App Land

I'm going to prognosticate. In fact, I'm predicting the imminent death of the internets. Well, not quite.

One needs neither wisdom nor courage to speculate that the web will be different in five years, in ways we can't imagine now. Change is a constant, in this game. The tricky bit is in guessing what the change will be.

Here's what I am smelling in the breeze. The increasing dominance of Mobile as a thing (fucking around on your phone, instead of on a computer) is leading increasing toward Apps and away from general web browsing. Don't let the bastards lie to you. An app is generally pretty much just a web browser that only goes to one web site. It's the holy fucking grail for web-based businesses. If they can just get you to download and use the App, now it's a gigantic goddamned problem to go to any other web sites. So, if my web site isn't utterly crappy and broken, and if I can get you to fire up my App, you're a whole bunch more likely to just stay put while I sell you to advertisers.

What's this mean?

Well, in theory it means less cross-fertilization in photographic style and method, perhaps?

Are we actually going to see anything other than the current complete homogeneity across the entire interwebs (inter-apps, whatever)? I dunno, it doesn't take very damn much cross-fertilization to create homogeneity. If you want grizzly bears that don't look pretty much like all the other grizzlies, you need to completely isolate them for quite a while. And then, zowie, white bears. WTF?!!!

There should be some more differentiation, at least. And perhaps even a little renewed enthusiasm, as people stop having it forced upon them quite so obviously that there are a billion Joes Just Like You out there.

I dunno. Cautiously optimistic. I don't see how this could be bad for photography.

Terrible for everything else? Oh, hell yeah. Definitely.

Attention Seekers and Kicking It Up A Notch

I'm going to talk about girls.

Girls use their appearance to get attention. I dunno if it's all socialized in to them, or if it's built in, or whatever. No, it's not universal, not every girl does it. Boys do it to, and so on. Please insert all the sensible caveats here. But it's an identifiable girl-related thing. Of ourse, we all like attention. Boys, girls, middle-aged men with angry blogs. But let's start with girls.

In my youth the competitive landscape consisted, mainly, of one's school. You had to compete with, at most, a couple hundred other girls for the attention of, well, whomever you wanted attention from. Generally the idiot jock boys who, by some bizarre consensus, became the desired attention-sources. But even attention from dweebs like me was not entirely without value. The competition wasn't with all the girls, of course, just the ones in roughly the same social stratum.

Enter Facebook. Abruptly there are 20 million girls roughly the same age as you are, all contending for attention. The attention sources are somewhat more amorphous, but the measuring technology is much better. You can gather Likes! Now you gotta up your game. It's time for more revealing outfits and a whole lot of duckface!

A related phenomenon. Boys with cameras have been talking girls out of their clothes since approximately 15 nanoseconds after the camera was invented.

Enter the Internet. Now we're getting a double-dose of attention: the model and the photographer are both getting attention. Dropping photos of naked or nearly naked young women into anywhere on the internet appears to flip a switch in people's brains. They return to the age of 17, and enter an attention-giving mode. In photographic forums, this manifests as a bunch of facile comments about photographic things. The light is always fantastic, the processing is wonderful, the mastery of technique is, well, masterful. Even when it's not. Nobody actually looks at any of that stuff, they're simply giving positive attention, mouthing the locally-recognized praise words. On wider social media it's Likes, +1s, and comments about how gorgeous you are, which really means how nearly naked you are.

Taking pictures of naked girls is an easy road to genuinely beautiful photos. It's pretty hard to go wrong.

It's an even easier road to Internet Approval, and it doesn't matter whether you go wrong or not. The only things that matter are the age of the model, her body shape, and her degree of nakedness. Literally. Nothing else matters. Find a hot model, get her naked, and photograph her any goddamned way you like, it just Does Not Matter. You'll be told that you a great photographer by pretty much everyone, except some other dudes who also photograph naked girls who will nitpick a bit mainly because you are stealing attention away from them.

Finally, we come around to kicking it up a notch.

Remember how we all seek attention? Maybe you're too shy or cheap to shoot pictures of naked girls. What can you do?

Well, find a place where attention is given, and then take pictures just like the ones that garner attention there. Then kick it up a notch. More saturation, more contrast, more of whatever it is they like there. This is the photographic analog of more naked, and who doesn't like more naked?

OK, so what?

Nothing in here is about photography. It's 100% about engineering your social situation.

But here's a puzzler for you: Isn't great photography supposed to be pretty much about social engineering? Doesn't that great iconic image create a social impact, and isn't that pretty much the point?

So why do we feel it's cheap and stupid to generate a desirable reaction with a naked girl, but it's awesome and cool to do it another way? I don't have an answer here, but I'm gonna noodle on it.

Transparent

Susan Sontag was very in to the idea of a photograph as a thing. It was a thing, back in the day. There was a physical piece of paper that had a picture on it. Sometimes it was a little rectangle of colored, translucent, material. It was an object, something you could see and touch and taste. I mentioned this in the previous remarks.

Digital imaging changed that. Almost no pictures are things in their own right now. They're an abstract pattern of 1s and 0s, replicated across the multiple disk drives of some cloud thing somewhere, generally. We render those on screens of one sort or another, a computer monitor, a tablet, a phone, sometimes even a digital picture frame.

There's still a thing, but you can't touch it any more, or taste it, and what it actually is is somewhat obscure and technical.

Worse, we generally render these things on a screen that we've become used to treating as a window. We look at many things on that screen. We don't think about the screen, we think of what we're looking at. In the case of a photograph, we're as likely to think of the thing photographed as anything else. The object or objects shown in the photograph are something real, something we could touch or taste. The photograph itself? It's an abstraction. The screen? Invisible and out of our thoughts.

Photographs have become transparent, as well as weightless and frictionless. When we take a picture, we're not taking a photograph any more, we're simply showing our friends, our family, something, this thing, this object or scene we have chosen to photograph. The act of photography is now, far more often than not, essentially equivalent to pointing a thing out to a friend we're walking with. It's the same thing as showing your friend the object in your hands "hey, check this out", it's the same thing as telling your friend to turn on the TV and flip to channel whatever, because you won't believe it.

I just tested with instagram. It takes 7 taps, and whatever I want to do for typing in a description. With a one word description, it took me 20 seconds, including launching the app, to share a picture of my Nikon FE2, which object happens to be sitting in front of me as I type. Instagram is notable in that I can (and did) select a little "effect", which makes us perhaps a little more conscious of the photograph-as-object. This is slightly more difficult than holding out my hand to show a friend an object, but only slightly. Compared to using film, it's indistinguishable from hold-out-my-hand. Check out my Nikon FE2.

There was always an element of this transparency, with a photograph. The essence of photojournalism is the illusion of transparency, that this is what is real, and you're seeing it. The transparency was never so dominant as now. We have to fight, now, to make pictures that are not just windows onto something else. When we think we've won that fight, then we have to fight to get past the "rule of thirds, we didn't you use fill flash, the highlights are blown out" technical irrelevancies.

I'm not saying you have to print, although a print is way to add weight and to force the issue of a photograph as a thing. I do suggest, though, that if you appreciate the photograph as a thing in and of itself, you've got a fight on your hands.

Weightless

This is a theme I've visited a few times in the past, here, for instance or here. The label "social media" will turn up a bunch more.

Time was, pictures had weight. Paintings, of course, were for posterity. They were for the unending future, for tomorrow but also for future generations, a permanent object. Photographs, on film, were also for the future. A instant was frozen, so we'd have that to look at next year, ten years hence, or when we were old. We took pictures of the kids so we'd have those moments in the future, and so our kids would have those moments to look back on when they were grown.

Pressing the shutter button cost something. A few cents for film, a few cents for processing, a few cents for a print. A factor at least as important and perhap moreso: the print bore the weight of permanence, of time. Susan Sontag remarked, glibly, that we did not photograph important moments, but that moments became important because they were photographed. While there's some truth to that, there was still a minimum bar of inherent importance the moment had to pass. We did not photograph our lunch, our coffee, that guy's hat. At least, not very much. There's a burden imposed on us when we commit some scene, some viewed object, to the permanent record, and we felt that as much as we felt the literal cost of film and print.

I've said most of this before.

With the idea of "use" in hand, though, we can push a little further. In past times, especially in the era of film, the "use" for a picture was almost always tied up in permanence. We made pictures because we wanted to use them, in some long-term way. The idea of taking a picture so that we should show a picture of a thing to our friends, and then throw the picture out, was absurd. Photographs might not be oil paintings, but they were certainly not so lightweight that we'd use them once and then discard them.

Besides, with the delays inherent in processing and printing, it would have been far too tedious.

Now, taking a picture is free. Sharing it is frictionless and instantaneous. And as a consequence, we are freed from the weight of time and of permanence. Photographs are free to be ephemera. They are an extension of our sight, we share a photograph thoughtlessly, trivially, not as an object in its own right, but as glimpse at the underlying thing. When a photograph is weightless and frictionless, the "use" can be anything at all, however trivial.

Mike, over on ToP, asks if we're in the middle of a new fad for photography. I think we're in the middle of something much bigger and more important, a sea change in the way we relate to photographs. Photographs are weightless and frictionless now. They float, they move, the appear and vanish. We are OK with that. This younger generations treat that as normal.

As artists, we seem to lean toward making things with weight. This probably explains, to a degree, the minor trend toward film, wet plate, and other permanent methods. It's a backlash against that weightlessness and ephemerality. The artists seeks to distinguish his work from the ephemera, to distinguish his work as permanent, as massy, as not trivial.

Here's a closing thought for the day: Why? If modern art has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that art need not be permanent. Ephemeral is OK. Tino Seghal, Banksy, many others. What can you make of that, in your own work?

It's a Web Of Pictures

People don't read, on the world wide web.

Well, that's not quite right. Still. Find yourself a context in which people can write things, and other people can reply to those things. Write some sort of thoughtful remark, say 200 words or so. Make sure it's on-topic, that is makes a single clear point, and that it backs that point up with a straightforward argument. Now watch for replies. You might have to do this a few times to actually draw a reply.

Almost invariably you will find that even a direct reply -- someone hit a "reply" button, and perhaps quoted some or all of your text -- will make almost no sense. It won't be a reply at all. You might ask yourself if the replier is insane, since your point was quite clear, and yet the reply seems to be about something else entirely.

People don't read, on the web. They're here to kill time, they're here on mobile devices that make reading text quite a chore. One could probably perform a study to measure the average amount of time people will devote to trying to read and grasp a comment, a forum remark, or any other "flow of conversation" snippet of content (as opposed to, say, a longer form news article). I bet the answer would come out to a small number of seconds.

People don't read. Instead, they skim. They pick out keywords and phrases, they try to guess what your position is based on that. They may slot you into a social group "my side" or "their side" if there's some sort of argument going on. Based on this sort of snap judgement, they will they dash off a reply based not on what you said, but what they imagine someone like you might say.

Ok, so what? Andrew's a damn crybaby, and nobody bothers to read what he wrote.

The important point here is that people allocate a very small number of seconds to some content you post. So, you're best off posting a picture.

If you write: went to a party last night, drank too much, it was awesome. Hung out with Billy and Susie, and laughed and laughed. Now I am hungover. people might read it. They might not. It's an impossibly tiny fragment of impossibly tiny text on their iPhone.

If you post a picture of you and Susie and Billy laughing very hard and visibly drunk, you communicate exactly the same thing, and people reading your social media thing will grasp the idea reliably and instantaneously. There is zero effort involved, no reading, no puzzling out of tiny letters. Instead of engaging a linear/reading part of the brain, what's engaged is the picture-recognizing parts of the brain, which work all-at-once.

Memes are somewhere in the middle. There's a picture, but there's words. What's nice about memes is that the structure of the picture with words on it enforces both a large font (easily read on mobile devices) and a very short lump of text (quickly read). It's not quite as instantaneous as a picture alone, but it is grasped by the reader very very fast indeed. It is a fine way to make some point in, nearly, an instant.

It's a world wide web of pictures. It's what people want, it's what they consume.

Hooray, photography for the win! (as civilization crumbles!)

Digital Vernacular

This posting is really a variation on this theme.

There's this thing called Vernacular Photography, which is really a nice and arty way of saying "snapshots" without saying "snapshots". The word snapshot is mainly used these days as a pejorative, and like most pejoratives really means "I suck and have no confidence" rather than anything about the picture under discussion.

Vernacular photography, let's say, mainly means pictures which appeal mainly to people with a a direct connection to the subject matter. They lack universals, they make no particular connection with the average person on the street. The child blowing out her birthday candles. Grandma in front of the Christmas tree. Bob standing in front of the Eiffel Tower.

There has been an interesting change in this with the advent of digital cameras. In the first place, there's a whole lot more of it. Several orders of magnitude, at least. In the second place, it's become quite different.

In years past, when the average family in the USA had perhaps one 35mm camera, that average family shot a few rolls of film each year. Maybe 1 roll, maybe 5. It was a pretty rare family that shot as many as 10 rolls. Film was therefore a resource to be husbanded, at least a bit. We don't see 100 shots from little Timmy's birthday party. We see 2 or 4 or maybe 10. A few of these are no good, out of focus, overexposed. Of the ones remaining, they tend to be Timmy posed stiffly in front of presents and Timmy blowing out the candles. In fact, the stiffly posed in front of something picture is practically the iconic American Snapshot from the 20th century.

Digital cameras have changed all that. Exposures are free. We might still get some people stiffly posed in front of things, but we also get silly things, goofy expressions, people falling down, Timmy covered with icing, because, why not? Free!

The vernacular has changed, it has broadened to include rather more genuine moments of life. There are what seem to be literally new icons in the vernacular. The mirror-iPhone-selfie is ubiquitous, and has perhaps no pre-digital analog. See also groups of drunk white chicks throwing fake gang signs, the duckface selfie, the photograph of my lunch or of my latte.

Along with this we see changes in how we use pictures. This new vernacular is a product not only of the cheapness of exposures, but of the venues and methods for sharing. It's not at all clear to me whether one drives the other, or if they simply evolved together, but there is no doubt that the new ways we use pictures work very well with the new pictures we are making. The drunk white chicks throwing gang signs is the perfect facebook picture. It says "we had a very fun time last night."

The very permanence of film and of prints, together with the associated costs, pressured the photographer to make pictures that were worth keeping, pictures that we'd want to look at in 20 years. You can certainly argue with the methodology, but the prevailing wisdom was that pictures worth keeping were mainly someone posed stiffly in front of something else. Proof that we were somewhere, or that something occurred, and a carefully arranged opportunity for the person or people in the picture to look their best.

Now that we're sharing online, now that pictures are ephemera, there's less perceived necessity to make permanent pictures. The content is permitted to be ephemeral, to be trivial, to be goofy and silly. We needn't look our best in these pictures, we needn't even try. In a week or two, they'll be so far down the timeline nobody sees them anyways. It's not like these damned things are going in a shoebox where we'll stumble across them every 5 years or so, to our increasing embarrassment.

There's probably something to be said here about the other ways we're using and displaying pictures, as well. We still print, but now we make books, we use digital picture frames, we email photos, we send them from one cell phone to another, and so on. More, perhaps, on that later.

A Bad Article, But..

This article by Craig Mod in The New Yorker is, maybe, worth your time. Skim it, but read the last couple paragraphs more closely.

Basically the article says "I am very cool, I live in Japan, and I have had a lot of cool cameras and I shot film, and stuff." which is pretty typical of the shorter pieces in this magazine. They're all auto-hagiography disguised as articles about something or other, and this one certainly is no exception.

What makes this one interesting to me is the bit at the end, where he makes a couple of points, jumbled together.

The first is that digital photographs, especially those made with smart devices that are not necessarily just cameras, potentially have a lot of metadata attached to them. This makes a new object, it's analogous to "picture + title" but instead it's "picture + extra data" where the extra data might be as odd as radiation levels, or as mundane as map co-ordinates.

This is an interesting idea. (I admit that I am dubious, but...) He suggests that a mundane picture taken near the site of a nuclear accident (in Japan, natch, Craig Mod is so interesting!), will be, when annotated with the ambient radiation levels, somehow elevated to something more. This is, I think, wrong. The interesting information is the radiation level, and attaching that to a shitty photograph just makes that information less accessible. It is possible that his example is just bad. He's fallen in to the Wired Magazine trap of "if it has data somewhere in it, it must be ever so cool."

There may be special cases. I can imagine that a portfolio tied to map co-ordinates which connect a sequence of pictures to a sequence of locations might create something bigger than just the portfolio, for example.

Regardless, it is certainly not true that hanging a bunch of data on just any old picture is going to make it better, any more than a really cool title will. Occasionally, hanging appropriate and interesting data on a picture, or group of pictures, could elevate that picture, or group of pictures to something bigger.

Anyways, that is the bit that's potentially interesting, and perhaps worth your time. Perhaps worth a bit of a think. It's something new that is enabled by the digital era. In what follows here, I'm just going to burn the rest of Mod's piece to the ground, there's not a lot of interesting commentary after this!

The second point Mod makes is, roughly, the same point everyone else who's paying attention has been making for the last few years: that photographs are for sharing, that connectivity is the essence of how we use pictures these days. Or, more precisely, of one important way that we use pictures these days. He cites Sontag, apparently just to give us the impression that of course he's read Sontag la de da, but the usage makes it clear that if he did read Sontag he didn't understand anything.

Sontag makes the point that things which are not photographed are lessened in our collective mind. We understand the world, to some degree, through photographs of it, and therefore what is not photographed is not as forward in our consciousness. This is perfectly correct. Mod then leaps to the conclusion that now it is not the photography of the thing that makes it important, it is the connectivity, the sharing of the pictures of it.

Again, we see the sloppy Wired Magazine thinking: it's the network, it's the data, it's the connectivity, the future is so darn cool because the thing itself doesn't matter, it's the connectivity, the network, the data, the access that matters.

He's missed some things. It was always the sharing and connectivity that created the effect. An undeveloped roll of film never did anything to enhance the social importance of a thing. Furthermore, the increased connectivity and sharing is on the whole lessening the importance of things, in Sontag's sense.

Her point was that the world was divided in to things photographed, and things not photographed, and that this division had certain effects. This division no longer exists, all things are photographed. It is all photographed, it is all shared.

It was always the case that a thing un-photographed and un-shared (in the 1970s sense) was lessened in importance, this has not changed. The change is that everything is photographed and shared, so, in the way that Sontag meant, nothing is more important than anything else. Being photographed is no longer differentiates the uninteresting from the interesting, the trivial from the important.

Of course, trivial and important things still exist. Interesting and uninteresting things still exist. The change is that photography no longer has much role is revealing or dictating these differences.

This is important, and Mod completely missed it, because he wanted to make some labored analogy about editing photos on an iPhone and developing prints in wet chemistry.

Prints

I tend to go on and on about how digital photographs, social media, most-recent-first viewing, and so on have changed our relationship with pictures. We treat them as temporary and ephemeral.

Recently I was asked "well, what about prints?" and I have to say I have no idea!

It is said that we're making more prints than ever. As a percentage of photos shot, it's dropped off to so close to zero as to make no difference, but in absolute terms we're making more prints than we ever have.

Surely many of these are local drugstore prints, not necessarily very good, but exactly equivalent to the old school business of dropping off a roll of film and picking up an envelope of prints an hour later, or the next day. Probably these are a little better, overall, since we're generally selecting the pictures we want before ordering prints.

Surely many of the prints we're making are in the now-ubiquitous photo book. Everyone on earth, it seems, is running a business to print books of pictures. Some of them are pretty bad, others are pretty good. They mostly let you do a little book design, so the results are usually pretty awful, most people not being book designers. Still, there's a lot of these things being churned out. Surely we give a little more weight to a Book than to a handful of slippery prints?

I know how my family treats these things, but I can't take that as typical. I don't even treat my digital/online pictures in a typical fashion. I print, frame, and hang pictures. I make nice books of the very very best pictures, which books we take down and look at several times a year. But we're atypical.

I don't know what typical is, on this point. But I'll keep my eyes open for analysis and discussion! Maybe someone knows, or has an idea.

Novelty

We are novelty-seeking animals. New things stimulate us in ways that familiar things do not. Conversely, familiar things stimulate us in ways that new things do not. For reasons I do not pretend to understand, this novelty seeking is what powers the internet, the world wide web. Web sites do not remain static, providing a comfortable and familiar experience. Web sites are constantly updating, changing, replacing old content with new. It is this property, we have determined, that makes web sites "sticky".

A sticky web site keeps us coming back, and it keeps us hitting Refresh or whatever the relevant button is. This keeps us present, and allows us to look at more ads, and that is what makes the web go 'round.

I've written some stuff on how getting people to generate new content for one another on your web site is far and away the cheapest and most successful way to produce this constant stream of new content. See also social networking. There seems to me to be a bigger issue here, though.

As photography went digital, it found a natural connection to this digital network. As that network converged rapidly on a newest-first display model, with a constant stream of new content, so changed photography. This is the source of our new relationship with pictures. Our relationship with pictures is this ephemeral thing, this relationship in which we glance at new pictures briskly, seeing them largely in terms of other pictures we have seen rather than as themselves.

This is in stark contrast to the old model in which pictures were more or less permanent, they were static. Our relationship with them was centered around sameness, nostalgia, the moment of the past frozen forever on the print. Pictures used to tickle those other pathways to pleasure: the permanent, the familiar, the old. Now pictures work quite the other way around, they are yet another source of the new, the novel, but not too novel, not too new. They're familiar faces, familiar tropes, familiar arrangements of shape and light, but in a new picture. Now we want our pictures to be, always, a new version of the same old thing. Our friends at a new party. A different, new, sunset, rendered in more or less the same way.

I hate this so much.

People don't look at pictures. Try putting up pictures for critique in some online venue for critique. Pay attention. You will, quite likely, notice after a while that some people are quite literally not seeing your picture. They're seeing a bunch of similar pictures in their memory, and noticing only that yours is darker, or lighter, or greener, and softer. Then they will offer critique reading, in toto: "too dark", "too light", "too green", or "too soft". Part of this is simple inattention and laziness, but I feel sure that at least part of this is that we're training ourselves not to look. Each picture is merely a trivial point in a larger river of imagery washing over us, and is to be seen and understood only as a sample of a much larger collection of similar things.

Opt out. Make pictures and portfolios for permanence, for nostalgia.

That's what I'm doing, anyways.

Curation

This is my blog, so I ask you to indulge me a little here and permit me to make the following bald assertion: the proper purpose of art, and of curating art, is to make available to the public work that will connect with members of the public, that will challenge us, that will teach us, that will open us to larger ideas and feelings, that will expand us, that will entertain us, that will move us. Art is, or should be, ultimately, for The People, for their greater enrichment.

Modern art curators, gallerists, and so on would, most likely, sign on to some or all of this. They would be quite unlikely to admit that the actual (as opposed to proper) purpose of modern Art Curation is to create an artificially limited supply of what is basically a wildly available product, in order to create the impression of a closed and exclusive club, with the aim of creating and maintaining a largely artificial and extremely lucrative market.

I beg your indulgence a little further, and baldly claim that, claims to the contrary, that is precisely what modern art is about. Like all human institutions, the goals and desires of the people in it are largely irrelevant. The institution itself behaves in such a way as to entrench its position and to expand itself and its influence. So, while individual curators and gallerists and artists may earnestly desire to serve some greater good, the institution as a whole does not. Among other things, it has devised its own language which seems to exist primarily to exclude the unwashed.

Whether or not you believe my assertion that the institution of Art operates largely to protect a lucrative market, perhaps we can agree that one would have a hard row to hoe should one choose to argue that the modern institution of Art effectively serves some greater public good.

There have been some motions toward democratizing access to art. Various web sites are springing up to offer art at various price points to various larger markets. These, I think, are really just an attempt to expand the exclusive club, and to thereby cash in. The aim is not to actually revolutionize the institution, but merely to join it and make a bunch of money. Making the same old art available to people who merely have a few thousand to spend isn't really the same thing as democratizing art itself.

On the opposite side, we have a sort of mass curation process which occurs in public, on web sites like flickr and so on. Rather than a cadre of credentialed gatekeepers trimming down the flood of available art into a small and manageable set of reliable workers and a right-sized flow of Certified Important Art, we have everyone on the planet empowered to Like or +1 anything, and to thereby to collectively elevate certain work over other work. By skimming the very top of this totem pole, we get a set of.. something.

The trouble on this end is that when the tools are a Like button and a 100,000,000 people, what you get is a homogenized collection of pictures that people generally tend to like. Add in some social norming, and the result is pretty uninspiring.

The Fine Art side has at least a chance of selecting work that is challenging, educational, expanding, interesting. The people in the system do, after all, perceive it as their job to do just that.

The democratic side doesn't. It is incapable of generating anything except some lowest common denominator of likable work. This is not because people are awful, it's simply that there are too many of them. Average up enough disparate opinions, and all the interesting stuff gets cancelled out. Every single person on 500px could have excellent taste in some sort of crazy avante garde form, but when you average up what the all like, that stuff gets eliminated because not enough people like any individual branch of the crazy.

So on the one side we have a Fine Art System which is devoted mainly toward maintaining a small and lucrative market, and on the other side we have homogenized and uninteresting pablum. The currently available systems are: Oligarchy, and Mob Rule. Neither one seems to be serving The People all that well, but at least nobody seems to be getting shot. Which is nice.

What is needed is some sort of middle ground. Simply replacing the gallerists and curators with a new set of Approved Gatekeepers won't help, they'll just descend into their own little world of madness. We don't need different oligarchs, and we certainly don't need more Mob Rule.

We need some way to generate small, interested, opinionated, and passionate groups of people who will make and curate art. We need some way to organize these groups, to rate and rank that output, and to make their output available. We surely do not lack for small, interested, opinionated, and passionate groups of people. The trouble is that these groups are of two kinds: the kind nobody has every heard of or ever will; and the kind that are already in charge, have been sucked into the Fine Art World, and are now serving the lucrative market. Perhaps we want something like a representative democracy, the traditional middle ground between oligarchy and the mob.

There are two problems:

• surfacing the work of little groups of weirdos so we, the general public, and jerks on the internet, can find it.
• preventing little groups of weirdos from cementing themselves into place as permanent gatekeepers of taste.

I'm tempted to propose the phrase "continuous revolution" at this point, except that history has provided this phrase with the connotation "most obnoxious gang of oligarchs ever" so it's probably a bad choice. In any case, my notion of a cellular social network is clearly an attempt to provide precisely this sort of thing.

There's plenty of excellent photography out there, plenty of excellent Art. What is needed is a mechanism by which more of it can be found, anointed with the magical oil of Good Art and brought forward to the people, a mechanism which does not reward the ability to chatter about playing with the dialectics of reality, but rather rewards actually challenging, entertaining, and enriching. We need enough mob rule to keep the oligarchs down, and enough oligarchy to force some challenge, some variety, some difficulty onto us, The People.

Got any ideas?

Social Network Rights Grab!

Everyone loves social media. There's Facebook for everyone (as of this writing) and there's instagram and a 100 similar sites for photographers. There's social networking sites for musicians, and, I assume, for every other conceivable interest group. Everybody loves this stuff. Nobody will pay for it. Why should we? There's always a new site willing to give it away as part of their effort to build traffic. We won't pay up front, we won't click ads, we don't like ads. The tech-savvy will block ads entirely. Anyways, ads aren't selling for what they used to, because they don't really work.

I think I am justified in asking what the hell is supposed to pay for these services.

Consider a picture you have taken. What is the value to you of this picture? In general, in almost all cases for almost all photographers, the value is emotional and personal. The picture is a thing we made, and perhaps it records a person, event, or object that matters to us. We derive pleasure from looking at the picture, and from allowing other people to look at it. These two things are essentially the only things we will ever do with the picture. A few pictures we may print or place inside of a larger derived work (a photo book or video slideshow with music, that sort of thing) which is just a bigger version of the same thing -- we want to look at the larger work, we want to show it to other people. In the bundle of rights that are attached to a picture, we really only will ever exercise a non-exclusive license for a small set of personal uses.

The bundle of rights associated with the picture has no hard value to us, we won't be getting any money nor will be we bartering, or otherwise converting any of those rights into value. Protecting those rights is of no consequence either, no harm will come to us if some of those rights are acquired by another party, always assuming we retain the aforementioned personal-use rights. There are, of course, exceptions. More on that in the sequel.

Every time some web site makes a "rights grab" by asserting some sort of usage policy which grants the corporate entity some sort of rights to content you upload, we are urged to rise up in rebellion. We are told that this is unacceptable and outrageous. Those rights which have, to us, exactly no value whatsoever, must be defended at all costs. So now we won't pay for it, we won't click on ads, and we won't even give up something of no value at all to us in exchange for the use of a service? What kind of society are we? This is insane.

Now, more on those special cases where the bundle of rights does have some value. If you happen to be selling licenses to your content, it would certainly behoove you to read and understand policies of this sort carefully. It's not likely, but you certainly could end up in a situation where you have explicitly sold a license, and then by uploading some content somewhere have accidentally given away a license which conflicts with the one you sold. Now you have a problem, and potentially quite a big one. Be careful and pay attention.

For most of us, most of our pictures have a bundle of rights with zero value to us. Be generous, share. I don't like giant corporations or even small ones any better than you do, but I do know that if I'm using a service they provide, they gotta get compensated somehow. If they can figure out how to turn my straw into their gold, more power to 'em. It's just straw, to me.

The Dishonesty of Straight Photography

Somewhere at the beginning of the 20th century, "straight photography" became the dominant mode of photography. I think it was a backlash and so on, whatever. I don't really care all that much about the history. The point is that for the last 100 years or so the default setting for photography has been: sharp, in focus, exposed to give detail throughout the tonal range. That is, pictures which show us as much as is technically possible about what was actually in front of the camera.

This is not to say that straight photography is all there is or has been. I mean only that other styles are viewed as relative to straight photography. Straight photography is the dominant thing. If you want to be "edgy" or "creative" start doing something else. Further, photojournalism and other reportage genres are all straight.

The trouble is, a straight photograph isn't any more honest than a.. bent one. In fact, it's arguably less honest. By presenting itself sharp and clear, with details in the highlights and the shadows, and with a fleet of social conventions attached, we take a straight photograph as truthful. It is in fact no more truthful than any other photograph. Straight photography methods allow the photographer to paint a veneer of truthiness on anything. A bent photograph might be more honest, more truthful, and more real. What newspaper today would publish a photograph that shows what it felt like to be there over a straight photograph that does nothing of the sort. See also Robert Capa's "Falling Soldier", which would be much lesser as a straight photograph, which might have been staged, but which may be the single greatest photojournalistic shot ever made.

I rather hope that we are on the verge of a new idea of photography, one which finally steps away from straight as the standard. With instagram filters, with easy digital processing, with any number of approaches and idioms in play, one at least can imagine a new generation of society which treats photographs with a skepticism as well as a little more art. One can imagine a future, I suppose, in which the New York Times publishes an honest picture of what it felt like to be there over a dishonestly cropped straight photograph that supports a lie about what it was to be there.

That might be pushing it, though..

Advertising and Social Media

I'm not an ad guy. Still, there's some stuff that you can figure out that's pretty obvious when you live in an advertising-steeped culture like mine. Ads serve at least two purposes. The first is to directly sell stuff, to induce you to go out and buy a thing. The second is to create an idea in you, and more generally in society, about some brand or product. BMW's advertising is rarely trying to induce me to go buy a car. BMW's advertising is almost entirely about creating and maintaining a widely held belief that BMW automobiles are of high quality, and are fun to drive. Internet ads have traditionally focused on the first one, which isn't as important, and internet ads are pretty unsuccessful anyways. The result is that internet advertising is kind of going in the crapper according to some analysts, as of this writing. I'm interested in the second one right now.

We are dramatically influenced in our beliefs by what we perceive as the beliefs of our peers and our friends. To a large extent, our beliefs are roughly the average of what we perceive as the beliefs held by "people like ourselves." If you were, for instance, to hand out plain white flyers that read simply:

People like you are saying that Geffenmacht cars are incredibly luxurious.

the result a month or so after is almost certainly that some people would think that this entirely fictional brand of automobile was quite luxurious. I don't know if anyone has done this specific experiment, but I bet it would work, and there's tons of science that says stuff kind of this sort pretty much works much better than you'd think it does. We are much simpler creatures than we imagine we are.

Obviously this is some sort of network effect. If BMW can convince many of my peers and friends that their cars are fun to drive, if they can convince people with whom I feel connected, they are well on their way toward convincing me that BMW cars are fun to drive. Whether BMW cars are in fact fun to drive is largely beside the point, although if it is true it makes the job of convincing people that much easier.

Network effect. Social network. Wait a second!

We're starting to see advertisers using "user created content", which is to say pictures from instagram and the like, in their advertisements. Of course this will resonate with the customers. These are real people, people like me, enjoying that product in a real setting. This is true. I feel this is only the tip of the iceberg, however.

Let us suppose that you want to create the idea that your new energy drink, POWJUS, is a great drink at parties. What if you could arrange for certain pictures on instagram or facebook, the pictures of parties in which a bottle of POWJUS appears, to be featured in someone's feed with somewhat greater probability. What if, when I log in to my social media network of choice, I am shown somewhat more often than random, pictures of my friends and peers drinking POWJUS at parties? This can be done with software. There will be some misses, the software may occasionally identify a cloud as a bottle of POWJUS and a herd of buffalo as a party, but we're talking about just nudging things up in the rankings a bit, so they appear somewhat more often. Some misses is OK.

I'll tell you this, if it's not being done already it's because someone's asleep at the switch. This stuff ain't even hard. It's all very well to push tweets about how awesome Coca-Cola is forward. How much better is it to push forward actual real true pictures of people just like me drinking Coca-Cola, driving BMWs, and smoking Marlboros? I can see it. It's real. It's true. My peers actually do all those things and, apparently, they do them quite a lot.

Mission accomplished! You just can't buy this kind of exposure! Oh, wait, actually, now you can.

Welcome to the future!

An Experiment in Curation

Over on ToP, Mike's running a fascinating experiment (see that link, and then later posts with the first cut of edited pictures and so on).

What makes this interesting to me is that it presents something of a solution to the "age of a trillion pictures" problem: How on earth shall we find new, good, work? We can simply dip in at random to the stream of pictures. We can do some sort of word of mouth thing, perhaps. It's not clear what results any of those will produce.

What Mike has done is:

• start with a relatively small group of very interested, serious people: his regular readers (maybe 100,000 people? small-ish)
• give them a theme and a narrow time window
• receive on the order of 1000 pictures
• edit that down to a small batch

Mike's audience is big enough to contain some genuinely "new artists" whatever that means, interested and serious enough to contain a high percentage of pretty good artists, and and small enough to produce a manageable set of pictures to start from.

As of this writing, he's posted a few dozen of the best, sifted from the submissions he's received. The work is truly excellent.

The question is, can this be replicated? Can you bottle it? If you can, this could be a significant channel for "breaking" new artists in this brave new world of a trillion photographs. That would be nice.

Sharing as Interior Monologue

Why do I write this blog? Obviously I started it for fame, fortune, and bevies of nubile maidens. Lately, though, these motivators have dropped off in importance. Now I write it mostly to help me sort of ideas that I want to get sorted out. By organizing my thoughts into little essays, and polishing them up sufficiently for "public" consumption, I figure out quite a lot of things and get a lot of ideas straight in my own mind. As a side note, my personal photography has improved, at least in my own eyes, immensely over the last year I've been writing this.

My current theory is that twitter and tumblr and facebook status updates and all of that short-form blogging is closely allied to what I am doing, but in a less organized, less edited and polished, fashion. Where a longer form blog represents some thoughts that have been examined, re-arranged to make more sense, and polished up, "micro-blogging" represents (frequently) something much closer to a raw stream of consciousness. When you're limited to 140 characters but can make remarks as frequently as you like, at any time and from anywhere, you tend to do less editing and polishing.

As we have that constant, silent, conversation with ourselves, our interior monologue, some things naturally seem more important than others. Some thoughts seem particularly apt, some observations of the world and of ourselves seem particularly interesting. For the avid twitter user, at some threshold these apt and interesting elements of the interior monologue get copied into a smartphone and sent out to the world. "World hunger is a political problem" "I just saw a cat with one blue eye and one orange one".

Social media users with particularly interesting observations, or particularly dull friends, or particularly many friends, get a little positive feedback. Social media services make it a one-click operation to generate approval, you can Like, or +1, or re-tweet with almost no effort. This generates positive feedback. This, in turn, tends to increase the amount of interior monologue that is surfaced onto the internet.

Essentially, it's mumbling onto the network like a crazy person, egged on by our idiot friends.

Twitter and similar textual systems allow us to offer up a lightly curated version of the verbal, conscious, part of our own thought processes to the world, and in fact encourage us to do so.

What about pictures?

Being non-verbal they're not really interior monologue, are they? I think they tend to be expressions of the observational aspect of the interior monologue. They are a manifestation of the "I just saw a cat with one blue eye and one orange eye" that gets interjected into that monologue from time to time. When we first get a camera, we do a variation of this. Of course, we're looking for things to take pictures of, we're not merely trotting through life observing things, but there is nonetheless the impulse to photograph random interesting things.

With a film camera, we must husband our film as we wander around taking pictures. Even with a digital camera, after the first love affair with pictures wears off, when we go out to take pictures we're husbanding our editing time. We don't shoot just everything cool, because we know we're going to spend some time picking out the good ones, at least. So we try to make good ones, not just everything.

The ability to dump pictures into a chronological infinitely deep stream with a couple button clicks removes all these brakes. There is no cost. There's no film to buy. We're not going to edit. We're not going to pick out the best ones. Perhaps our friends will, with their Like buttons, but we're not going to. Editing is replaced with simply dropping pictures into a time-stream, where shortly they will be obliterated by a mass of newer pictures. It's all ephemeral. Our observational impulse is unbridled. We can now tweet about the cat, and post a picture of the same cat with a cool sepia vignette, and the whole thing takes only slightly more effort than the internal thought "wow, that cat has different colored eyes"

Is this an indictment? Not really. The only difference between a busy twitter feed of nothing and this blog and the most erudite of books is one of degree. Each represents a selected subset of an interior monologue. This blog is a little more organized, edited, and polished. A good book is more organized, more edited, the thoughts are more thoroughly curated.

Henri Cartier-Bresson's street photography, just to pick an example, is merely a carefully curated selection of his "hey, will you look at that" moments.

In short, you're all just a bunch of crazy people mumbling onto the network, but that's OK.

Alternative Compensation

Alternative Compensation is at least one of the terms of art for how creative types can arrange to get paid for their creative works, apart from copyright enforced mechanisms.

How, specifically, can a photographer get compensated for doing photography, in a world where copyright does not exist? Since in many areas of photography copyright does not exist in any effective fashion, we can look at the world as it exists today. There might be some other ideas rattling around as well, though.

Work for hire is pretty what most photographers who make money do anyways. You're hired to shoot the wedding, the engagement. You might even be hired to shoot photographs of local newsworthy events. Your technical skills, your equipment, and your time, are rented to the customer. This is essentially how plumbers and most other skilled laborers operate. It's how I work, even though I produce copyrighted materials for a living. My employer pays me for my labor, and my employer enjoys the copyright protection on the fruits of that labor.

This is how the world works now. Wedding photographs and the like get copied and passed around to anybody who has the slightest interest in possessing a copy, despite copyright law. Copyright law is, for almost all intents and purposes (but not quite - there are rare exceptions) absent here.

What else?

Musicians are allegedly returning to performance as a primary money maker. Rather than relying on copyright law to protect the revenue stream from easily reproduced digital songs (which revenue stream mostly doesn't go to the musicians anyways) they are providing the consumer with an experience. They provide an entertaining live show. They also sell schwag, shirts and whatnot. This leads us to:

There's always a market for things, objects. Unique objects are better, but objects with any kind of perceived value can be sold for money. Ordinary photographic prints have very little perceived value, but there are other related objects.

So you can, at least, provide experiences and objects. Interestingly, we see experiences already being offered.

The photobooth, a computer set up with a webcam or a better camera, and some software, is increasingly an entertainment provided at events. The event photographer is perhaps uniquely positioned to offer this, and to sift through the results. This provides both an experience, an entertainment within the larger event, and a collection of pictures.

The currently-popular "trash the dress" event is another photographically themed entertainment, which can be orchestrated by the photographer.

As for objects, the standard photographic print used to be the object provided by the professional photographer. A high quality print was viewed as a valuable object in its own right. This is simply no longer true. Given a digital image I can have any number of prints at any number of sizes and qualities made for me for any price I care to pay. A photographer providing this to me strikes me purely as a way for the photographer to clip off a piece of the action, when I can place an order with a couple of clicks of the mouse.

There are processes such as tintypes and Ambrotypes which produce unique objects. These are indeed making a little bit of a comeback in the portrait market, mostly aimed at monied hipsters. There might be a market for an add-on to the usual wedding package, here, as well.

It's not clear to me what else there is, but if I was a wedding photographer I'd be thinking furiously about what kinds experiences and objects I could be featuring as add-ons to the basic wedding package.

Photographs as Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property is a pretty big area, but I'm going to pretty much stick to pictures here. Copyright, for our purposes, is the legal machinery around ownership of intellectual property (yes, yes, there's lots of other stuff, patents and trademarks and trade secrets blah blah blah, I don't care). A photograph is copyrighted, and it is that legal machinery that provides the maker of the photograph with a meaningful idea of "ownership" of that photograph as an abstract image, not merely as a physical artifact.

Intellectual property in and of itself is arguably a pretty odd idea, and it is certainly just a social construct. The idea of property of any kind is a social construct, after all, and ideas like "land ownership" are virtually incomprehensible to some societies which remain with us to this very day. Be that as it may, we have a notion of intellectual property in general, and legal machinery exists very specifically in the western world to create a clear notion of ownership of a picture.

Another traditional and particularly clear example of a copyrightable piece of intellectual property is the novel. The particular sequence of words that makes up a novel, the sequence itself, is an ownable thing, a piece of property. There are a couple of dimensions to this:

Until recently it was pretty hard to actually make a copy of a novel. The means of production was constrained. An individual could copy a novel, but it was quite difficult. Even the dullest person could see that there was some value in a physical copy of a novel.

Orthogonally, even the dullest person can see that creating a novel, devising that unique sequence of words, is real labor. Not just any fool can be taught to do it even acceptably well, it takes a degree of talent. It takes many many hours of mental effort. Furthermore, the maker's stamp is more or less indelible: while many people can write a novel, only Agatha Christie could have written Murder on the Orient Express.

There are, therefore, at least two dimensions in which people perceived value in a copy of a novel, value in the book they held in their hand.

Contrast this with, say, a typical wedding photographer in this current era:

Making copies of the photographs from the wedding costs nothing. It's all digital, and I can have my local drugstore print out copies of digital photographs for pennies a picture. I can post a digital picture to a dozen places on the internet to share with my friends for nothing at all. Digital images have perceived value approximately equal to 0 cents.

Taking wedding photographs is certainly a craft, like plumbing. Not just any fool can do it, but almost any fool can be taught to do it. Furthermore, wedding photographs tend to look pretty much the same. Bob's wedding photography may be distinctly different from Alice's wedding photography, but Ralph's, Susan's, and Albert's wedding photographs look a heck of a lot like Bob's. Finally, it's pretty easy. There's some hours of labor involved, before, during, and after. It's work, but it's a lot more like plumbing than it's like defusing bombs or writing novels.

Photography loses in both dimensions: it's digital, and thus trivially copied; and it's easy.

The perceived value of wedding photographs has always been quite different from the perceived value of a novel. People have always suspected that commercial photography is really work for hire. They are paying to have something recorded, and are vaguely surprised and irritated to find that the photographer mysteriously retains ownership of the pictures. A plumber does not retain ownership of the pipes he installs in my home, after all.

This perception is increasing, and will continue to. More and more, people are simply ignoring the copyright held by the photographers, and posting wedding photos, school photos, portraits, and other commercial work on their facebook pages. The sole-practitioner photographer can rail about it and send angry letters, but not much else. The commercial photographer is free to "educate" the customer about copyright, and to try to explain why it is that they "own" the pictures. The commercial photographer is also free to buzz down to the beach and attempt to hold back the tide with a stick. Insofar as anyone bothers to think about it, there simply does not seem to be a supportable rationale for "ownership" of the intellectual property inhering in wedding photographs. There's the law, but the law appears to be an ass.

Digital media has dropped the value of a song, a picture, a movie, to very close to zero. Stock photographs are virtually free. I expect to be able to watch all the movies I want for a modest monthly fee. Ditto music. A song is worth -- at most -- 99 cents, and to many people that's much too high. It is simply not reasonable to expect that wedding pictures, engagement photos, baby portraits, are going to retain high values. They are not. When you shoot these things, the perception today is largely that you are performing skilled labor for a period of time, and that alone is the basis on which you should be compensated.

The legal machinery of copyright isn't going anywhere any time soon, but it is increasingly becoming irrelevant and ignorable. Speed limits aren't going anywhere any time soon either, but it's not like anyone follows them.

This sucks for people who want to make money taking pictures. I have some ideas on that point, coming up.

The Shadow World II

This is a follow on to this prior remark.

To Susan Sontag, writing in the 1970s, the print was the photograph. Photographs did not exist in any interesting way apart from the print. Moving pictures had a couple of other varieties, but photographs were prints. This is, obviously, no longer the case. While we may be printing more photographs than ever, as a percentage of the images we actually see the print is negligible. Even printed photographs in magazines have the ephemeral nature that the online ones do, in the sense that they are with us only for a short time before fading in to memory.

To Sontag, a photograph froze a moment in amber and converted it to a Past Moment instantly. The moment would then recede slowly in time, changing in our minds as it went, but always frozen there in the print. The print would deteriorate, the image itself might change a little, and our idea of the image would certainly change. An old photograph is interesting largely because it is old, because it is a moment from long long ago, preserved for our amusement and education. The subject becomes less and less important. This strikes me as an essentially accurate characterization of the situation in the 1970s. It might not be all-encompassing, but it covers a lot of the territory that was in play at the time. The fascination with old prints and negatives remains with us today, if anything amplified by the everything-is-digital world we live in now. These physical artifacts appear, correctly, not merely old but of another era. A negative with an interesting provenance (whether true or not) is now virtually a fetish object, and the subject doesn't matter a fig.

As I have suggested earlier, things are now different. A change in scale to vastly more photographs produced at a vastly higher pace has occurred, a change in scale so vast as to manifest very much like a change in kind. Photographs are now rarely printed, and are almost never within our scope for very long. There is no time for a photograph, a snapshot of the birthday party or the wedding or the vacation, to get old enough to be interesting as an image from a past time. They slide back along the timeline at a rate of one hour per hour, until in a couple of weeks they are too many clicks away to ever look at again.

In the 1970s, Sontag expressed the belief (and perhaps concern) that we were increasingly existing through the medium of photographs. An event which was not photographed did not happen, in a sense. Our memories of a birthday party, an inauguration, a moon landing, or a vacation were all influenced profoundly by the photographs of those events, whether we were present or not. We lived partially, but in a meaningful way, in a reality made up of photographs, a reality which stretched into the past until there were no photographs.

We live in a real world of real things and real events, but ever-increasingly spend time with the shadow world of photographs of things and events that have taken place recently. The shadow world contains images of things we experienced in the real world, and of things we did not, but all or almost all from within the last couple of weeks. This shadow world takes up an increasing amount of space in our mental model of our life. We spend less time attending birthday parties, and we attend far more of them by proxy through photographs shared by our friends.

How often do we experience a vague memory of having attending some event that we did not? How much of our memory of the wedding we did attend is mediated by the photographs we remember from it? Are these effects increasing in frequency and depth in this world of facebook, endless snapshots, and small tile-shaped mobile phones? Is this good or bad?

I don't know, but it worries me a bit. We seem to be living a much broader life, and a life whose broadness is largely by proxy. It seems reasonable that increased breadth is paid for by decreased depth. It seems reasonable that decreased depth, somehow, and whatever that even means, is undesireable.

This is going on your Permanent Record

I am reading Susan Sontag's collection of essays On Photography. In fact, I am at least partially re-reading it, since I know I've seen some of this stuff before. I just can't remember when or where. Anyways, I will probably write up a little review of this book in a bit (only 40 years after publication) but not today. The capsule review which will suit for now is that it's a very sloppy little book full of very bad thinking and very good ideas.

At the moment, two ideas stand out to me. The first is that photographs make all things photographed equal and equivalent. This idea happens to be wrong, but it's an interesting idea and it's not completely wrong. The second idea is that Photography (with a capital P) creates a parallel reality based on our own but different. It is an edited version of reality, captured in a set of instants. This idea is pretty much correct, and even more literally correct today than it was when Sontag wrote about it.

Consider the way we document our lives in photographs. When Sontag was writing, a family might take a few dozen to a few hundred photographs each year, of themselves and their lives. These photographs existed as small prints, compact physical objects, which were embalmed in shoeboxes or photo albums. These albums and shoeboxes provided, and still provide, a Permanent Record of sorts. These things can be riffled through in a few minutes, perhaps an afternoon. A true fanatic might have accumulated enough material to present a couple of days of work to flip through. This Permanent Record was of course limited, incomplete. Large gaps exist, where the camera was broken, there was no film, dad was sick, or a shoebox was lost in a move. While Sontag is wrong in that not all things photographed are made equal per se, there is an equalizing effect in placing the last photograph ever taken of Grandma in a shoebox with a handful of out of focus pictures of long-forgotten toys.
This collection of prints is a parallel reality, it is a version of the story of the family or the people. It is false as much as it is true. It is fragments which, less and less, evoke complete memories.

Let us consider this photographic record as a line of footprints in the sand. Permanent, but easily erased by the caprices of nature, by the hand of man, by accident, malice, or folly.

Compare this situation with what we are doing today, digitally. We take photographs at a much faster pace, generally, than we did when we used film. We no longer need to change film rolls, we can shoot 200 exposures of our child's birthday party with a mere 200 button presses. We no longer require development and printing, we get instant feedback. So the rate at which images are produced has, of course, shot up. These images are much more durable, in theory, than prints, being digital 1s and 0s stored in the cloud. A JPEG could, in theory, endure forever, unchanged and perfect. On the one hand, our photographs are more permanent than ever. On the other hand, two factors conspire to make them effectively more ephemeral than ever.

First, the way we share photographs is largely chronological. In order to satisfy the desire for novelty, sharing services show our most recent images first. This keeps our friends clicking on our stream, which keeps the ad revenue up, which powers the whole machine. Second, the sheer mass of images we produce makes riffling through anything like the complete record utterly unmanageable, no matter how the images are presented.

Together, this means that photographs made today and yesterday are handy and convenient. Photographs from last week are maybe a click away. Photographs from six months back, those perfectly preserved JPEGs, eternally embalmed on disk drives in the cloud, might as well be on Mars.

Instead of a patchy, incomplete, and slowly fading record of our entire lives, we now have a much more detailed photographic reality that stretches into the past like a very short comet's tail. A few days, a few weeks of history easily, perfectly accessible in crystalline clarity. Pictures of our lattes, our hamburgers, our children, Grandma's birthday. They're all there, practically accessible for a few days or weeks after the event and then, practically, gone forever.

The footprints in the sand have become the wake of a boat, stretching back a ways, shrinking and vanishing until, quite soon, no visible trace is left. The analogy is selected quite carefully. What has happened is not truly a change in kind, it is a change only in degree. The pace has picked up, photographic time moves much much faster, the torrent of images gushes rather than trickles.

Sand dunes, photographed over years and then sped up, behave exactly like waves in a fluid, because they are. The wake of a boat, footprints in the sand, they vanish in the same way and for the same reasons, but at different time scales. The effect is that we've seen a change in degree but not in kind that is so great that it behaves almost like a change in kind.

Sontag foresaw this, I think. She died in 2004, when the current trends were probably becoming quite clear if one were paying attention. Possibly she was too busy dying to pay attention. In any case, even in the 1970s there were hints. The production of trivial images was proceeding at a high rate, and it was clearly not going to slow down. Sontag did think of the photograph, in those days, as synonymous with the print and it it truly the transition to purely electronic media that has enabled the staggering pace and corresponding increase in time-scale we've seen today.

I think Sontag knew that something was coming. She would surely be unsurprised by the world of flickr, instagram, facebook. I think she would have been saddened.

Interestingness, Stickiness, and Photographs

To a degree, this is a follow to this post.

What is stickiness? For our purposes I will define it to be a quality of an advertising-containing medium (e.g. a magazine, a web site, a mobile app) which allows it to hold the attention of a typical viewer. It is a measure of the ability of some advertising delivery system to hold your attention and deliver advertising. Interestingness is closely allied to stickiness in that we tend to find our attention held by things we find interesting. Sticky isn't quite the same, there are elements of novelty and constant stimulation involved, and so on, but the two ideas are quite closely related. To be precise, in order to make a sticky system, you must find interesting content to fill it with.

We are interested in many things, but one of the most interesting things to us is people. Not every person, just some people. We are interested in, first and foremost, ourselves. We are also interested in friends, and other people against whom we measure ourselves, people we judge, people we like. There are people with narratives we find interesting, for whatever reasons. Each of us, in turn, is interesting to zero or more other people. A celebrity is, more or less by definition, a person who is interesting to a large group of other people. Magazines have long known that photographs of people who are widely interesting (i.e. celebrities) help make the magazine sticky and thus make it an effective medium for delivering advertising.

We like pictures of celebrities because those pictures compactly communicate to us about the celebrity. We can see how fat or thin they have become, who they are hanging around with, whether they look good or bad. We can imagine larger narratives based on a photograph (and aided by a good caption or accompanying story). Her hair is shorter, why did she cut it? We can measure ourselves against the celebrity. Look how fat he has gotten, while I have remained less fat! We can take pleasure in their successes and failures.

We like pictures of some members of our social group (the ones we are interested in, to be exact) in precisely the same way. What we like even better than pictures of celebrities and our friends, though, is pictures of ourselves. We are all basically narcissists. We especially like pictures of ourselves in which we look better than the other people in the photograph, but generally we'll take whatever there is.

We also suffer from the impression that everyone is interested in us. This is why we take photographs of our food, our coffee, our new outfit, and why we share them. Although many of us are interesting to some tiny little group, we generally overestimate our interestingness. Mostly our photographs, our "personal nows," are interesting to other people when they intersect with the personal nows of the other people. In simpler terms, people like the pictures we take, of them. So, when we share 100 photographs of coffee, food, shoes, and our friends, our friends mostly like the last category. This gives us a little positive feedback, and reinforces the impression that our friends love our pictures and by extension, us. We get the impression that we are interesting.

So where does all this go?

Social media is, essentially, an advertising medium in which the content is provided for free to the advertisers by the targets of the advertisements. Roughly, social media is a method by which the cow can be persuaded to butcher and pack itself. A magazine is static and limited in size, it must use content that is broadly interesting. This is why they use pictures of celebrities and stories about celebrities. Social media is built on the observation that a digital medium is neither static nor size-restricted. Social media can then use any old content, great masses of it. As long as some small fraction of it is interesting to some people, the potential for stickiness is there. The technological problem of social media is therefore to present to each viewer a sifted collection of the shared crud likely to be found interesting. To first order, this boils down to:

• Permit tagging photographs with the names of the people in it.
• Notify people when their name has popped up in a photograph.

This creates the cycle of positive feedback which keeps all of us uploading more and more photographic (and other) content, which can in turn be fed into the "who is this interesting to?" grist mill, which in turn drives the stickiness of the social medium in question. This drives the advertising dollars, and if all goes well someone makes a great deal of money. Note that the people making money are not the people providing the content.

This all works astoundingly well. A well designed social media platform is mind-bogglingly sticky, precisely because of the personal nature of it all. When the interestingness feedback loop is working well, new content flows in at a furious pace, providing interesting content as well as the necessary elements of novelty and stimulation. People simply cannot leave their God. Damned. iPhones. alone.

There are of course other forms of content: text, video, likes, +1s, and so on. Photographs are simply the content that is most interesting to me and presumably to you, gentle reader. Photographs are also particularly of note because they cost virtually nothing to create and share, but provide such rich content to the people who find them interesting.