Shooting Wide Open

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.

- Why we subsidise arts majors

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.

Andreas Gursky

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 interview with Peter Van Agtmael, is also excellent.

1.

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.

- Justine Musk

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.

Kevin Carter

Let me confirm what you already know. The Bang Bang Club was not a stellar movie. More accurately, it was the gritty-glam version of wartime tragedy. However, it contained this brief exchange:

Greg Marinovich: Where are they getting the guns?
Joao Silva: It doesn’t matter, just take the picture.

Meaning what? It’s someone else’s job to find out. Is it?

Maybe it is.

The montage of Kevin Carter being grilled about the fate of the little girl stalked by the vulture stood out to me. I felt simultaneously overwhelmed and emotionally manipulated, having been provoked, just as the producers intended, by the notion that Carter should’ve taken measures to save the child, aside from shooing the bird away and walking off.

No matter what you think about the industry’s relationship with images of suffering, it is clear that Carter was in no way responsible for the child’s life, no more than any other observer or outsider was. A chain of negligence by a slew of people, high and low, resulted in that girl finding herself in such a pitiable state, but Carter was the one who stepped in to document it, thereby drawing the ire to himself. Classic case of shoot the messenger.

When you’re in a conflict zone and half the job is avoiding a violent death, you have already given far beyond what the rest of us are capable of giving, and at that point, getting the shot is enough. And if it’s not enough in an ideal sense, it is still all that is humanly possible.

An individual working alone on one long term documentary project in peace time with no agency support is in vastly different circumstances than someone working within an infrastructure of reporters and editors. Perhaps the burden is on them in that case. I have been too quick to generalize in the past about what photojournalism lacks and its relationship to images of suffering. It is after all 5 parts photo and 5 parts journalism, and who takes on which part is fluid.

My father has always sought security and stability in his job. His salary was never huge, but he supported a family that wanted for nothing. I set out to do as he had done, and to pursue a career that would provide me with a similar stability and security. But at the last minute I stepped away, because I wanted to be a writer instead. Stepping away was what was essential, and what was also fraught. Even after I received the Pulitzer Prize, my father reminded me that writing stories was not something to count on, and that I must always be prepared to earn my living in some other way. I listen to him, and at the same time I have learned not to listen, to wander to the edge of the precipice and to leap. And so, though a writer’s job is to look and listen, in order to become a writer I had to be deaf and blind.

I see now that my father, for all his practicality, gravitated toward a precipice of his own, leaving his country and his family, stripping himself of the reassurance of belonging. In reaction, for much of my life, I wanted to belong to a place, either the one my parents came from or to America, spread out before us. When I became a writer my desk became my home; there was no need for another.

Substitute the word “photographer” for “writer” and, if you knew what I looked like, you could easily imagine those words (well, minus the Pulitzer) coming out of my mouth. But they belong to Jhumpa Lahiri, possibly the best living writer to tackle the lives of educated first-generation immigrants of my generation. This was part of a piece she did for the recent Fiction Issue of the New Yorker. (A wonderful issue by the way, as much for the reflections of writers about their beginnings as for the fiction itself.)

It occurs to me, though, that there’s a more succinct way of putting all that. Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook exec) says in the July 11th issue of the same magazine:

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

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 I should never openly admit it.

Cruising a discussion forum the other day, I stumbled onto a debate about the gender biases inherent in the phrase “let yourself go.” Apparently the implications of this insult are much worse when leveled at women than men (read: objectification, body image issues and other similarly nasty words). Well, I think, this is why you should never openly admit it.

And then, “inelegantly and without my consent,” as Miranda July puts it, a blur of artist statements flashed before my eyes. Actually, just one, but it’s a doozy. Arturo Soto’s Blind Views is about “the blinding normalcy of the present,” not to mention the “specificity of the photographic trace.” Perhaps a fitting irony: the text is literally unreadable, at least on my screen. Whoa! I think. He’s really let himself go!

We don’t need anyone to really point out the cellulite and the cottage cheese and all the grisly details of how someone has visibly let themselves go. It’s pretty clear when we see it, as much as I hate to admit it. And despite all our attempts to pinpoint the exact fine line between well-versed theoretical gymnastics and nonsensical artspeak, we don’t need anyone to point out artspeak. Don’t you know it when you read it? There’s a warning bell indicating something gone awry that’s apparent from first glance, before any deeper analysis even happens.

Arturo Soto

The problem isn’t necessarily the use of jargon. Maybe it is very necessary to speak as Barthes did in certain contexts. The problem also isn’t the absence of meaning. I do in fact have a good sense of what Soto means, because his work is good and his other statements clear and concise. But the thing is, I can’t be sure. That’s what’s missing. A certain flavor of certainty. It’s not a problem with the sentiments behind the word – rather, it’s the failure of those words to communicate with any sort of assured clarity. He has let himself go because this is sloppy communication, this is talking around something rather than speaking to it.

Would the statement be different if the words “race,” “class,” “advertisements,” “small town” were included? These are the things I believe he is referring to, but I can’t really say one way or the other. What I hear is, “these photos have cultural significance.” But all photos do. Color in this one for us! Or, alternatively, leave the obvious unstated.

(If you must know, I have stolen this example from Utata. Sorry Arturo, nothing personal. I really do like your work and, in fact, your other statements. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or the right place at the right time?)

~

Stowe understood how influential narrative could be, and with ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ she achieved what endless speeches in the halls of Congress, political tracts, harangues, and newspaper articles failed to do: she made the reality of slavery palpable to the American public. As one Southern commentator noted, “Thousands will peruse an interesting story, and thus gradually imbibe the author’s views, that would not read ten lines of a mere argumentative volume on the same theme.” (“The Persuader“)

Visual art is old as anything, older than writing. Unless you see pictorial art as a stand-in for writing before we invented the word. In which case, my suspicion is that there is less of a dividing line between art and documentation, fiction and non-fiction, than we make it out to be.

Art is either a recognizable rendering of the flower in the field, recorded for our primal sensory pleasure or to evoke significant memories, or it is an explanation of the significance of such an object to our personal experience. When you can no longer recognize the flower at all (or at least when it ceases to be the primary subject), the effect of art enters a more gut-reaction, subliminal level on which user-oriented design or perhaps consumer-herding works. At that point, you may need the explanation, an explicit explanation.

For those more versed in the canon of a particular form, it may be easy to stay in the realm of social context relevant to personal experience, but for the unenlightened, a guiding hand is needed. Kittens, babies and sunsets are popular for a reason. We have collectively encountered kittens, babies and sunsets for a very long time. We have extensive experience with kittens, babies and sunsets, and our brains know precisely what to do with them. Modern art is a different story. As much as I’d like to claim it, we have not had experience with Stephen Shore (nor light bulbs, for that matter) since the beginning of time, though that may very well be a characteristic of the best of all possible worlds.

>
Sean Dreilinger‘s random baby vs Stephen Shore‘s light bulbs. Winner is…?

This is my explanation of why modern art annoys some people. “My kid could paint that” actually unpacks into: “My kid has no understanding of adult human life and therefore he paints meaningless abstractions / photographs random street corners that bear no relation to my life as an adult human.” Which is another way of saying, “I don’t understand what I, as an adult human, am supposed to take away from this. What does this have to do with my life? What do I learn from this?”

A lot of the murk of bad statements could be precipitated out with an infusion of teacherliness. If we (I!) wrote statements with a nod to the layman, we find a larger audience. It’s not about the lowest common denominator, it is simply acknowledging the fact that more people have had exposure to babies than to Stephen Shore. If you must stand in the inner circle, with Shore and Co., then do it, but do it clearly, without haziness (not to be confused with ambiguity). There is no shame in phrasing things in a way that everyone can understand.

In fact, if can you explain Stephen Shore in a way that babies can understand, I’m pretty sure you’re a genius. Or that at least there’s a teacher’s chair out there eagerly anticipating your sweet ass.

Graduation nears and I’ve got commencement speeches on the brain. Tom Hanks delivers this one about our choice between fear and faith at Yale this year.

While watching, I had an aha! moment. What he outlines in the following first paragraph is exactly what’s wrong with photojournalism. What our traditional, conflict-based, gritty photojournalism peddles is exactly fear. It is not the way to new solutions, but the death and suffering that evokes pity and fear. Just as surely as the TV news plays on our fears so does the type of photojournalism that tends to win, say, the World Press Photo awards.

Fear is a powerful physiological force in 2011. We have come to fear many things. Fear has become the commodity that sells as certainly as sex. Fear is cheap. Fear is easy. Fear gets attention. Fear is spread as fast as gossip, and is just as glamorous, juicy and profitable. Fear twists facts into fictions that become indistinguishable from ignorance. Fear is a profit-churning go-to with a whole being your whole family.

So Commencement Day arrives. Your work begins. Work that will not always be joyful to you. Labor that may not always fulfill you, and days that will seem like one damn thing after the other. Your career as human beings, as Americans and as graduates of Yale is to stand on the fulcrum between fear and faith – fear at your back and faith in front of you. Which way will you lean? Which way will you move? Move forward, move ever forward.

So how do we move forward?

Robert Krulwich, a science reporter who hosts Radiolab, gave a rousing commencement speech at Berkeley earlier this month. He told the story of Charles Kuralt as an indication of how times have changed. Given his big break at CBS in the time of Edward Murrow, Kuralt was devastated to find out that in this day and age, CBS had hired as station manager a man who raised ratings by putting attractive anchors on the beach in damp swimwear.

Krulwich warns, “You can’t trust big companies to keep you safe. I know most of you don’t and I’m just here to remind you: A job at NBC, ESPN, New York Times, NPR, may look safe today – but things change. They always change. And companies won’t protect you from that change. They can’t. And these days, they don’t even try.”

So what to do? Don’t wait your turn. Krulwich is talking specifically about journalism, but his remarks apply to all freelance-heavy fields and jobs done as a labor of love:

The people in charge, of course, don’t want to change. They like the music they’ve got. To the newcomers, they say, “Wait your turn”.

But in a world like this… rampant with new technologies, and new ways to do things, the newcomers… that means you… you here today, you have to trust your music… It’s how you talk to people your age, your generation. This is how we change.

So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.

And build a community of likeminded people around yourself. I don’t know that it was so different back in the day. Good advice because it will almost always be true.

Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

How they managed, I don’t know. Some of them worked by day and wrote by night. Some lived with their parents. Some must have struck deals with spouses or with friends.

But I notice that they get courage from each other. They’ve got a kind of community. At first it was virtual; they wrote each other. Then they met each other. Now they support each other. Watch out for each other. One day, I imagine, they will get and give each other jobs.

If you choose to go this way, you won’t have Charles Kuralt’s instant success. It will take time. It will probably be very lonely. A living room is not a news room. It doesn’t feel like one. You know you’re alone. And on the way, you might get scarily close to not being able to afford a living room.

And when it comes to security, to protection, your friends may take better care of you than CBS took care of Charles Kuralt in the end. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back.

(via Tim Wagner)

Lee Nelson

Lee Nelson must be my long lost older brother. I was born just about when these photographs were born. There were too many reviewees to meet everyone, so I never got a chance to sit down with Lee, but these two images are the ones I liked most the whole weekend. He has a way of treating space in that flat, broken up, almost confusing way that I love.

I’m drawn to the moment of looking at something and figuring out what the hell you’re looking at. One of the older methods of gathering information and valuable because there aren’t many moments in our domesticated lives when it really takes you a moment (not even half a second!) to figure out what you’re looking at. Everything is simple, messaged, categorized.

What a pity that the web experience lacks the (to use a hated word) aura of the print. Looking at this large matte prints is not the same as squinting at these little jpegs. What are we going to all do about this, I say!