I want to clarify a couple things.
This isn't ning.com, not at all. This isn't about little social networks, this isn't about bespoke social networks. This is a way to organize large social networks, in such a way as to encourage a sort of forced evolution of ideas and norms.
When I log in to a cellular social media site, I don't just see a tiny network of me and my 300 closest friends. I see, at some level, a huge social media site. I see that there are 100,000,000 photos that have been uploaded. I see Trending Islands. I see some samples from Islands that are closely connected, in some sense or another, to Islands I belong to.
The point is that I only have full access to, I only "belong to", a small set of Islands. I am aware, at some level, of the entire archipelago.
The degree to which I am aware of the rest of the archipelago, the degree to which I can see "nearby" Islands, the populations of my Islands, the ways in which Islands interconnect, and all of that machinery is available to the designers as tuning parameters. The goal is quite specific, it is to maximize evolution of ideas in divergent directions. The goal is maximize the creation of idiosyncratic affinity groups, as divergent and specific as is reasonable.
This is good for art. It's good for ideas. And it's good for monetization too.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Thursday, November 14, 2013
A Crazy Theory
I have developed a crazy theory. It's guaranteed to be at least partly wrong, but there might be an element of truth somewhere in it.
The theory is that the settling of North America ruined The Landscape as an artistic subject. From the point of view of Western European Art and its derivatives.
In the 19th century, and probably before, we have painters painting landscapes. Sometimes with people and buildings, the "hand of man", and sometimes not. These painters were after something about the sublime, about beauty, about the hand of God in nature. Some of them did a darn good job. These paintings required a bit of effort, since all these guys were working in Europe, basically. Since I've already restricted us to Western European Art and its derivative, I get this for free.
Europe is not exactly awash is pristine landscapes. There's plenty of rural scenery, but there are people and so on all over it. There's a lot of farms and towns and cities, and people who build stuff have been rattling around there building stuff for thousands of years.
Now we get to America, and start painting pictures and taking photographs. America is awash in landscapes, in the sublime. The hand of God in nature is available in million square mile lots. You want a sunset over the ocean, with attractive rugged forefround? Sure! We got 3000 miles of that on the Pacific coast! Mountains? What kind? We got big ones and small ones, we got snow-capped and green, we got old ones, we got new ones. We got mountains. Picturesque mountain valleys? Heck yeah! You want one with a log cabin, or not? We got like 1000 with and 2000 without. Vast expanses of grassland? Did you want a sunrise over the ocean instead of a sunset? No problem, other coast, 3000 miles. You want rocks, trees, or sand in the foreground? What about fjords? Islands? Yup.
Now we've got a 100 million pretty decent landscapes on flickr and 500px and instagram.
Now when you see most landscapes you barely see the picture at all. You see the cloud of similar pictures you've seen in the past. You relate to this picture largely in terms of how it resembles and differs from those pictures. The sublime, the beautiful, the hand of God in nature, that's all pretty much lost. It's another one of those pictures.
You can argue that Ansel Adams and f/64 started closing the book on the subject, and Galen Rowell and his acolytes came along and slammed it shut. And nailed it shut, encased it in cement, and bricked that up in an alcove in the basement.
There's probably more to it than just America, but I feel like that's a piece of it.
The theory is that the settling of North America ruined The Landscape as an artistic subject. From the point of view of Western European Art and its derivatives.
In the 19th century, and probably before, we have painters painting landscapes. Sometimes with people and buildings, the "hand of man", and sometimes not. These painters were after something about the sublime, about beauty, about the hand of God in nature. Some of them did a darn good job. These paintings required a bit of effort, since all these guys were working in Europe, basically. Since I've already restricted us to Western European Art and its derivative, I get this for free.
Europe is not exactly awash is pristine landscapes. There's plenty of rural scenery, but there are people and so on all over it. There's a lot of farms and towns and cities, and people who build stuff have been rattling around there building stuff for thousands of years.
Now we get to America, and start painting pictures and taking photographs. America is awash in landscapes, in the sublime. The hand of God in nature is available in million square mile lots. You want a sunset over the ocean, with attractive rugged forefround? Sure! We got 3000 miles of that on the Pacific coast! Mountains? What kind? We got big ones and small ones, we got snow-capped and green, we got old ones, we got new ones. We got mountains. Picturesque mountain valleys? Heck yeah! You want one with a log cabin, or not? We got like 1000 with and 2000 without. Vast expanses of grassland? Did you want a sunrise over the ocean instead of a sunset? No problem, other coast, 3000 miles. You want rocks, trees, or sand in the foreground? What about fjords? Islands? Yup.
Now we've got a 100 million pretty decent landscapes on flickr and 500px and instagram.
Now when you see most landscapes you barely see the picture at all. You see the cloud of similar pictures you've seen in the past. You relate to this picture largely in terms of how it resembles and differs from those pictures. The sublime, the beautiful, the hand of God in nature, that's all pretty much lost. It's another one of those pictures.
You can argue that Ansel Adams and f/64 started closing the book on the subject, and Galen Rowell and his acolytes came along and slammed it shut. And nailed it shut, encased it in cement, and bricked that up in an alcove in the basement.
There's probably more to it than just America, but I feel like that's a piece of it.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Cellular Social Networking
(Free Business Idea, Go Nuts)
There is a well known phenomenon of evolution. If you get an island, or a bunch of islands, and you stick some species on them, you'll tend to get fairly rapid divergence. You get an island group full of white grizzly bears, for instance. You get the Galapagos.
As I understand it there are basically two things going on: small populations lead to a lot of inbreeding which brings out recessive traits; and the separation from other populations causes the recessive traits so brought out to stabilize. With a bunch of islands and a bunch of small populations, you get different families of traits brought out and stabilized. Larger populations in large environments tend to produce homogenization. If you take a whole bunch of dogs, it doesn't matter what breeds or mixes, and let them run wild for a few generations you get a 40 pound animal, yellow-ish brown, medium length coat, with a moderate length tail that curves up toward the head. Every single time. If you get a small population of three or four dogs and stick them on an island, you're gonna get something else. Maybe border collies, maybe no dogs at all in a couple generations. Probably not the generic yellow dog, though.
Let's think about social norming and pictures for a minute. If you have a huge population of ideas about pictures, let's say flickr or 500px, they're going to converge on the generic 40 pound yellow dog pretty fast. We've seen it happen. The same little family of extremely pretty and emotionally sterile pictures starts popping up and then the taste of the population as a whole is defined, and we're pretty much done. Ugh.
Let's think about the curation problem, too. Digging out good work from flickr is a nightmare. It's buried under snapshots of lattes and purple sunsets, by the billion. flickr is too much like a giant pile of pictures.
So here's a free idea for a startup, that addresses both of these problems, creates a potentially interesting new paradigm for social networking, and has a lot of revenue potential, as these things go.
The cellular social network is built around the idea of a group of islands. Each island is, well, let's call it a mini-network. A mini-network is a standard social network, but with limited membership. Within the network all the usual things apply, one can follow people, like, +1, whatever. Perhaps you can share photos, or comment on one another's walls, or share video clips, or broadcast snarky little messages of 141 characters or less. If you're smart, you'll build the infrastructure to support anything at all. There's a cellular social network infrastructure, and you can build photo-sharing, video-sharing, twitter-alikes, facebook-alikes, whatever you like on top of the cellular structure. You gotta have a story for mobile, it can't just be the web, blah blah blah. The usual.
The conceit is that the mini-networks have limited membership. Perhaps 100, perhaps 1000. A person, an identity on the larger system, can belong to a limited number of mini-networks, perhaps 2, perhaps 50. So, there's some cross-fertilization, but most of the activity takes place inside the mini-networks. Identities have limited visibility to mini-networks to which they do not belong, perhaps they can browse "public" content, but cannot contribute. Perhaps they can only see a random sample of content. Whatever. Make that configurable too.
There needs to be ways to explore mini-networks that you do not belong to. There needs to be a way to enter and leave a mini-network. You might want the ability to join a waiting list for a mini-network. Mini-networks might have a "fission" operation in which they split in two, with some rationale for assigning members to the new mini-networks.
Most mini-networks will simply die on the vine. That's ok. It's a few rows in a database somewhere, so what. The point is that the ones that work out will, ideally, evolve unique identities. A photograph sharing cellular social network would, ideally, generate mini-networks with distinctive artistic visions. The social norming within each would not, ideally, stabilize on the same half dozen pictures, but might stabilize on a variety of different things. By browsing, new members could find mini-networks with compatible visions, and could contribute in interesting ways. Because the populations are small, individuals have the power to move the social norms by more than infinitesimals.
Recessive memes, in the original sense of the word "meme" not in the sense of a picture with a stupid caption, can be expressed, nurtured, and stabilized within a mini-network in ways that the cannot in a giant singular social network.
How does this monetize? What do you tell Y-Combinator? The mini-networks form affinity groups that can be targeted for marketing, obviously. A cellular social network for creatives (photographers, etc) could sell access to talent scouts, giving them deeper browsing and search capabilities. User-generated content produced by highly specialized affinity groups is obviously a lot more valuable, and easier to find, than user-generated content in a giant monolithic network. Connections between affinity groups can be mapped (the BMW-lovers mini-network has a lot of members who belong to the Bi-Rite ice cream lovers mini-network... interesting!). And so on and so forth.
This model, applied to photography in particular and art in general, helps to render the curation problem more tractable. 1000 mini-networks with 100,000 pictures in each is a lot more tractable than a simple pile of 100,000,000 pictures. This self-organization contributes both to monetization and to curation.
Neat, huh?
Ok, so, someone. Go out and build this thing.
As I understand it there are basically two things going on: small populations lead to a lot of inbreeding which brings out recessive traits; and the separation from other populations causes the recessive traits so brought out to stabilize. With a bunch of islands and a bunch of small populations, you get different families of traits brought out and stabilized. Larger populations in large environments tend to produce homogenization. If you take a whole bunch of dogs, it doesn't matter what breeds or mixes, and let them run wild for a few generations you get a 40 pound animal, yellow-ish brown, medium length coat, with a moderate length tail that curves up toward the head. Every single time. If you get a small population of three or four dogs and stick them on an island, you're gonna get something else. Maybe border collies, maybe no dogs at all in a couple generations. Probably not the generic yellow dog, though.
Let's think about social norming and pictures for a minute. If you have a huge population of ideas about pictures, let's say flickr or 500px, they're going to converge on the generic 40 pound yellow dog pretty fast. We've seen it happen. The same little family of extremely pretty and emotionally sterile pictures starts popping up and then the taste of the population as a whole is defined, and we're pretty much done. Ugh.
Let's think about the curation problem, too. Digging out good work from flickr is a nightmare. It's buried under snapshots of lattes and purple sunsets, by the billion. flickr is too much like a giant pile of pictures.
So here's a free idea for a startup, that addresses both of these problems, creates a potentially interesting new paradigm for social networking, and has a lot of revenue potential, as these things go.
The cellular social network is built around the idea of a group of islands. Each island is, well, let's call it a mini-network. A mini-network is a standard social network, but with limited membership. Within the network all the usual things apply, one can follow people, like, +1, whatever. Perhaps you can share photos, or comment on one another's walls, or share video clips, or broadcast snarky little messages of 141 characters or less. If you're smart, you'll build the infrastructure to support anything at all. There's a cellular social network infrastructure, and you can build photo-sharing, video-sharing, twitter-alikes, facebook-alikes, whatever you like on top of the cellular structure. You gotta have a story for mobile, it can't just be the web, blah blah blah. The usual.
The conceit is that the mini-networks have limited membership. Perhaps 100, perhaps 1000. A person, an identity on the larger system, can belong to a limited number of mini-networks, perhaps 2, perhaps 50. So, there's some cross-fertilization, but most of the activity takes place inside the mini-networks. Identities have limited visibility to mini-networks to which they do not belong, perhaps they can browse "public" content, but cannot contribute. Perhaps they can only see a random sample of content. Whatever. Make that configurable too.
There needs to be ways to explore mini-networks that you do not belong to. There needs to be a way to enter and leave a mini-network. You might want the ability to join a waiting list for a mini-network. Mini-networks might have a "fission" operation in which they split in two, with some rationale for assigning members to the new mini-networks.
Most mini-networks will simply die on the vine. That's ok. It's a few rows in a database somewhere, so what. The point is that the ones that work out will, ideally, evolve unique identities. A photograph sharing cellular social network would, ideally, generate mini-networks with distinctive artistic visions. The social norming within each would not, ideally, stabilize on the same half dozen pictures, but might stabilize on a variety of different things. By browsing, new members could find mini-networks with compatible visions, and could contribute in interesting ways. Because the populations are small, individuals have the power to move the social norms by more than infinitesimals.
Recessive memes, in the original sense of the word "meme" not in the sense of a picture with a stupid caption, can be expressed, nurtured, and stabilized within a mini-network in ways that the cannot in a giant singular social network.
How does this monetize? What do you tell Y-Combinator? The mini-networks form affinity groups that can be targeted for marketing, obviously. A cellular social network for creatives (photographers, etc) could sell access to talent scouts, giving them deeper browsing and search capabilities. User-generated content produced by highly specialized affinity groups is obviously a lot more valuable, and easier to find, than user-generated content in a giant monolithic network. Connections between affinity groups can be mapped (the BMW-lovers mini-network has a lot of members who belong to the Bi-Rite ice cream lovers mini-network... interesting!). And so on and so forth.
This model, applied to photography in particular and art in general, helps to render the curation problem more tractable. 1000 mini-networks with 100,000 pictures in each is a lot more tractable than a simple pile of 100,000,000 pictures. This self-organization contributes both to monetization and to curation.
Neat, huh?
Ok, so, someone. Go out and build this thing.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Intersubjectivity
There is this idea of intersubjectivity. It seems to have been invented more or less to talk about art, so let's talk about it.
The idea is that much of how we react to art, how we feel about a piece of art, is subjective. It has to do with us, not objectively measured Standards and the like. The thing is, for powerful art, for good art, lots of us tend to feel the same way. It is this idea that the word intersubjective is intended to capture. It captures the idea of a subjective experience, which is nonetheless shared by many. A collectively subjective experience.
A really successful piece of art tickles similar subjective reactions in lots of people. Lots of us react to a piece of art in similar ways. We can talk about, we have common ground to agree on much of what we perceive in the piece, we have some differences we can argue about.
Where do these things come from? We're all human beings. We have similar biology, similar neurology. If we happen to come from the same cultures, or near enough, we share a lot of experiences and symbols. We are enough alike that our subjective reactions tend to resemble one another's.
Another source of an intersubjective experience is social norming. There's a bunch of ways this can happen, but essentially we all want to conform to the local society. This might be our family, our ethnic group, our city, or the group of people in an online context, or almost anything else. Our tastes, our responses, will tend over time to align with whatever we perceive as the normal taste and response on our social groups.
Scotch, for example, is an objectively nasty substance. Our biology and neurology is definitely not programmed to like the stuff. It's toxic, for starters, and it tastes like stuff that's been burned. However, many societies have in essence decreed that this stuff is a refined taste, it is subtle and interesting, sophisticated people like it, and have opinions about it. I like it myself, because I trained myself to like it. I do indeed have opinions about it. There is Scotch I like, and Scotch I don't like, and everything in between. This isn't fakery, my liking of Scotch is genuine. It's just learned, as a result of my desire to conform to social norms. My father likes Scotch, intelligent, sophisticated people like Scotch. So, I learned to like it as well. I know this for a fact, since I was there.
To be sure, there is fakery out there. People will profess to like things that they really do not like, in order to conform to those same social norms. People will profess to like things more than they actually do. People will learn to like things a little, and then lie about how much they like them. There's a whole spectrum of individual response to those pressures to conform. Still, a lot of it is genuine.
We learn to like pictures and art that our social groups like. We might choose to like other things, or to dislike some things our social groups like, to be maverick, an an independent thinker. That too is conforming to social norms. Sophisticated society decrees that being independent, that having your own ideas and opinions, is also a desirable thing. So, some people elect to be the one that doesn't like Scotch, or de Kooning. Again, this is often completely genuine. Not everyone likes Scotch, but everyone has to find an acceptable social response to Scotch, because Scotch is there. It's a thing in society that people like. So is de Kooning, so is Ansel Adams.
If you think of yourself as a photographer, and hang around with people who think of themselves as photographers, you pretty much have to have an opinion about Ansel Adams. You can choose to conform with the social norm, or you can choose the role of maverick, but the overarching social norm is that you must have a position. Almost everyone complies.
Even more interestingly, social groups will produce these norms. There's some sort of invisible process by which the pre-existing ideas and opinions of people entering a social group are massaged and averaged, reduced to some widely agreeably common denominator. The norm is neither predetermined nor static, each member of a group has an infinitesimal influence on it. As we push the norm slightly, it pushes back, and we learn to like it in much the same way one learns to like Scotch.
Intersubjective experiences are first subjective, and secondarily inter. Our collective subjective experiences draw on pre-existing commonalities between us, they draw on our individual subjective experiences, and they average, smooth, and simplify, down to some common medium which we all silently, unconsciously, consent to more or less agree on.
Finally, then, these intersubjective experiences of art come back around. They inform the system of symbols within our culture. How much of the greatness of "Migrant Mother" is drawn from the resemblance to "Mona Lisa" and how much of the greatness of the latter derives from the received wisdom that Leonardo was awesome?
In smaller scales, on faster timelines, we have camera clubs and their ridiculous rules of composition, and their modern equivalents in flickr, 500px, and so on. Look at Flickr Explore, or 500px Most Popular, or any of a dozen similar venues. There are literally something like 6 pictures in play here, being made over and over again in the millions, offered up to the masses, who will invariably pick out the best executed examples of whatever the ambient social norm decrees. This isn't faked. People genuinely like this stuff. They love the macro bug (focus stacked for massive depth of field, natch), the whatever it is reflected in the lake with the horizontally streaked pastel clouds behind, the wildlife frozen in interesting posture, the model with the lighting from the textbook and perfect makeup, the lightly HDRed boat pulled up on the shore, and the mist wrapped around the foothills.
Not a single one of these pictures has a shred of meaning or emotional weight, not a single one shows a shred of originality, but they are genuinely what people love. They are the social norm which these large groups of disparate people have produced. If these pictures stick around for a long time, will they acquire weight as they worm their way into the culture, as symbols? I don't know. In any case, we're watching something evolve here. Rather than building up on continental scales over centuries, we have an aesthetic built up over a handful of years. The same processes apply.
Coming up, I have a proposal for a solution! Of sorts.
The idea is that much of how we react to art, how we feel about a piece of art, is subjective. It has to do with us, not objectively measured Standards and the like. The thing is, for powerful art, for good art, lots of us tend to feel the same way. It is this idea that the word intersubjective is intended to capture. It captures the idea of a subjective experience, which is nonetheless shared by many. A collectively subjective experience.
A really successful piece of art tickles similar subjective reactions in lots of people. Lots of us react to a piece of art in similar ways. We can talk about, we have common ground to agree on much of what we perceive in the piece, we have some differences we can argue about.
Where do these things come from? We're all human beings. We have similar biology, similar neurology. If we happen to come from the same cultures, or near enough, we share a lot of experiences and symbols. We are enough alike that our subjective reactions tend to resemble one another's.
Another source of an intersubjective experience is social norming. There's a bunch of ways this can happen, but essentially we all want to conform to the local society. This might be our family, our ethnic group, our city, or the group of people in an online context, or almost anything else. Our tastes, our responses, will tend over time to align with whatever we perceive as the normal taste and response on our social groups.
Scotch, for example, is an objectively nasty substance. Our biology and neurology is definitely not programmed to like the stuff. It's toxic, for starters, and it tastes like stuff that's been burned. However, many societies have in essence decreed that this stuff is a refined taste, it is subtle and interesting, sophisticated people like it, and have opinions about it. I like it myself, because I trained myself to like it. I do indeed have opinions about it. There is Scotch I like, and Scotch I don't like, and everything in between. This isn't fakery, my liking of Scotch is genuine. It's just learned, as a result of my desire to conform to social norms. My father likes Scotch, intelligent, sophisticated people like Scotch. So, I learned to like it as well. I know this for a fact, since I was there.
To be sure, there is fakery out there. People will profess to like things that they really do not like, in order to conform to those same social norms. People will profess to like things more than they actually do. People will learn to like things a little, and then lie about how much they like them. There's a whole spectrum of individual response to those pressures to conform. Still, a lot of it is genuine.
We learn to like pictures and art that our social groups like. We might choose to like other things, or to dislike some things our social groups like, to be maverick, an an independent thinker. That too is conforming to social norms. Sophisticated society decrees that being independent, that having your own ideas and opinions, is also a desirable thing. So, some people elect to be the one that doesn't like Scotch, or de Kooning. Again, this is often completely genuine. Not everyone likes Scotch, but everyone has to find an acceptable social response to Scotch, because Scotch is there. It's a thing in society that people like. So is de Kooning, so is Ansel Adams.
If you think of yourself as a photographer, and hang around with people who think of themselves as photographers, you pretty much have to have an opinion about Ansel Adams. You can choose to conform with the social norm, or you can choose the role of maverick, but the overarching social norm is that you must have a position. Almost everyone complies.
Even more interestingly, social groups will produce these norms. There's some sort of invisible process by which the pre-existing ideas and opinions of people entering a social group are massaged and averaged, reduced to some widely agreeably common denominator. The norm is neither predetermined nor static, each member of a group has an infinitesimal influence on it. As we push the norm slightly, it pushes back, and we learn to like it in much the same way one learns to like Scotch.
Intersubjective experiences are first subjective, and secondarily inter. Our collective subjective experiences draw on pre-existing commonalities between us, they draw on our individual subjective experiences, and they average, smooth, and simplify, down to some common medium which we all silently, unconsciously, consent to more or less agree on.
Finally, then, these intersubjective experiences of art come back around. They inform the system of symbols within our culture. How much of the greatness of "Migrant Mother" is drawn from the resemblance to "Mona Lisa" and how much of the greatness of the latter derives from the received wisdom that Leonardo was awesome?
In smaller scales, on faster timelines, we have camera clubs and their ridiculous rules of composition, and their modern equivalents in flickr, 500px, and so on. Look at Flickr Explore, or 500px Most Popular, or any of a dozen similar venues. There are literally something like 6 pictures in play here, being made over and over again in the millions, offered up to the masses, who will invariably pick out the best executed examples of whatever the ambient social norm decrees. This isn't faked. People genuinely like this stuff. They love the macro bug (focus stacked for massive depth of field, natch), the whatever it is reflected in the lake with the horizontally streaked pastel clouds behind, the wildlife frozen in interesting posture, the model with the lighting from the textbook and perfect makeup, the lightly HDRed boat pulled up on the shore, and the mist wrapped around the foothills.
Not a single one of these pictures has a shred of meaning or emotional weight, not a single one shows a shred of originality, but they are genuinely what people love. They are the social norm which these large groups of disparate people have produced. If these pictures stick around for a long time, will they acquire weight as they worm their way into the culture, as symbols? I don't know. In any case, we're watching something evolve here. Rather than building up on continental scales over centuries, we have an aesthetic built up over a handful of years. The same processes apply.
Coming up, I have a proposal for a solution! Of sorts.
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Our Relationship to Photographs
Kirk Tuck wrote an interesting piece here. He's talking about the camera industry in 2013 here, repeats a couple of well understood points (cell phones are eating in to sales up and down) and then makes a couple of points that are, I think, genuinely new and interesting. This is probably not quite what he means, but it's my understanding of what he meant:
In the first place, the mass of pictures currently being made is utterly daunting. You cannot stand out, it seems that every picture has been taken, my pictures look like everyone else's pictures. Mere technical excellence is clearly not enough, there are millions of people who are that excellent. Artistic excellence is not enough, there are many genuinely talented artists out there. Even a strong artistic vision isn't enough, there will be 100s of people with a vision indistinguishable from yours and a million pictures that look, whether by accident or design, like yours.
In the second place, the internet and sharing culture mean that anything genuinely new I produce, if it's interesting to anyone, will be picked up and copied and modified and evolved into yet a new thing all in the blink of an eye.
This is surely true, and surely depressing. I experience these problems myself, and I suspect you, Gentle Reader, do as well.
Let's back up and consider our relationship to photographs a bit. In the 1970s when Susan Sontag was writing about this, she spent a certain amount of time mulling over, roughly, the idea that a photograph was a moment in time, frozen, and made permanent. We treated photographs as permanent, eternal, records of a split second of time, and our relationship with them was built around that idea. This was true from the beginning of photography until sometime in the early 2000s.
At that point, things started to change. The model for pictures was no longer to place them in a shoebox or an album, where they would live on forever. The model for pictures was to share them digitally, usually in a most-recent-first arrangement. This meant a shift in how we view photos, we now treat them as ephemeral. They're a record of a moment in time which we share with others who were not there, which we save away and remember, but which will in a few weeks be too many clicks away to ever see again. We treat photos as ephemeral and impermanent now. At least to a substantial degree.
So it goes with the digital photographer/artist. The aspiring artist places his or her best work up, and then it gradually disappears into the past, covered up by newer, better, different work. We spend no time living with our work, or with anyone else's work. Indeed, the amount of time we spend taking pictures, and fussing with them, and fiddling and painting on them may be greater than the time we spend looking at pictures. Picture taking is almost a write-only process now -- we create them, we don't look at them. There's no time!
If you're frustrated and stymied by the overwhelming glut of pictures, of people "better" than you, of new processes, looks, software, cameras, and ideas, here's my advice to you:
Don't.
Just don't take part. Do something different. Why fling digital copies of your work into a maelstrom of a billion others just like it? Make prints, or put your work in digital photo frames, do something else. Just opt out. If you care about your work, why would you relate to it as a piece of ephemera?
Sure, there are people that do what you want to do better than you. There always have been people who were better than you. Sure there are new ideas and new techniques all the time. Who cares? What do you want to do?
This doesn't meant to get off of flickr, unplug from the internet. It simply means that you should recognize that what they're doing hasn't got anything to do with what you're doing. They're experiencing one relationship with photos, one in which photos are ephemeral scraps of time, soon lost under new strata of new photos. Your relation with photos doesn't have to be that. Make prints, put them on your walls, enjoy the pre-2000 relationship with photos. Or, make your own relationship with them, invent something new that pleases you.
This also doesn't mean to ignore what other artists are doing. It means only that you should recognize that they are doing their thing, and you are doing yours. Steal ideas as they suit you, but don't feel any obligation to copy, to emulate, to follow.
In the first place, the mass of pictures currently being made is utterly daunting. You cannot stand out, it seems that every picture has been taken, my pictures look like everyone else's pictures. Mere technical excellence is clearly not enough, there are millions of people who are that excellent. Artistic excellence is not enough, there are many genuinely talented artists out there. Even a strong artistic vision isn't enough, there will be 100s of people with a vision indistinguishable from yours and a million pictures that look, whether by accident or design, like yours.
In the second place, the internet and sharing culture mean that anything genuinely new I produce, if it's interesting to anyone, will be picked up and copied and modified and evolved into yet a new thing all in the blink of an eye.
This is surely true, and surely depressing. I experience these problems myself, and I suspect you, Gentle Reader, do as well.
Let's back up and consider our relationship to photographs a bit. In the 1970s when Susan Sontag was writing about this, she spent a certain amount of time mulling over, roughly, the idea that a photograph was a moment in time, frozen, and made permanent. We treated photographs as permanent, eternal, records of a split second of time, and our relationship with them was built around that idea. This was true from the beginning of photography until sometime in the early 2000s.
At that point, things started to change. The model for pictures was no longer to place them in a shoebox or an album, where they would live on forever. The model for pictures was to share them digitally, usually in a most-recent-first arrangement. This meant a shift in how we view photos, we now treat them as ephemeral. They're a record of a moment in time which we share with others who were not there, which we save away and remember, but which will in a few weeks be too many clicks away to ever see again. We treat photos as ephemeral and impermanent now. At least to a substantial degree.
So it goes with the digital photographer/artist. The aspiring artist places his or her best work up, and then it gradually disappears into the past, covered up by newer, better, different work. We spend no time living with our work, or with anyone else's work. Indeed, the amount of time we spend taking pictures, and fussing with them, and fiddling and painting on them may be greater than the time we spend looking at pictures. Picture taking is almost a write-only process now -- we create them, we don't look at them. There's no time!
If you're frustrated and stymied by the overwhelming glut of pictures, of people "better" than you, of new processes, looks, software, cameras, and ideas, here's my advice to you:
Just don't take part. Do something different. Why fling digital copies of your work into a maelstrom of a billion others just like it? Make prints, or put your work in digital photo frames, do something else. Just opt out. If you care about your work, why would you relate to it as a piece of ephemera?
Sure, there are people that do what you want to do better than you. There always have been people who were better than you. Sure there are new ideas and new techniques all the time. Who cares? What do you want to do?
This doesn't meant to get off of flickr, unplug from the internet. It simply means that you should recognize that what they're doing hasn't got anything to do with what you're doing. They're experiencing one relationship with photos, one in which photos are ephemeral scraps of time, soon lost under new strata of new photos. Your relation with photos doesn't have to be that. Make prints, put them on your walls, enjoy the pre-2000 relationship with photos. Or, make your own relationship with them, invent something new that pleases you.
This also doesn't mean to ignore what other artists are doing. It means only that you should recognize that they are doing their thing, and you are doing yours. Steal ideas as they suit you, but don't feel any obligation to copy, to emulate, to follow.
Monday, November 4, 2013
Our Relationship with Art
Alain de Botton wrote a nice piece for the Wall Street Journal this weekend, evidently adapted from a book I have not read: Art as Therapy. The essay makes the rather bold claim that Art with a capital A might actually have a purpose, rather than simply existing for its own sake. It offers up "therapy" as a purpose, but perhaps not in quite the way one might suspect.
The essay in the WSJ goes on to examine a few pieces and the kinds of therapeutic results one might get by looking at them, but largely seems to take introspection as therapy. This is fair enough. I think it's more interesting to just stop at the idea of introspection.
The interpretations de Botton proposes strike me as very personal and specific. He presents them, I think, as generally applicable and this is the weakest element of the essay. Who cares if we struggle with a piece, and find something very specifically personal in it? Isn't that a good thing? Why must the result be general? My idea here is to look at a piece of art and then to consciously reach for some sort of reaction to it, to consciously cast about for something one might take away from it. Mostly we seem to feel that it's the artwork's job to reach out to us, to poke and prod us, to make feel or think or something. Why not turn this around?
This isn't quite deconstructionist. I don't mean to dismiss the artist's ideas as irrelevant at all. Insofar as the artist's ideas are clear, they will surely color our reaction to it, no matter how we struggle. We could strive to understand the artist, or we could simply free-associate, or, or.. the point is simply that we actively strive to make something of the work.
I'm not sure I buy into the idea of art as "therapy" per se, but I'm pretty interested in this idea that we can consciously bring our selves to bear on a piece of art, that we can try to pull from it, that we can be an active participant from the moment we open our eyes. Photography, as usual, stands a little apart. That this was a real thing, a little slice of reality, connects us already to the work. What if, instead of demanding that the picture pose the question "what was out of frame?" or "what is she thinking?" we consciously posed these questions to ourselves?
Would it be reasonably to walk around a gallery with a notebook of questions, and to interview each picture? Possibly out loud? Why not?!
The essay in the WSJ goes on to examine a few pieces and the kinds of therapeutic results one might get by looking at them, but largely seems to take introspection as therapy. This is fair enough. I think it's more interesting to just stop at the idea of introspection.
The interpretations de Botton proposes strike me as very personal and specific. He presents them, I think, as generally applicable and this is the weakest element of the essay. Who cares if we struggle with a piece, and find something very specifically personal in it? Isn't that a good thing? Why must the result be general? My idea here is to look at a piece of art and then to consciously reach for some sort of reaction to it, to consciously cast about for something one might take away from it. Mostly we seem to feel that it's the artwork's job to reach out to us, to poke and prod us, to make feel or think or something. Why not turn this around?
This isn't quite deconstructionist. I don't mean to dismiss the artist's ideas as irrelevant at all. Insofar as the artist's ideas are clear, they will surely color our reaction to it, no matter how we struggle. We could strive to understand the artist, or we could simply free-associate, or, or.. the point is simply that we actively strive to make something of the work.
I'm not sure I buy into the idea of art as "therapy" per se, but I'm pretty interested in this idea that we can consciously bring our selves to bear on a piece of art, that we can try to pull from it, that we can be an active participant from the moment we open our eyes. Photography, as usual, stands a little apart. That this was a real thing, a little slice of reality, connects us already to the work. What if, instead of demanding that the picture pose the question "what was out of frame?" or "what is she thinking?" we consciously posed these questions to ourselves?
Would it be reasonably to walk around a gallery with a notebook of questions, and to interview each picture? Possibly out loud? Why not?!
Saturday, November 2, 2013
On the use of Color
I am uncomfortable with color. I'm just not good at it. But, I can see it and think about it. My ideas about how it's used have evolved over time. This essay is kind of a snapshot.
There is a device called the color wheel. This is, essentially, the colors of the rainbow in rainbow-order wrapped around a circle with the red end and the purple end connected together. Whether you proceed red-orange-yellow-etc in the clockwise or counter direction varies. How the colors are spaced varies, which means that which color is opposite which other color can vary a bit. The point is, though, that for any color there are colors that are close to it on the color wheel and there are colors that are far apart on the wheel. Some color wheels represent saturation as well, as a distance from the center. The center is white, the rim of the wheel has very saturated hues, and so on.
Colors that are opposite one another on the color wheel are called complementary but this notion depends, obviously, on the wheel. I will use the word complementary instead to simply mean that two colors are very far apart on the wheel. Blue/orange, green/red, yellow/purple, these are complementary. Also, however, Purple/orange, or green/violet, or yellow/purple might be considered complementary. I am being somewhat naughty here, since complementary really does mean something specific, it just happens to depend on your color model.
A quick web search will turn up loads of pictures and examples of this sort of thing.
When I say a narrow palette of colors, I mean a collection of colors drawn from close together on the color wheel, colors that are similar in hue. However, generally, I mean that they are similar in value and saturation as well, although a certain amount of variation is permitted here. A narrow palette of colors "goes together" in general terms. A collection of muted oranges, reddish-yellows, and warm browns might form such a narrow palette, for instance.
By far the most common color design in fashion photography and, interestingly enough, high end landscape art, uses two narrow palettes which are complementary. One is dominant, and provides colors for most of the frame, while the other is subordinate and colors a smaller percentage of the frame area. The subordinate color is an accent color.
Some people will talk about patterns of three colors or palettes, or even four, evenly spaced around the color wheel. Again, since color wheels vary, these colors will depend on which wheel we're talking about. In addition, we start talking about exceedingly narrow palettes, or even single colors, here, otherwise the palettes overlap and we simply have all available hues and there is, in reality, no plan. I don't notice this occurring much in real work, to be honest, but perhaps it's out there. I think that these ideas tend to either disintegrate or to be read as simple a "riot of colors" idiom, which can certainly be successful.
Let us, therefore, return to the two-palette theme.
Once you recognize the pattern and know what to look for, you will start to see it everywhere. It is perhaps too much to say that it is the single most important thing nobody ever tells you about marketable photography, but there are moments when this seems to be true.
The dominant palette pulls the frame together. It creates a very coherent look, the frame feels controlled and "put together". Ideally, the dominant palette colors the things you want to emphasize, the dress, the model's hair, the sand dune. A single palette can work by itself, but tends toward visually dull. The subject matter or the graphical properties of the frame better be pretty interesting. With an accent palette in play, you get visual interest for free.
At this point you can use the accent palette to manage the frame a bit. By saturating those accent colors, you can draw the eye to those accented regions. Fashion, both as worn and as photographed, does this a lot. The shoes, the clutch, and the lipstick are popped reds to draw attention, as well as to complement the navy blue dress and hat. Alternatively, the accent colors can be desaturated and muted, to push them into the background, to simply add a little visual depth and flavor to the picture. In this case, you might saturate, brighten, or use graphical techniques to draw the eye to whatever it is in the dominant palette that you want to be visually important.
With modern digital editing tools it is trivial to select areas and to adjust hues and saturations within them. It is somewhat startling how far you can go here without making the picture look unreal. You can apply much more radical changes to hue and saturation that you can to values. I strongly advocate for using the hue and saturation equivalents of burning and dodging, and I am practically certain that most successful commercial work uses these ideas extensively. If they're not using them in post, they're doing much the same thing by gelling lights.
While these ideas are certainly dominant in landscape and fashion, there's no reason event photographers and other commercial workers cannot use the same ideas. Put the bridesmaids up against complementary background, or otherwise use a complementary color palette. If you can't make it happen in camera, at least do some adjustments in post.
I wouldn't recommend messing with the dress colors, though. The bride's gonna notice that.
There is a device called the color wheel. This is, essentially, the colors of the rainbow in rainbow-order wrapped around a circle with the red end and the purple end connected together. Whether you proceed red-orange-yellow-etc in the clockwise or counter direction varies. How the colors are spaced varies, which means that which color is opposite which other color can vary a bit. The point is, though, that for any color there are colors that are close to it on the color wheel and there are colors that are far apart on the wheel. Some color wheels represent saturation as well, as a distance from the center. The center is white, the rim of the wheel has very saturated hues, and so on.
Colors that are opposite one another on the color wheel are called complementary but this notion depends, obviously, on the wheel. I will use the word complementary instead to simply mean that two colors are very far apart on the wheel. Blue/orange, green/red, yellow/purple, these are complementary. Also, however, Purple/orange, or green/violet, or yellow/purple might be considered complementary. I am being somewhat naughty here, since complementary really does mean something specific, it just happens to depend on your color model.
A quick web search will turn up loads of pictures and examples of this sort of thing.
When I say a narrow palette of colors, I mean a collection of colors drawn from close together on the color wheel, colors that are similar in hue. However, generally, I mean that they are similar in value and saturation as well, although a certain amount of variation is permitted here. A narrow palette of colors "goes together" in general terms. A collection of muted oranges, reddish-yellows, and warm browns might form such a narrow palette, for instance.
By far the most common color design in fashion photography and, interestingly enough, high end landscape art, uses two narrow palettes which are complementary. One is dominant, and provides colors for most of the frame, while the other is subordinate and colors a smaller percentage of the frame area. The subordinate color is an accent color.
Some people will talk about patterns of three colors or palettes, or even four, evenly spaced around the color wheel. Again, since color wheels vary, these colors will depend on which wheel we're talking about. In addition, we start talking about exceedingly narrow palettes, or even single colors, here, otherwise the palettes overlap and we simply have all available hues and there is, in reality, no plan. I don't notice this occurring much in real work, to be honest, but perhaps it's out there. I think that these ideas tend to either disintegrate or to be read as simple a "riot of colors" idiom, which can certainly be successful.
Let us, therefore, return to the two-palette theme.
Once you recognize the pattern and know what to look for, you will start to see it everywhere. It is perhaps too much to say that it is the single most important thing nobody ever tells you about marketable photography, but there are moments when this seems to be true.
The dominant palette pulls the frame together. It creates a very coherent look, the frame feels controlled and "put together". Ideally, the dominant palette colors the things you want to emphasize, the dress, the model's hair, the sand dune. A single palette can work by itself, but tends toward visually dull. The subject matter or the graphical properties of the frame better be pretty interesting. With an accent palette in play, you get visual interest for free.
At this point you can use the accent palette to manage the frame a bit. By saturating those accent colors, you can draw the eye to those accented regions. Fashion, both as worn and as photographed, does this a lot. The shoes, the clutch, and the lipstick are popped reds to draw attention, as well as to complement the navy blue dress and hat. Alternatively, the accent colors can be desaturated and muted, to push them into the background, to simply add a little visual depth and flavor to the picture. In this case, you might saturate, brighten, or use graphical techniques to draw the eye to whatever it is in the dominant palette that you want to be visually important.
With modern digital editing tools it is trivial to select areas and to adjust hues and saturations within them. It is somewhat startling how far you can go here without making the picture look unreal. You can apply much more radical changes to hue and saturation that you can to values. I strongly advocate for using the hue and saturation equivalents of burning and dodging, and I am practically certain that most successful commercial work uses these ideas extensively. If they're not using them in post, they're doing much the same thing by gelling lights.
While these ideas are certainly dominant in landscape and fashion, there's no reason event photographers and other commercial workers cannot use the same ideas. Put the bridesmaids up against complementary background, or otherwise use a complementary color palette. If you can't make it happen in camera, at least do some adjustments in post.
I wouldn't recommend messing with the dress colors, though. The bride's gonna notice that.
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