cultural niche for art, while self-expression served to integrate personal experience and skill with those larger goals. But ritual, which took form as painted bison on the cave wall and found its high flowering in the time of the great religions, has receded into secular fad and decoration.
And utility, in whose service the early artist gave form to every object from obsidian arrowheads to fired clay pottery, has yielded to complexity and mass production. In our time, the cultural niche for art remains unfilled, while self-expression has become an end in itself.
Answer 2 At the age when you have the most capacity to learn
If an artist’s ability to produce great work depended on the amount of free time available, we’d have a high proportion of masterpieces produced by artists of retirement age. That doesn’t seem to be the case, in art or in any field.
A simpler explanation is that the ability to do good work is correlated with mental agility. It’s no surprise that a person’s early mature years are also his peak years, physically speaking – productivity and ability are tied to health. But I think creativity is tied to the mental capacity to learn and adapt to a changing world. Why do most people stop producing “good” or interesting work? Because this mental capacity plateaus or even diminishes with age for most. (I am not asserting that older folks are less knowledgeable or intelligent. I am talking specifically about how malleable and capable of change their thinking can be.)
But not all. If you can nurture a flexible and curious mind into your grey years, you can become an Old Master. The Young Geniuses find a groove that works and stay there for the rest of their careers.
[It's not clear to me, though, that this question is particularly important. We can't ignore the fact that the assessment of one's "greatest work" is a construct of the narrative told by the art and critical world.]
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 going to pull a few short quotes, but as you’ll see, that’s damn near impossible!
On the Fear of Changing His Life
He talks about his process, and the ideas behind his projects. Many viewers seem to be curious about his transition from lawyer to photographer in middle age, so he elaborates a great deal on overcoming his fear of changing his life.
My whole legal career – when I look back on it now, it was a decade where I was just afraid of life. I was afraid of taking the risk of living. People seem to be interested in how I got out of the legal profession, but I’m interested in why did I go in there in the first place. And when I really look at that, it was really just because I was afraid…
I was living with this big fear, and that was my fear of failing if I took the risk of being a full time photographer. I had this whole scenario of what would happen. In retrospect, it was sad, but it felt real at the time.
My scenario was: If I leave my legal job, I won’t be successful as a photographer. I won’t make any money, I’ll run out of money, I’ll get behind on my condo payments to the point where maybe six months later it would get foreclosed on. I didn’t have any close friends or supporters at the time. I was living a false life, I was filled with shame. I wouldn’t be able to share with my friends: I’m failing, I’m crashing, I’m burning, can you help me. I anticipated that I wouldn’t be able to do that; I had to put on a facade – “everything’s fine, I’m doing great” – when actually I’d be running out of money, I’d get my condo foreclosed on, and sometime during that I would turn to alcohol and drugs to medicate myself and I would become a homeless drug addict. I gave myself about a 50/50 chance of having that scenario happen to me.
I sat in that law office and I thought that my fear of failing was the biggest fear I could think of, and it was like this giant wall, this brick wall, in front of me. There was no way over it, there was no way under it, there was no way around it.
With the help of a good therapist – he helped me see that there’s a way bigger fear out there and that’s the fear of not living my life. It’s a different fear, it’s not a fear that stops me, it’s a fear that motivates me. The fear of not living, the fear of becoming old and filled with regret, and realizing that I didn’t take the risk of living – that was like a giant cowboy boot kicking my ass over the wall. There wasn’t any great act of courage, I was motivated by fear.
It took me until I was almost 40 to take the risk of living my life. And I see all these young people now, people in their 20s, thinking it – “how do you know?” Well, I say just look in your heart and you probably already know, don’t you?
I don’t believe in conquering fear. To me, what courage is is when you’re scared and you acknowledge that you’re scared, and you do the thing anyway. As someone who’s leaving a safe job and going into the unknown could crash and burn in a thousand ways, there’s naturally going to be fear and anxiety that come with living that kind of life. It never goes away for me. It’s always there. That’s one of the feelings you have to bear if you’re a person who’s fully living.
Chase Jarvis: Hold that top of mind – the desire to live the kind of life you want. If you don’t pay attention to that, it recedes, it goes away. I’m not always proud of the things that I’ve made, but making it makes me remember that I’m doing the thing that I’m supposed to be doing with my life.
On Inspiration
Running the Numbers accomplishes the feat of dealing with a real life issue in a very visually engaging and new way, but he hits on something key about working on real life issues through visual art: “One of the things that constantly frustrates me about my Running the Numbers series is all they really are are signposts that point in the direction of comprehending these issues. It’s a little bit better than reading the number.”
This seems to be an inevitable pitfall of making visuals that don’t hit people over the head with tragedy and human suffering – you risk failing to find the hook that gets people’s attention in the first place, or the hook is a cerebral rather than emotional one.
But it is clear that we can no longer only tell individual stories since our problems now occur on a scale that is too large for us to understand on the individual level. Jordan explains how he learned to conceive of the size of our waste flow, and how he was accidentally inspired to begin working in a way that is more engaged with contemporary problems:
I love color, in a naive way maybe, because it wasn’t really engaged in the real world. I looked at the work of artists like Andreas Gursky and Richard Misrach, whose work is not only gorgeous from a formal standpoint, but they’re also engaged in the contemporary world in a really powerful way, and I just craved that, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. I didn’t want to let go of the beauty and go take ugly pictures of contemporary issues.
So it happened by happenstance that I found a giant pile of garbage in the port of Seattle, and I photographed it with my 8×10. I made a print of this huge pile of garbage and all I was interested in at the time was the color. I was looking for a particular kind of unexpected color and I found it in this pile of garbage. It was other people who came over and looked at this print on my wall who said, “I love the colors, but what I see is a macabre portrait of America. There’s something cutting edge about making gorgeous photographs about our waste.” And that’s when the lightbulb went off – I finally made a relevant photograph.
I started dropping into this issue of our waste. I discovered this vast body of literature out there that talks about it in these massive statistics. One of the things I discovered was that when we read this statistics about our mass culture, and our mind just doesn’t have the ability to comprehend it. As a photographer out taking pictures, I’m trying to comprehend it myself. I try to stand in front of these giant piles of garbage and behold the scale of our waste. I’m thinking, “Man, I’ve never seen so much garbage!”
And then a massive front-loader comes in and picks up the entire pile and dumps it on a ship, and in comes another front-loader and dumps the same size pile again.
I realize that I’m not looking at the scale of our consumption at all, I’m seeing one drop in a river. And that’s all I can ever see as a photographer. There was a while there where I was craving to go anywhere to stand in front of the Mt. Everest of our waste. And of course there is no such place. These vast cultural issues are spread out over thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of locations, where there isn’t one place you can go to have a sensory experience of them.
On Midway and the Marriage of Beauty and Tragedy
His work has begun to deal with consequences of our resource use instead of the material itself (a series like Midway for example), and there he zooms back in to the human scale.
But it’s difficult to visualize concrete consequences of our consumption or war-waging habits on the scale that he manages to frame the statistics attached to them. It’s interesting that when it comes to the consequences, we still resort to the story of individual people or creatures or communities. Yet this is a very effective balance – we can essentially say, “look how vast this issue is! Everyone is affected. But you will bear the consequences; here is how each person will feel the effects of everyone’s actions.”
In talking about his current project, the Midway film, he articulates this idea and talks about being a first-time filmmaker:
I became interested in the Pacific Garbage patch, and learned that it’s not something you can photograph. Plastic is under water, it’s broken down into tiny pieces spread out over thousands of miles of ocean. There’s not like a floating island of trash and behold with our senses, feel the shock of it and then go do something about. It’s an invisible issue, like some of the others.
My goal is to make this global issue personal.
When I first came back with the images, I put them out on the internet and I thought the series would bomb. I didn’t think anyone would be interested in seeing dead birds filled with plastic. And it actually went more viral than any work I’d done previously. It reached a huge global audience, and the overwhelming response that I got was hopelessness and despair. I was in Australia and I was presenting work to a group at a girl’s school and I said what are people feeling after seeing this work? And some people said they were feeling sad, and some people said they were feeling angry. At the end, their teacher stood up and said, “I get that you want us to feel these feelings but there’s a feeling that I’m having that is much deeper and more uncomfortable than any of those and it is I feel overwhelmed and panicked.”
I realized that I had stumbled on really powerful medicine with this work and that I had put it out there in a way that is incomplete. I went to Terry Tempest Williams, whose work I revered for years, having read her books about how she’s gone through grief and come out the other side. She said, “if you want to get to hope, you’ve got to go all the way through. You’ve got to go back there and go deeper into the process.” And it turned into this multi-year thing, and during that process is when I connected with the ecstatic beauty of life, the miracle of life on this island as well.
I realized I need to make a film. Talk about jumping off a cliff. I know nothing about filmmaking. I’m a first time film director learning which button to press on the camera and out there trying to make a film. But as you said the way to be successful is to surround yourself with people who know what they’re doing. I have a brilliant team of cinematographers and a sound guy and some good mentors who are long time directors and we’re out there trying to make a film that’s going to try to attempt to bring together the horror and the tragedy and grief – all the uncomfortable feelings that come with witnessing a tragedy – bring it together with the ecstatic miracle and beauty of the world we live in and combine them in a way that we can’t tell them apart any more.
I started out thinking I’m going to make a documentary film and so we’re going to go out there and we’re going to say, “Here we are on Midway Island and here’s this terrible tragedy.” But then I thought, wait a second, there are lots of films out there where the director respects the audience’s ability to hold a really complex plot that you don’t really understand until the end of the film. I can bring the viewers’ intelligence in and collaborate with them and bring hard things like grief and beauty together and trust that they’re going to be able to handle it.
I don’t want my work to be a downer. I bear the pain of standing over dead baby birds in Midway, not because I want to blame anybody, but because I love our world. I believe in our ability to change and the world is worth taking better care of… If we could remember how much we love what we’ve been given, then seems like some of these problems wouldn’t be so hard to face and do something about.
On Knowledge vs Action
So how do we get people to act? He also draws a line between art and activism, claiming that art is how we feel things, activism a blunt instrument for action:
I know that looking at that kind of stuff can be traumatizing. It’s easy to drop into a place of hopelessness and despair. I believe we all have to grow our hearts big enough and expand our minds big enough to be able to face the realities of the times we live in. If the only information we have to try to relate to it is incomprehensible charts and graphs that we can’t feel anything about, then it’s no wonder we’re disconnected from these things and it’s no wonder we’re not acting with more passion and resolve.
There’s a gap there, where we all know about the issue, but we aren’t acting. If you jump from knowing about the issue to acting, that’s what activists are all about. The way I get you to act is if I wag my finger hard enough and tell you you’re bad enough, finally you’re gonna act. But we’re jumping over something that to me is the crucial piece of the puzzle, and that is feeling something. Really facing the issues of the times we live in requires us to bear some very uncomfortable feelings, starting with anxiety and grief.
I have a hierarchy of them in my mind. Anxiety is the very surface one and if you can’t hold anxiety, then you never even get to any of the other ones. You just have to get out and live in denial. But if you can hold anxiety, then you can get to the next one down, which is anger. And where’s our anger now, as a culture? And underneath anger is rage, and finally at the bottom is this vast ocean of grief. My wish as an artist is that we as a culture could get to our grief. In community. Because when you face these issues alone, then you can go down the hopelessness/despair path.
But as soon as you share those feelings in community, then something happens. There’s a transformation that happens.
I want to live in that place of feeling. If people see my work and feel something, I have no advice, or suggestions or judgments about what they should do next. It’s not for me to tell you whether you should go do this or that. But maybe if we could all feel a bit more deeply in our culture right now, then collectively we can begin to make some conscious decisions that we aren’t making.
And I thought this was a good piece of advice to end on:
I have a tendency to figure it out in advance. I want to sit on the couch, dream up the world’s greatest piece of art that’s going to blow everybody’s mind and then just go make it, but it never actually happens that way. It’s more like, as a photographer, I just follow around behind my camera. I was clueless at the time about the meaning of the work and where it would lead me. The one piece of advice I give to people who are making the leap is don’t try to figure it out in advance. You have to make the leap.
I’m glad to have made the leap, even if things are uncertain and stressful. As Chris Jordan says, it is a motivating rather than incapacitating fear. My better self realizes I do have a lot to be thankful for and not much to complain about, complain as I might at times. The future looks very good if do we some work to carve out a future where art is accessible, affordable and made by all. Here’s to hoping we get to see it.
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 and enriching and not for anything except cherishing the rest of their lives?
As we grow wealthier as a society, we also devote ever more money and time listening to music, attending performances, reading books, watching film and TV. Somebody has to make this stuff, and I’m certain its full value is not captured in the economists’ growth stats… I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.
I saw this everywhere. There are so many things wrong with both articles.
First off, can we really ignore the Gursky Phenomenon? The dream of superstar art wealth is a dangling carrot that certainly lures some students to art. Of course the number of people who make it to that level is a very very tiny percentage of those who try, but it doesn’t stop people from trying, just as many people try to be actors despite a very low pay-off for the average actor.
Though I agree with it for the most part, the Economist article eventually sinks to the same level as the Tabarrock piece it criticizes. Tabarrok evaluates on the criteria of contribution to economic growth and the Economist author (oh use bylines already!) evaluates on the criteria of personal fulfillment. But both miss the glaring point that we shouldn’t evaluate any field on either of those criteria alone. (Read on for more on that point.)
Tabarrock is wrong. Though the arts may not contribute a huge percentage of total GDP, subsidies for the arts are similarly tiny. Compared to the level of energy (average $16 billion* per year from 2002-08) or agricultural subsidies ($15 billion in 2010), the arts do not make a dent. Created in 1965, to date the NEA has given $4bn worth of grants. That’s on average $87m/yr. That’s about half a percent of the farm subsidy. Considering that the arts do generate tens of billions, that’s not a bad investment. And yet, we live in a culture where the first things you get when you google “arts subsidies” are calls to eliminate them. (At least there are people across the pond who believe that the arts are affordable and profitable!) Who’s really subsidizing artists anyway? I’d hardly call a loan you have to pay back with interest a subsidy. After graduation, day jobs (yours or your partner’s) and commercial gigs subsidize artists.
The Economist is also wrong. Some lab work is indeed mindnumbing and unfulfilling in and of itself, but so is spotting dust spots off film scans or cleaning paintbrushes.Yet it’s work we do to accomplish our higher level goal of discovering new scientific knowledge or making art. Studying the stars or the genome is just as exciting and inspiring of an occupation for some, and it is strange that the author can’t see why it might move someone to tears to contemplate impossible mathematical puzzles or the scale of the universe. Some artists certainly seem impressed enough by those concepts to reference them in their works! To dismiss practical jobs as the equivalent of lab gruntwork is to set up a straw man.
Graduation numbers don’t tell you much
These numbers do not tell us anything about how many artists persist in the field but simply the number who graduate with an arts degree. We can’t draw any real conclusions from that given the following questions:
Did these arts grad focus on arts alone or also double-major in something else that may be “practical”?
Is an arts degree a statement of intent to pursue art as a career specifically? If it’s true that everyone knows that engineering pays better, everyone also knows that having a degree period pays better (see Is College Worth It?). What percentage of arts grads choose art as part of a plan to study liberal arts and pursue office work? This may irrelevant if we’re talking about what people desire to study, regardless of what they intend to do with what they learn. But in that case, we should be looking at the number of undergraduates who choose to study art in college beyond a class or two, not who graduates with an arts degree.
But. BUT!
Back up: bad data alert!
That aside, there is something that feels wrong about the piece of data we are all basing these arguments on. The graph in the Tabarrok article doesn’t seem right at all to me, so I dug around on my own. Look at the Tabarrok graph:
Now look at this chart from the National Center For Education Studies from 2010-11:
Obviously students ARE choosing and have always chosen the field that pays, which is business, which is by far is the most popular field, and in fact the field that has grown much more than other fields in the last 10 or so years. Students do very much have dollar signs in their eyes.
Also notice that there is an entry for engineering. Despite mentioning engineering repeatedly, Tabarrock uses a graph that lists only chemical engineering, a small segment of the entire field. From our charts, we can see that on its own, engineering fields attract as many students and produce as many graduates as the arts, and if you add that to the CS numbers, there are, very roughly, 50% more tech grads than art grads. All in all, that chart is a very selective subset of the whole picture.
However, it is surprising to me that the number of computer science and engineering degrees have not grown exponentially in popularity given the huge growth of the tech sector, but the low numbers may simply be explained by the unavoidable fact that there are some areas of the tech world where people who have learned on their own can get a decently paying job by simply demonstrating technical competence without never needing to either begin or complete an actual degree. I’d be interested in any data that shows us the proportion of tech workers who have degrees vs not.
Then there’s the likely possibility that our perceptions are skewed. There are other sectors that tech is just far more visible and tangible to us as consumers than other fields which may actually contribute more to GDP.
And why shouldn’t artists choose money?
I’d be remiss to suggest that monetary motivation is the only reason artists decide to pursue the careers we do (obviously that is not the case if we simply look around the blogosphere), but if it is, is that so bad? What irks me about the article is that doesn’t address what we should do about low pay in the arts as a problem in and of itself. It comes close to saying we should be proud of being poor, that not being able to make a living is somehow a badge of how committed we are to our work. That’s just rationalization. We could be paid a living wage for our work AND be fulfilled by it.
What use is a manifesto about choosing fulfillment over money when you have to take a second non-arts job to subsidize your art? As a recent grad trying to patch three or four different things together to make a living or develop leads for making a living, that we can enter college in pursuit of something other than the means to make a better living is great, but to leave it at that without taking the opportunity to address the sad finances of most artists upon graduation is to avoid the reality that artists need money to survive.
As someone tweeted, “money doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys film.”
PhotoQ interviewed 9 photographers about the future of the business of photography in the age of decreasing prices and the digital boom, and put together a feature on Vimeo called Facing the Future.
“People will always want stories. People will always want storytellers. And today people want visual storytellers more than ever.” – Ed Kashi
“Frankly, if things hadn’t've changed, then I would’ve been worried, because there’s only so long you can live and do the same thing over and over again. What I find is that the last few years have given us freedom.” – Donald Weber
The art of any art is the art of obsession. This is not something that people in general tend to understand. They encourage you to be well-rounded, which bemuses me in a society that tends to reward the specialists – the obsessives – those who decided to excel at one thing instead of becoming good at a hundred or competent at a thousand.
2.
Fiction may not provide you with the same kind of information as non-fiction, but information is not always knowledge, and knowledge is not always wisdom. Fiction – the best fiction – is wise, and makes you just a little bit wiser, and you can take that wisdom and apply it across all the different parts of your life.
Joao Silva on the photographer’s role: “You have to have clarity as to what your role is. If you want to help people, then you should not become a photographer.”
He also speaks quite explicitly about the Kevin Carter photograph. He says it much better than I can.
People always assume that this heartless photographer just walked past and shot the image of the child, and that wasn’t the case. For one, the child was a few hundred yards from a feeding center. That child was not abandoned. But that’s the power of photography. You isolate something, you transmit your image through that isolation, and it was the most powerful image. Ultimately that image was such a strong message of famine. Suddenly there was this influx of money that came out of nowhere. He saved more lives by taking that picture than he would have by not taking the picture.
At the other side of the camera, there is a human being, and that human being is trying to stay alive, trying to capture, trying to get the message out to the world, and trying to stay safe.
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 [...]
