Hasselblad

The tl;dr is this. Most indicators suggest that Hasselblad is staying the course as an effort to become a luxury brand, despite the fact that their parent company does not, as a rule, invest in this sort of thing. The H6D is probably intended not to drive growth but rather is a halo product to drive credibility, to support a to-be-released luxury camera.

A little history. Hasselblad was acquired by Vorndran Mannheims Capital (VMC) then called Ventizz, and quickly pivoted into a nascent luxury brand with the delivery of some embarassing Sony rebrands, the Lunar and Stellar cameras. These were Sony cameras with wooden grips glued on and the price moved up to the stratosphere. After the laughter on the internet died down a bit, VMC dropped in a new CEO, and is now pitching H as a re-pivot back to its roots. That's silly on the face of it, pivoting back is an admission of defeat and an indicator that VMC ought to dump the investment. But there's more.

Let us examine the career of the current CEO of Hasselblad, Perry Oosting:

• CEO Hasselblad for the last 2 years.
• CEO of Vertu (marketer and manufacturer of super-luxury cell phones) for 4 years prior.
• 24 years of Managing Director jobs at, at least, Bulgari, Prada, and Gucci. These are three separate concerns, he's moved around a bit.

His linkedin skills "tags" all revolve around marketing and sales of luxury products, and a suite of business management skills (team-building, P&L, M&A, etc.) Everything up until the Hasselblad job is crystal clear, this guy spend 28 years selling objects of desire to the extremely well-heeled.

VMC is a private equity firm that targets hyper-technical companies, basically the opposite of luxury brands, with potential for high growth. Hasselblad, while technical, is not technical in the sense VMC specializes in, at all. Still, VMC is looking for high-growth and is clearly committed to Hasselblad as a luxury brand. There's something odd going on there, but who knows what? Perhaps one of the partners at VMC just loves Hasselblad.

If you take the Hasselblad pitch at face value, it makes exactly no sense: Blah blah blah passion for the highest quality for the hardest working professionals, etc and so on. If true, what on earth is Mr. Oosting doing at the helm? Also, where is that high-growth market? Last I heard the professional photography market was going nowhere but down. It's probably flatter than the sky-is-falling crowd thinks, but no thinking human thinks it's going to experience explosive growth, or substantial growth at all, any time soon.

If I have the timeline correct, the story we are expected to believe is this:

VMC and H, observing that the luxury play at H was not working out so great, decided the company should pivot back to its roots and deliver pure photography at the highest qualities. To drive this charge into the high-growth market of professional photography, they hired a guy with 28 years of experience at Bulgari, Prada, and Gucci, and some company that glued diamonds on to phones, and no experience whatsoever in the camera business.

Go ahead, pull the other one, it's got bells on!

Try this story instead. VMC and H, observing the luxury play was not going so great, and knowing that there is no high growth to be had in high end cameras, decided to hire someone with a deep understanding of the luxury market, to show them how to do it right. Mr. Oosting took stock and told them that the first thing the needed to do was to fix their reputation, which was in pretty bad shape.

Hasselblad under Oosting has doubled-down on the Hasselblad heritage, delivering a fully up to date Medium Format camera, and doing quite a credible full court press getting the word out. It won't sell many units, but they don't care. It's a halo product, intended not to generate revenue but credibility and reputation. It may or may not make a profit, but that's not its purpose.

So what's the luxury product? I'm not feeling the H6D as a luxury product, really. It has some of the earmarks and is definitely intended for an exclusive market of the well-heeled. But there's no high-growth here, there's no cracking the wealthy Asian markets with this thing. Mr. Oosting wants to sell a billion dollars worth of stuff, not a few million.

Let's look at Hasselblad's job openings. These can be very informative.

They're looking for embedded development engineers, to work on a complete system (VHDL through QML, i.e. chip design through UI design). The specs are consistent with a new imaging system with a modern UI (that is, not piles of menus). They're also looking for a test engineering lead. They've got something they need to build. The job descriptions say "camera" and since there's no call for special skills (animation, rocketry, whatever) I take that at face value. It also makes sense.

Oosting knows about Leica, and no doubt does not want to be a second-rate Leica but probably likes the idea that a certain class of wealth likes to just carry one around. He wants something sleek, beautiful, distinctive. He wants it to scream Hasselblad, he wants it to be a portable status symbol for the elite, and he doesn't want to just copy Leica.

Let's think about what has to be in the design brief for whatever it is H has in the works:

Must fully embody Hasselblad's brand and look the part. Strong branding, which implies 1) strong design notes from Hasselblad's history, 2) an imaging system with perceived very high quality.

Object of desire/Status symbol. Therefore portable, sleek, beautiful. Broadly desired. Not a camera for camera nerds, but a mass-appealing (but not mass-available!) imaging system. Purse-sized, one hand-sized. Slick user experience, social media, cloud connected. Phone-like ease of use. Friction-less photo/video sharing.

Allow me a flyer here. A small camera, with excellent but not earth shattering technical specs. Definitely does video.

Design notes: leatherette+chrome/cube/space for a clearly visible logo/slanted-rear screen, non-removable lens that is nonetheless obvious, prominent.
Size: easily held by one hand, about 300 grams.
System: Touchscreen, syncs with app on your phone (NFC/bluetooth?) for seamless "one-touch" (or nearly) connectivity.
Price: $5000 US.

This will be the Lunar/Stellar reborn as a real boy, it'll be the real article, an actually good camera in a beautiful package that screams Hasselblad. By being ultra-modern (touchscreen, connectivity) it will be both broadly desirable beyond camera-geek forums, and definitely not Leica. It will be blinged out, but subtly. Silver and exotic leathers, not crystals. It will, ideally, be lauded by the camera-geek forums, though, as that's the first step.

The sophisticated elite client needs to believe that their desired object is the real thing, that it is essentially the same as the one used by jet pilots and professional photographers, and they will check the web before they buy.

If Oosting has any sense, he's talking to his old bosses, looking for a Prada or Bulgari co-brand. If he can get Miuccia to carry one, he's won.

Prognostication

Another issue of the How's Andrew Doing newsletter. In this post I made several predictions, among them:

Michael will take on more of an advisory role as he concentrates more deeply on the Luminous Endowment and his own artistic endeavors.

And lo, in a thread explaining (ho, ho, ho) why LuLa hasn't got anything about Hasselblad's New Thingy, Michael writes:

Most people have noticed that I am no longer involved in the site on a day-to-day basis. Kevin is now the publisher. I am mostly involved in the charity that I started last year, http://www.luminous-endowment.org/pages/home.html.

The big prediction, though, the one that matters, has yet to appear. No new management has appeared. Yet. I only wrote that a few months ago, after all, the year is young.

Whoa!

Here's a surprise!

Ming Thein's been big on photo essays lately, and here's his latest. Go look at it. Seriously. Go. Look. Take your time and get past any issues you might have with the man or the methods and really look at one picture after another, take them on their own terms.

I don't give a damn if you like the pictures or not. I don't know if I like them or not, that doesn't matter. I direct your attention to the fact that this is a fully realized idea. The text he gives you is direct, simple, and precisely describes the pictures. I glanced at the photos first, and that's exactly what I read. Like, exactly.

This is real photography, real work. He's taken an idea, and a pretty good idea. He's thought about his tools and methods, and worked out a very clear way to express that idea using photographs. And then he's gone and shot a bunch of that. This is the real deal, it's serious and deserving of accolades and applause.

Well done, Ming, really.

Medium Format State of the Industry

Hasselblad has a new thingy out. Woo hoo!

Ming Thein, the newest Hasselblad Ambassador, has a big ol' announcement on his web site, touting all the glorious features of the Phase One 100 Megapick.. I mean the Hasselblad WonderThing. Interestingly, LuLa has nothing, although they did have an on-time announcement of Phase One's thing. Indeed, Kevin mentions that P1 called him up and told him he had to hustle because they were moving up the launch date.

Ok, so we have some selected mouthpieces for the two camps, and the two vendors have decided who's friendly and who's not (one imagines that there might be an element of payment involved, but there's no evidence particularly). The two mouthpieces named are well understood to have the ears of well-heeled amateurs. Thus, the pitch is that these are the ultimate machines, absolutely professional grade, this is what Real Pros Use, and so on. There's even the business about New Magic Lenses, as if covering a 645 frame at 100 lp/mm was a new thing that wasn't pretty well sorted out 30 years or more ago.

I can find any number of pros named ProCameraGuy on forums who not only use this equipment, but know tons of other pros who do. What I cannot find is any actual identifiable professional photographers who do (apart from the paid shills in the promo videos and, to be honest, I haven't heard of any of those dudes either). Actual identifiable professionals use 35mm full frame or smaller sensors, because they can do basic math and own some software

Chuck a couple of things into the mix. Hasselblad is owned by a private equity firm that mainly has technology plays. But, they parachuted in a CEO from the luxury goods world to fix their "ok, bolting wooden handles on to Sony cameras isn't going so great" strategy. Per Oosting is the real deal, he knows how to sell luxury goods. He talks a good fight about passion for photography and creating the finest whatever, but make no mistake, he's there to shift cameras to rich Chinese who want a status symbol. Period, full-stop. It's literally what he does. Hiring him to run a camera company that wants to build superb tools for professional photographers makes as much sense as hiring Taylor Swift to manage your datacenter deployments.

Hasselblad has rebooted their luxury product effort, which they started with the stupid re-branded Sony products. That went noplace, so their private equity guys dropped in Oosting to fix it. Turns out that you can's shift a thing as an Object of Desire if nobody Desires it. Bolting lumber on to Sony cameras doesn't make people Desire them, it makes people laugh at you, it turns out. So that's gonna be a problem, because the well-heeled Chinese may be status conscious, but they do read the Internets. So Oosting has put together a program for making H credible again. First you make an object that people desire, then you sell it by the trainload to status-conscious idiots. The fact that the new thing looks a lot like the second generation of failed Lytro products may not be that bright, but it looks pretty distinctive, and that is absolutely vitally important.

H is an almost pure luxury play, and has been since their private equity parent bought them, Though they might be toying with a multi-pronged approach a la Phase One, I am dubious. If they can succeed in parlaying the Hasselblad brand into something serious numbers of well-heeled idiots buy, I predict they'll dump the scanners and aerial cameras, because that's the right thing to do. Stay on target, guys.

Hasselblad may be in some sense "getting back to their roots, pure photography, ideal machines for capturing the blah blah blah" but make no mistake, they're only doing it because they have to, and they're only doing it to the extent that they need to. Louis Vuitton needs to make luggage that actually prevents its contents from disgorging themselves all over the jetway, but just barely. H's trouble was that they, metaphorically, were making luggage that literally could not contain objects. Oosting's contribution can probably be summarized as "Jesus Christ you retards, the luggage has to actually hold the shit inside, our customers are rich idiots but they, unlike you, are not morons." (although, to be fair, the backlash against Sony+Lumber was probably not predictable, that particular scam might have gone beautifully.)

Anyways, it's all very fun to watch. The key point to keep in mind here is that every single person with any actual information is lying his ass off, and almost everyone else is a dupe.

It's Bulgari watches all over again: Fucking ASTRONAUTS use our watches ON THE FUCKING MOON! You should totally buy a watch that does not keep accurate time for $10,000!!!!! IT'S MADE OF STEEL AND SHIT AND IT KEEPS WATER OUT SOME OF THE TIME!

Please Compare

Here's a piece from the New Yorker, by Om Malik. April 4, 2016.

And here's me, May 20, 2015. And then, me again, in June 2015.

That's me, out in front! But Google's Photos product has indeed progressed since I wrote that, and it is indeed trying to do more. It's still missing the output piece, and I assume google will abandon the product, or try to pivot it into being the next Social Network Thingy before they get around to it.

Malik and Google have both missed the point that simply organizing this stuff (and what google does is both miraculous and entirely inadequate, at this point) is not enough. You've got to let me do something with that. I need to be able to take those organized collections and:

• Fine tune them, easily
• Do something with the resulting bolus of photographs

Google's bread and butter is simply "organizing" things (which they think means tagging, without hierarchy, because they are dumb and anyways all they have is this hammer) so the output side simply hasn't occurred to them. Which means it hasn't occurred to Mr. Malik either.

Let me print the collection as a book, share it as a Ken Burns-ified movie, share it as a collection with my friends, download it to my digital picture frame, print it as a collection of identically framed prints to mass on a wall, whatever. Make some stuff up, do something, anything, with the result. This is a perfect moment to upsell some stuff, google. Arrrg.

Instead Mr. Malik wanders off into vague nonsense quoting various people about how photography is "becoming more of a visual language" (what, again?) and “real value creation will come from stitching together photos as a fabric, extracting information and then providing that cumulative information as a totally different package” which sounds like standard Silicon Valley jive that means exactly nothing. Silicon Valley has, for the last decade or more, eaten well on the theory that if you can just heap up enough data in a pile, then you can IPO and make a ton of money. This standard jive is how they sell that, and what it means is "we have no idea how to turn this pile of data into money, except by selling our own stock, so we're planning to do that" which in turn means that the giant pile of data actually hasn't got any value...

... because we can't figure out what to actually do with it.

So solve that problem, you punks. Except they won't, because the Standard Jive tells them that once you have the pile of data, you're done. It's received wisdom, and need not be questioned. Neitehr Malik nor Google even recognize that there's a problem here.

Slicers and Gestalters

Hat tip to ToP for the links and some thoughtful discussion. Steve McCurry has a relatively new book, India and one critic thinks it's rather too limited in scope, and compares McCurry unfavorably to another photographer, Raghubir Singh.

I don't pretend to have any particular knowledge of either photographer. Of course I've seen any number of McCurry's pictures, but this is the first time I've heard of Singh.

Still, I think there's an interesting tangential view here.

Let's think about National Geographic. As a kid, this magazine had me persuaded that living in an undersea habitat at 600 feet was both awesome and the future. This is, of course, insane. It's pitch black and ridiculously cold at 600 feet. The environment 600 feet down in the ocean makes intergalactic space look like Baja California as far as humans are concerned. National Geo's business was to give you 2000 words and a dozen photos and make you believe that you really knew something about the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. National Geo gave us narrow slices of the world, neatly packaged, digestible to the Western mind. Foreign, exciting, interesting, but nothing too threatening. This is the essence of what I am calling Slicing. By its very nature slicing is untruthful, simply because it explicitly elides almost everything. It wraps the material up, putting down artificial boundaries. Done well, it feels complete, you don't notice the edges around the material.

In a way, all journalism does this, to one degree or another. The newspaper only has so many column inches for your article, and you've got to wrap it up, make it coherent.

A separate issue here is whether a Slice in this sense is true even within itself. If the National Geo article about habitats at 600 feet had shown that world as a sunlit paradise, that would be one thing. If it merely de-emphasizes the inky darkness in favor of the well lit chamber filled with happy divers, then the darkness is excluded from the story, but there's no actual lie. The Slice is true, but (in the nature of Slices) incomplete. That artificial edge was placed carefully, to exclude the terror and impracticality, but no outright untruth was inserted.

I suspect that McCurry's book is in the first place Slicing at its best. I suspect also that it flirts with internal untruth, in the sense that even within its narrowly defined area there is very little of anything recognizable as an authentic India to be found. McCurry favors bright colors, quiet scenes, austere composition. India, as I understand it, has the first one some of the time and the other two almost never. While McCurry's pictures are surely real, authentic, and taken in India, they define India no more than Ansel Adams' landscapes define the USA.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Gestalt, and to be blunt, this is what we expect from an entire book of pictures named after a country. It's what we expect from India, I cannot imagine it's what is actually in India, and this may be the root of the critic's problem. Frank's book is the best example I can think of, of this Gestalt notion of mine. The Americans is of course still an incomplete picture of the USA, but it's vastly closer to a definition of the country than anything Ansel Adams did. Of course, those two were going for completely different things. Adams had, I suspect, no interest whatsoever in capturing a coherent picture of the entire country. He was explicitly a Slicer, Frank was explicitly a Gestalter.

My guess is that Singh was also a Gestalter, striving to make broad work.

Not only does a Gestalter strive for breadth, but they're less fussy about the edges. They allow that their work isn't complete, it ends, but in a ragged edge that indicates "and so on, there's more which I haven't gotten to yet," at least ideally. Not only is the work more complete, more ultimately truthful, it admits its own incompleteness in turn, it admits that in the end the only complete picture is every picture ever taken.

I expect that I am stretching here, to "find" this in (say) Frank's work. I don't think you can possibly miss it in Winogrand. Perhaps it is likewise obvious in Singh's body of work.

I am, explicitly, a Gestalter.

Where did Color Aesthetics Go?

I picked up an issue of a fascinating journal from the early 1991s ambitiously entitled "History of Photography" which appears to be an ongoing concern, somewhat to my surprise. In any case, I was skimming it and reading this and that (I picked it up for its "The mythology of the f/64 group is largely invented bullshit" piece, but there's lots more!). In there was some discussion of Impressionism and the invention of the Autochrome. Autochromes are the ones where there's a layer of potato starch grains dyed variously red. green, and blue, in front of a standard panchromatic emulsion.

Observations made at the time note that this is essentially Pointillism, and that it scientifically proves some various theories and ideas of the Impressionist painters. The idea that pure tones "blend" in the eye to produce various and sundry hues, while well known to scientists, was convincingly proven and demonstrated in a very precise way by the Autochrome, in a way the general public could easily understand. Interestingly, modern color emulsions (I think) are not Pointillism as such, since the dye blobs overlap and blend optically before they reach the eye, and I think the modern RGB monitor is also not because of the regularity of the pattern of dots. Inkjet might be back to Pointillism, though. That's kind of academic wankery, though, and quite beside the point.

This was also the era of the Pictorialists, who explicitly related themselves to Impressionism. Thus there arose at the time the color version of the usual debate. Should we strive for "true" colors in some technical sense, or should we strive to create the proper "impression" of color, or more generally seek to provide the proper "impression" of the whole thing, using color as one of several tools. The impressionist leaning photographers would naturally have been more or less the same chaps who advocated for a softer focus, for un-realistic tones, and so on. The whole Pictorialist gig. The "true and accurate" color people were the ones who would grow up to be Straight Photographers.

Where'd all this go?

These days we seem to be divided into two camps. There are the "you should calibrate everything" crew, and the "hey, I do what I want!" crew who seem to largely be about popping colors to increase likes on social media. The first bunch is arguably the Modernist "true" color gang, with all new members and all new technology. The second bunch, I dunno who those people are, although I guess they're sort of Expressionists. Or trying to be. The Impressionists seem to have no analog in today's photographic discussion. There is manipulation of color for effect, but rarely for impressionistic effect.

The debate seems to be between "technically accurate" color and "inaccurate color which creates the effect I want", without a "inaccurate color that creates a true impression."

I think we see the Impressionist idea groped toward, from time to time, by landscape photographers who are popping the saturation because that's what their Impression was. Popped the greens off the scale because that's what Hawaii's wet slopes feel like, that sort of thing. There might be a few other specific cases, but there doesn't seem to be an actual aesthetic position in play here. While I see people talking about specific colors in specific pictures, I don't see anyone making a philosophical statement that echoes the impressionist aesthetic.

I happened, just now, upon a forum thread that I think summarizes it all for me. Some relatively erudite fellow asked where people stood on Realism vs. Expressionism in photography. These are, really, they only two schools that exist (insofar as schools exist). Either you're trying for technical accuracy (essentially, Realism both as a noun and as a movement) or you're trying to express your own ideas about whatever it is, usually with saturated colors and cloning out a bunch of shit (Expressionism). The dominance of Impressionism as a philosophy (embraced by the Pictorialists and, notably, by Adams) seems to have simply vanished.

In case you're curious, the forum thread of course veered off into imbeciles talking about leveling horizons and how "ALL DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MANIPULATED" and so on, because they literally cannot be bothered to spend 5 minutes on wikipedia trying to work out what the question is.

I'm not particularly advocating some two-party (or ten-party) system for photography, in which each of us needs to select a camp to belong to. I do think it's a real loss to not have active philosophical schools in play, working to define, refine, extend ideas about what we ought to be doing. It's possible that in "High Art" some of this is going on, but the masses on the street are very much in an every-man-for-himself situation. The arguments aren't philosophical, they're about whether you should use a ColorSpanker or a ParrotNinja to profile your monitor.

Nobody really wants a coherent Aesthetic of Color, or anything else. Not even me, but I am going to have to think about that some.