I've been thinking a lot about how we understand photos of real stuff. News photos, vernacular photos, things which are not staged. Photos which are themselves made, of things which are not made. All along I have shoved off until later the other sort of thing. I feel like now it's later.
Why do we take fashion photographs? Why not fashion drawings? (Fashion drawings do exist, and they are far more fabulous than the photographs, and certainly much cheaper to make in many cases, so why fashion photos?) Of course, this applies to all kinds of things. Advertising, certainly, or really anything that falls under the broad aegis of still life.
The formal portrait probably lands near here as well, although I maintain (with my clumsy little fists if necessary) that a well done portrait is also in the documentary mode. Perhaps it bridges some gap, here.
Perhaps it's like the difference between a puppet show and a play? Other than a certain awkward aesthetic, are not puppet shows and plays essentially the same? It's artifice all the way down, a bunch of representational figures acting out a fictional story. And yet somehow when the player are live humans versus puppets, the result is different in ways that matter.
If we see photographed a collection of human figures in action, in such a context as to believe that this is documentary, we find ourselves compelled to make sense of the picture in terms of our own world-view. We try to fit the picture to our notion of reality. This is, as I have noted, a fairly ruthless and rigid process. We are wont to reject the photo as somehow faked if we cannot make it fit.
If, on the other hand, we are given to understand that these are actors in a play, we only need to fit their action to a fictional story. If we don't know the play, we may be fairly unconcerned with the story, although we'd probably still try to guess at the point of the scene. Regardless, we no longer need to reconcile the photo with our probably fairly rigid world-view.
What, then, is left that is photographic here?
To be perfectly honest, I am unsure, but I do think there is something. We do not use fashion drawings, and people watch a lot of plays with human actors.
I think it likely that there is something, something important, in the reality of the things on stage. Perhaps the fact that the model is real, and wearing a real dress, provides some emotional access point. Even though we know the scene is artifice, and the model is actually an angry European waif who will shortly fly home to Milan to argue with her layabout boyfriend, the dress is real. We can, perhaps, imagine ourselves in the same dress with the same haughty look, stamping on a few serfs, because it is a photograph.
The toaster and the car are more appealing, because they are real and we can imagine making toast, and then driving very fast.
If this notion is right then, naturally, it applies just as well to photos in the documentary mode. Not only do we have to fit the photograph of the UFO into our world-view, but when we succeed, we can imagine ourselves in those roles. We feel an empathy, perhaps, with the man in the picture; we can imagine, perhaps, ourselves tossing pie-plate UFOs across the frame while our sibling photographs them.
Maybe it's this emotional trap-door to the scene that the photograph provides, which is supposed to be changing the hearts and minds?
If this notion is right, then it is, obviously, inextricably entangled with that whole business of how we read the picture, how we make sense of it in terms of our world view. Not for complicated theoretical reasons, I assume an entanglement because everything always is.
Wednesday, June 10, 2020
Monday, June 8, 2020
Changing Hearts and Minds
As long time readers know I am fascinated by the question of if and how photographs change minds and alter public opinion. This is the latest iteration of my evolving thoughts on the matter.
When we read a novel or watch a movie, the world implied is fictional. It may contain fantastical things. Alien spacecraft, talking dogs, college girls who are not boring and who truly love middle aged men, that sort of thing. We accept these things, because that world is fictional.
A photograph, on the other hand, at least a photograph in the documentary or vernacular mode, is nominally true. The world implied by the picture is the same world we live in.
Accordingly, when we look at a photo of this sort and attempt to make sense of it, we strive to reconcile it with the world we live in — as we understand it. Sometimes we simply elide details in the photo, either by accident, or semi-kinda-on-purpose to make it fit. Almost always we interpret details, even if the details are objectively neutral, as having some biased meaning that makes the picture fit. If we cannot reconcile the picture with our idea of the world, we are most likely to reject the picture as fake.
The fictional worlds of novels and films can introduce us to new ideas more gently. We do not reject the remarkable college girl as ridiculous, because she exists only in this movie. More usefully, there are actually ideas and possibilities that are relevant to the real world that can be more safely offered up. You can sneak a little socialism past a die-hard free-marketeer, a little racial justice past the bigot, even a little authoritarianism past, well, me.
Consider a photograph of Donald Trump reading Infinite Jest. There is a large swathe of the world that would summarily reject the photograph as faked: either staged, or photoshopped. Almost all of them would say that thay're rejecting the photo on the grounds that it is an objective fact that Donald Trump doesn't read books like that. This isn't quite right: the rejection comes from your belief that Trump doesn't. Whether he actually does or not is irrelevant, you reject the photo because you believe he does not. Others would accept the photo because they believe no such thing.
Yes, yes, they are wrong and you are right and it is objectively true. Hush, you're missing the point.
If a photograph were to have changed our mind, in the first place it would have had to not fit into our world view, and in the second place we would have actually altered our world view to fit the photo, rather than vice versa. That's what it means to have changed our mind, after all.
Unlike a novel, or a movie, or a drawing, the photograph does not present us with a possible new world, it does not offer a what-if scenario. It offers what actually is. In order to change our mind, we must change our idea of what actually is. There is no gentle path to a modified world-view here, it's all or nothing.
The only place I can see a photograph working, on its own, to change anything in our minds is in a place where we're already uncertain. A space needs to be available in the mind. A photograph of something we know nothing of? Fantastic, now I know a little. A photograph of something I used to be sure of, but am now uncertain? Perhaps it will change my idea, it's possible. An opening exists.
I think one might have a firmly held opinion softened up over time, probably not entirely by visuals. A news story here, a fictionalized (and thus more digestible) account there, a few pictures and so on. After a while we're no longer entirely sure that our country's adventure in Vietnam is a great idea. At some point, we are prepared to accept a photograph of an atrocity as, maybe, real. There is a soft spot in our world-view into which, with minimal housekeeping, we can actually fit that awful picture.
A year earlier, when we were more sure about the rightness of the adventure, we would have dismissed the photo. A fake, a poorly chosen camera angle, a fluke of some sort. Now, it feels quite different. The war itself has not, history will teach us, changed very much. Our belief about the war has.
Accordingly, the world-idea against which we are compelled to reconcile the photograph is different, and the reconciliation is possible, or at any rate proceeds along different lines.
It feels fairly weird to be arguing that photographs are peculiarly ill-suited to changing public opinion, but to be honest, I think my argument's pretty strong.
When we read a novel or watch a movie, the world implied is fictional. It may contain fantastical things. Alien spacecraft, talking dogs, college girls who are not boring and who truly love middle aged men, that sort of thing. We accept these things, because that world is fictional.
A photograph, on the other hand, at least a photograph in the documentary or vernacular mode, is nominally true. The world implied by the picture is the same world we live in.
Accordingly, when we look at a photo of this sort and attempt to make sense of it, we strive to reconcile it with the world we live in — as we understand it. Sometimes we simply elide details in the photo, either by accident, or semi-kinda-on-purpose to make it fit. Almost always we interpret details, even if the details are objectively neutral, as having some biased meaning that makes the picture fit. If we cannot reconcile the picture with our idea of the world, we are most likely to reject the picture as fake.
The fictional worlds of novels and films can introduce us to new ideas more gently. We do not reject the remarkable college girl as ridiculous, because she exists only in this movie. More usefully, there are actually ideas and possibilities that are relevant to the real world that can be more safely offered up. You can sneak a little socialism past a die-hard free-marketeer, a little racial justice past the bigot, even a little authoritarianism past, well, me.
Consider a photograph of Donald Trump reading Infinite Jest. There is a large swathe of the world that would summarily reject the photograph as faked: either staged, or photoshopped. Almost all of them would say that thay're rejecting the photo on the grounds that it is an objective fact that Donald Trump doesn't read books like that. This isn't quite right: the rejection comes from your belief that Trump doesn't. Whether he actually does or not is irrelevant, you reject the photo because you believe he does not. Others would accept the photo because they believe no such thing.
Yes, yes, they are wrong and you are right and it is objectively true. Hush, you're missing the point.
If a photograph were to have changed our mind, in the first place it would have had to not fit into our world view, and in the second place we would have actually altered our world view to fit the photo, rather than vice versa. That's what it means to have changed our mind, after all.
Unlike a novel, or a movie, or a drawing, the photograph does not present us with a possible new world, it does not offer a what-if scenario. It offers what actually is. In order to change our mind, we must change our idea of what actually is. There is no gentle path to a modified world-view here, it's all or nothing.
The only place I can see a photograph working, on its own, to change anything in our minds is in a place where we're already uncertain. A space needs to be available in the mind. A photograph of something we know nothing of? Fantastic, now I know a little. A photograph of something I used to be sure of, but am now uncertain? Perhaps it will change my idea, it's possible. An opening exists.
I think one might have a firmly held opinion softened up over time, probably not entirely by visuals. A news story here, a fictionalized (and thus more digestible) account there, a few pictures and so on. After a while we're no longer entirely sure that our country's adventure in Vietnam is a great idea. At some point, we are prepared to accept a photograph of an atrocity as, maybe, real. There is a soft spot in our world-view into which, with minimal housekeeping, we can actually fit that awful picture.
A year earlier, when we were more sure about the rightness of the adventure, we would have dismissed the photo. A fake, a poorly chosen camera angle, a fluke of some sort. Now, it feels quite different. The war itself has not, history will teach us, changed very much. Our belief about the war has.
Accordingly, the world-idea against which we are compelled to reconcile the photograph is different, and the reconciliation is possible, or at any rate proceeds along different lines.
It feels fairly weird to be arguing that photographs are peculiarly ill-suited to changing public opinion, but to be honest, I think my argument's pretty strong.
Saturday, June 6, 2020
The Apparatus of Photographic Criticism is Trash
The first pillar of contemporary theory of photography is that the truth claim is ridiculous. Any mention of something like it is brushed off with a fruity laugh and a condescending "all photographs are constructs, of course." While this may be true in some theoretical/academic world, down here on earth people treat photographs rather differently than they do paintings.
The condescending reply is an expression of something real, of the basically squishy nature of the truth of photos, but the person with the fruity laugh doesn't understand that because he's an idiot and doesn't care.
He doesn't even notice how radically his idiotic idea conflicts with the other pillar of contemporary theory of photography, which is that photographs have immense power to harm. Curiously they seem to have almost no power to generate change for good, but they have almost infinite power to harm.
The mechanic I have in mind here is usually described as something like "perpetuating stereotypes."
Now, I do not deny even slightly that photographs can depict stereotypes, even very negative ones, and that such things are odious. My objection is to the claim that by making an odious depiction, a photograph becomes a deadly instrument capable of wreaking harm.
When we can date these things, and we often can, we find that photographs follow culture or, at best, are abreast of culture. They do not appear to generate culture. They follow, rather than lead. The claim, though, isn't quite that photos generate (negative) culture, but rather that that sustain it, which is a somewhat weaker claim.
The idea that imagery can generate cultural or social change was trotted out a while back in studies purporting to illustrate that watching pornography turned men evil. These studies, um, have not held up. Given that we're watching astronomically more porn now as a society than we were in 1990, you'd expect a 24/7 rape party in the streets, but rates have gone down instead. But, perhaps it's just sustain anyways.
It is clear, from the timelines if nothing else, that photographs reflect culture. They are, at least, a kind of mirror which reveals culture. When we consistently see, say, women, depicted in a certain way in photographs, we know something of how the culture perceives women. Timelines teach against the idea that photographs generate new understandings of women, but perhaps photographs do actively sustain an idea of women.
The conceit, thus, is that if we could eliminate those stereotyping pictures we could break some cycle of feedback which sustains the cultural idea. On the face of it, this sounds like a pretty sound idea. It does, however, begin to smack of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for language, that our vocabulary dictates the limits of our thoughts. This sort of idea has not stood up well in the courts of actual studies.
I will concede that photographs of stereotypes are part of a cultural morass, a system of inextricably entangled cause and effect, in which everything is causal and everything is also an effect. What is not clear is what changing some part of that system actually does. There's no particular reason to suppose that the system won't roll along just fine without the photos.
At the very least, photos of negative stereotypes can be condemned as a kind of proxy for the underlying idea they illustrate. Rather than "this photo ought not exist" you would say "the stereotype this photo illustrates ought not exist." This isn't a big distinction, but the latter phrasing has the advantage of being much easier to support, and also rather more on-point. In the end, who even gives a shit about some photos, it is after all the stereotype that's the problem.
Speaking against the photos rather than the stereotype itself begins to feel a bit like sympathetic magic, when you examine the notion closely.
It's not really that the idea photos of negative stereotypes are bad is a terrible idea, it's that it's so shoddily presented. It's invariably stated as an obvious truth when, if you take a few moments to think about it, it's not at all obvious. As with everything else in photographic theory, this is stated without a shred of evidence.
All the theory of photography appears to simply be convincing blather. Sontag, Barthes, and me, we all just say stuff that sounds good to us without a shred of evidence. The academy accepts ideas, as far as I can tell, based largely on how well they support the easy writing of stupid derivative think pieces complaining about anything and everything.
Nobody seems to notice or care if the entire edifice is a maze of contradictions and stupidity, it's entirely about how easy it is to grind out another 1200 words on how much you dislike some artist who's making more money than you are.
The condescending reply is an expression of something real, of the basically squishy nature of the truth of photos, but the person with the fruity laugh doesn't understand that because he's an idiot and doesn't care.
He doesn't even notice how radically his idiotic idea conflicts with the other pillar of contemporary theory of photography, which is that photographs have immense power to harm. Curiously they seem to have almost no power to generate change for good, but they have almost infinite power to harm.
The mechanic I have in mind here is usually described as something like "perpetuating stereotypes."
Now, I do not deny even slightly that photographs can depict stereotypes, even very negative ones, and that such things are odious. My objection is to the claim that by making an odious depiction, a photograph becomes a deadly instrument capable of wreaking harm.
When we can date these things, and we often can, we find that photographs follow culture or, at best, are abreast of culture. They do not appear to generate culture. They follow, rather than lead. The claim, though, isn't quite that photos generate (negative) culture, but rather that that sustain it, which is a somewhat weaker claim.
The idea that imagery can generate cultural or social change was trotted out a while back in studies purporting to illustrate that watching pornography turned men evil. These studies, um, have not held up. Given that we're watching astronomically more porn now as a society than we were in 1990, you'd expect a 24/7 rape party in the streets, but rates have gone down instead. But, perhaps it's just sustain anyways.
It is clear, from the timelines if nothing else, that photographs reflect culture. They are, at least, a kind of mirror which reveals culture. When we consistently see, say, women, depicted in a certain way in photographs, we know something of how the culture perceives women. Timelines teach against the idea that photographs generate new understandings of women, but perhaps photographs do actively sustain an idea of women.
The conceit, thus, is that if we could eliminate those stereotyping pictures we could break some cycle of feedback which sustains the cultural idea. On the face of it, this sounds like a pretty sound idea. It does, however, begin to smack of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for language, that our vocabulary dictates the limits of our thoughts. This sort of idea has not stood up well in the courts of actual studies.
I will concede that photographs of stereotypes are part of a cultural morass, a system of inextricably entangled cause and effect, in which everything is causal and everything is also an effect. What is not clear is what changing some part of that system actually does. There's no particular reason to suppose that the system won't roll along just fine without the photos.
At the very least, photos of negative stereotypes can be condemned as a kind of proxy for the underlying idea they illustrate. Rather than "this photo ought not exist" you would say "the stereotype this photo illustrates ought not exist." This isn't a big distinction, but the latter phrasing has the advantage of being much easier to support, and also rather more on-point. In the end, who even gives a shit about some photos, it is after all the stereotype that's the problem.
Speaking against the photos rather than the stereotype itself begins to feel a bit like sympathetic magic, when you examine the notion closely.
It's not really that the idea photos of negative stereotypes are bad is a terrible idea, it's that it's so shoddily presented. It's invariably stated as an obvious truth when, if you take a few moments to think about it, it's not at all obvious. As with everything else in photographic theory, this is stated without a shred of evidence.
All the theory of photography appears to simply be convincing blather. Sontag, Barthes, and me, we all just say stuff that sounds good to us without a shred of evidence. The academy accepts ideas, as far as I can tell, based largely on how well they support the easy writing of stupid derivative think pieces complaining about anything and everything.
Nobody seems to notice or care if the entire edifice is a maze of contradictions and stupidity, it's entirely about how easy it is to grind out another 1200 words on how much you dislike some artist who's making more money than you are.
Friday, June 5, 2020
The Object Under Consideration
In the relatively early days of photography, Duchamp selected a urinal, named it Fountain, and declared it Art.
This was in a sense a watershed moment in the Art world, and had an impact on Photography As Art. Duchamp in one fell swoop declared that craft, that labor, that skilled work, was not required for Art. One need not make a thing at all for it to be Art. Any object that, because of an artist's declaration or perhaps for other reasons, has Art-like properties is Art.
The photograph, with its depressingly low skill requirements, with its unfortunate reproducibility, with its potential for simply happening by accident, was suddenly liberated from stodgy requirements, and was free to be Art.
Well, in a sense. The liberation began much earlier, and was never much of a sudden event, but still, the idea has a certain soundness. This is an old story, well worn.
It occurred to me this morning that at the same time a second thread of thought was launched, one rather less fortunate.
Duchamp's experiment also suggested that the object itself didn't matter much. What mattered was intention, context, authorship.
We can draw a pretty straight line from Fountain to the modern approach to photographic criticism. The modern conceit, despite protestations to the contrary, is that the picture itself hardly matters. What truly matters is who made it, why, and for whom.
I am the first to allow that context, authorship, and politics absolutely affect the way we grasp a photograph. The nude selfie made by the feminist, even if pixel identical with the nude made by the male pornographer, will take us differently — if we are aware of the facts of its making. Intention, context, and authorship do indeed matter, when we know them.
Still, the object under consideration, the photograph and its contents, have largely gotten lost here.
The result we have arrived at today is that the apparent job of a critic is to project his or her politics onto whatever random collection of pixels swims into their view. They don't notice details in the frame, they don't care about the ground truth, they just open their mouths and let words fall fecklessly out.
These are maybe not quite the droids we were looking for.
This was in a sense a watershed moment in the Art world, and had an impact on Photography As Art. Duchamp in one fell swoop declared that craft, that labor, that skilled work, was not required for Art. One need not make a thing at all for it to be Art. Any object that, because of an artist's declaration or perhaps for other reasons, has Art-like properties is Art.
The photograph, with its depressingly low skill requirements, with its unfortunate reproducibility, with its potential for simply happening by accident, was suddenly liberated from stodgy requirements, and was free to be Art.
Well, in a sense. The liberation began much earlier, and was never much of a sudden event, but still, the idea has a certain soundness. This is an old story, well worn.
It occurred to me this morning that at the same time a second thread of thought was launched, one rather less fortunate.
Duchamp's experiment also suggested that the object itself didn't matter much. What mattered was intention, context, authorship.
We can draw a pretty straight line from Fountain to the modern approach to photographic criticism. The modern conceit, despite protestations to the contrary, is that the picture itself hardly matters. What truly matters is who made it, why, and for whom.
I am the first to allow that context, authorship, and politics absolutely affect the way we grasp a photograph. The nude selfie made by the feminist, even if pixel identical with the nude made by the male pornographer, will take us differently — if we are aware of the facts of its making. Intention, context, and authorship do indeed matter, when we know them.
Still, the object under consideration, the photograph and its contents, have largely gotten lost here.
The result we have arrived at today is that the apparent job of a critic is to project his or her politics onto whatever random collection of pixels swims into their view. They don't notice details in the frame, they don't care about the ground truth, they just open their mouths and let words fall fecklessly out.
These are maybe not quite the droids we were looking for.
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
Notes on Lens Compression
Somehow or other lens compression effects seem to have hit the zeitgeist. A day does not go by when I fail to see some news photograph critiqued on the grounds of lens compression. Either what it appear to show is fake (or allegedly fake) due to lens compression, or lens compression is concealing some truth. So here's a little description of it, and a cautionary example.
Lens compression doesn't have anything to do with lenses. It's about where you are.
If two things are 10 feet apart, but you're 500 feet away, they look pretty much the same distance away from you. That is, they appear really close to one another. On the other hand, if you're 5 feet from the nearer thing, then the farther one is three times as far from you as the nearer one; the farther one is "much further away" even though the two objects in question have not moved — you have.
Lens focal length only comes in to play because to photograph something 500 feet away you usually want to use a pretty long lens.
The cautionary tale is this: you can't actually tell how far apart things are from just a photo. You can sometimes tell ratios if you know how big things are (e.g. two people are usually about the same size): this thing is so-and-so further from the camera than that thing. If you then have one or more of several measurements, you can calculate the rest them, but without any actual measurements all you have is ratios.
Here are two photos I made just now:
In both cases the tiny cake is closer than the eraser. In one of them, though, the cake and the eraser are 6 inches apart, and in the other they are 12 inches apart. The camera is twice as far away for the 12 inch gap, so the same "compression" is accomplished. The ratios between all the distances between this thing and that thing are the same (except, the sharp-eyed might note, the background is a bit off).
While you can, usually, tell from other evidence in the picture that there's some sort of compression effect in play, one cannot a priori tell much about the absolute distances in play without knowing a little more.
In these pictures, the floor underneath the two objects betrays that there is some front-to-back gap between the two. It is possible that a minute examination of the floor texture would allow you to determine that the gap is larger in one case than the other, but in general this cue is at best difficult to read and at worst cropped out of frame entirely.
So when you see someone saying "the cop is 20 feet behind that guy" take it with a grain of salt. "Behind" might be discernible but "20 feet" is probably a wild guess.
Lens compression doesn't have anything to do with lenses. It's about where you are.
If two things are 10 feet apart, but you're 500 feet away, they look pretty much the same distance away from you. That is, they appear really close to one another. On the other hand, if you're 5 feet from the nearer thing, then the farther one is three times as far from you as the nearer one; the farther one is "much further away" even though the two objects in question have not moved — you have.
Lens focal length only comes in to play because to photograph something 500 feet away you usually want to use a pretty long lens.
The cautionary tale is this: you can't actually tell how far apart things are from just a photo. You can sometimes tell ratios if you know how big things are (e.g. two people are usually about the same size): this thing is so-and-so further from the camera than that thing. If you then have one or more of several measurements, you can calculate the rest them, but without any actual measurements all you have is ratios.
Here are two photos I made just now:
In both cases the tiny cake is closer than the eraser. In one of them, though, the cake and the eraser are 6 inches apart, and in the other they are 12 inches apart. The camera is twice as far away for the 12 inch gap, so the same "compression" is accomplished. The ratios between all the distances between this thing and that thing are the same (except, the sharp-eyed might note, the background is a bit off).
While you can, usually, tell from other evidence in the picture that there's some sort of compression effect in play, one cannot a priori tell much about the absolute distances in play without knowing a little more.
In these pictures, the floor underneath the two objects betrays that there is some front-to-back gap between the two. It is possible that a minute examination of the floor texture would allow you to determine that the gap is larger in one case than the other, but in general this cue is at best difficult to read and at worst cropped out of frame entirely.
So when you see someone saying "the cop is 20 feet behind that guy" take it with a grain of salt. "Behind" might be discernible but "20 feet" is probably a wild guess.
Monday, June 1, 2020
Central Camera of Chicago
So apparently there's this camera store in Chicago that burned down. Mike over at ToP has a thing on it. I'm not going to link to anything here, but you can look it all up if you like.
So they burned, and within what looks like under 24 hours they had a GoFundMe up aiming to raise $250,000. As of now, they're more than half way there and will likely blow out that number by morning (update: they didn't, the rate of new donations, while still large, has dropped a LOT). The details in the fundraiser are all pretty generic vows to rebuild, nothing whatever about the very first thing that popped to my cynical mind which was don't you guys have insurance?
At this point I can guarantee you several things: first, the owners of this business have no idea what kind of insurance settlement they are up for; second the subject of insurance is front and center in their minds. They are trying to determine if the building owner has coverage that may be relevant, they are checking with their own insurance providers, and they are seeing if there is anyone else relevant (a building management firm?) who might have some insurance they'd be eligible for.
They got the GoFundMe up before they actually filed anything.
8 hours from now they may decide not to file anything, because they'll have way more money than they need, since all they really need to do is replace inventory and cover some startup costs. The business still exists with all its goodwill, relationships, cash-on-hand, and systems. The staff all survived. What they need is a new storefront and some shit to sell.
Now, there certainly are reasons one might choose to fundraise. Perhaps they see speed as vital. Perhaps they are confident that they're underinsured (in which case, what dumbshits, but, sigh, ok.)
But you know, perhaps they also decided that, since a GoFundMe is free and photographers are dumb, they might just take a shot at raising a nice big lump of cash. The fact that they do not mention insurance, or really anything, in their fundraising campaign makes me pretty unhappy. I know they're thinking about it, so.. why aren't they talking about it?
There's some chance that if they raise $300,000 or whatever, the insurance company will just knock $300,000 off the top of whatever the settlement is in the end.
To be blunt, this feels like some good old Chicago-style grift.
Give your money to... anything else. Or, what the hell, give it to these guys. It's your money. If you just wanna give it away to some insurance company, go for it!
Me? I'm giving money to my local food bank.
So they burned, and within what looks like under 24 hours they had a GoFundMe up aiming to raise $250,000. As of now, they're more than half way there and will likely blow out that number by morning (update: they didn't, the rate of new donations, while still large, has dropped a LOT). The details in the fundraiser are all pretty generic vows to rebuild, nothing whatever about the very first thing that popped to my cynical mind which was don't you guys have insurance?
At this point I can guarantee you several things: first, the owners of this business have no idea what kind of insurance settlement they are up for; second the subject of insurance is front and center in their minds. They are trying to determine if the building owner has coverage that may be relevant, they are checking with their own insurance providers, and they are seeing if there is anyone else relevant (a building management firm?) who might have some insurance they'd be eligible for.
They got the GoFundMe up before they actually filed anything.
8 hours from now they may decide not to file anything, because they'll have way more money than they need, since all they really need to do is replace inventory and cover some startup costs. The business still exists with all its goodwill, relationships, cash-on-hand, and systems. The staff all survived. What they need is a new storefront and some shit to sell.
Now, there certainly are reasons one might choose to fundraise. Perhaps they see speed as vital. Perhaps they are confident that they're underinsured (in which case, what dumbshits, but, sigh, ok.)
But you know, perhaps they also decided that, since a GoFundMe is free and photographers are dumb, they might just take a shot at raising a nice big lump of cash. The fact that they do not mention insurance, or really anything, in their fundraising campaign makes me pretty unhappy. I know they're thinking about it, so.. why aren't they talking about it?
There's some chance that if they raise $300,000 or whatever, the insurance company will just knock $300,000 off the top of whatever the settlement is in the end.
To be blunt, this feels like some good old Chicago-style grift.
Give your money to... anything else. Or, what the hell, give it to these guys. It's your money. If you just wanna give it away to some insurance company, go for it!
Me? I'm giving money to my local food bank.
Crit: Tokyo Likes You by Dan Ryan
Dan Ryan has now made two books out of his apparently very deep archive of photos from Tokyo. I wrote about the first one some time ago. There's a lot of background there that probably applies exactly as well here.
This one, available in the form of a PDF here, is much the same sort of thing.
The concept is pretty simple. It's a whole bunch of pictures of people in Tokyo, making eye contact and, more often than not, smiling. There is a range of reaction from neutral acceptance of the photographer, through friendly smiles, all the way to outright mugging for the camera. The common theme is that all the subjects see the camera and the photographer, and all accept him and his photograph.
That by itself is worth noting. If we pay attention in the right places, we "learn" that Japanese object to being photographed. My personal experiences suggest that in the USA there is not exactly universal acceptance of being photographed. Dan has something of a magical ability here, and I don't know how he does it. Does he simply take millions of pictures and throw the snarls out? Is he brandishing a pistol in his non-camera hand and screaming SMILE! at people? I do not know, but if you follow his activity online you will see that he produces pictures not unlike these from Tokyo, in California, on a daily basis.
He has some manner, some glamour, some way of interacting that makes this work. Even in what we are taught is the famously insular land of Japan.
So what can we learn from these interactions, from what we might as well take as our Special Ambassador to Japan, Dan Ryan?
Well. The title says it, doesn't it? Tokyo Likes You.
We see that Tokyo is filled with a humanity we recognize. These are not mysterious aliens, although to my eye they are not quite familiar.
What I feel, looking at these pictures, is the continued presence of the wall that separates my culture from theirs. There is a degree to which the person in the photograph and I would never understand one another. Of course, this is true between any two humans, two brothers will never fully understand one another, so this truly is a matter of degree. The point is, though, that a Tokyo native and I are farther apart, culturally, than I am from an average westerner, and the gap between us is in some ways deep and broad.
According to legend, to received wisdom, and things I have been told personally by people I trust, the average Japanese is not much interested in closing that gap.
Perhaps I am merely projecting, here, I certainly can point to no specific evidence in the pictures, but these pictures feel consistent with that notion, to me. The people in the pictures strike me as smiling at Dan across that chasm of cultural difference.
But the point here, the big revelation, is that it's OK. The cultural chasm isn't a fortified wall, it isn't fueled by anger or hate.
The pictures seem, to me, to say you and I, we are different, irrevocably, but that is OK. you are I, we're still human, and we share a lot. you and I, we both smile, mostly for the same reasons, mostly at the same times. like right now. hi!
These pictures do not tear down the cultural barriers, at all. They do not unify us as brothers. They reveal the wall as essentially transparent, and without animosity. At least in these moments the wall is transparent and amiable.
It's a very hopeful and positive book. It speaks, to me, to a way of relating across cultures that is neither assimilating, nor antagonistic.
Our differences do not need to be reconciled for us to like one another. We can be different, even mutually incomprehensible, and still we can like one another. It's OK.
This is maybe a lesson for all of humanity, applicable to every human relationship.
This one, available in the form of a PDF here, is much the same sort of thing.
The concept is pretty simple. It's a whole bunch of pictures of people in Tokyo, making eye contact and, more often than not, smiling. There is a range of reaction from neutral acceptance of the photographer, through friendly smiles, all the way to outright mugging for the camera. The common theme is that all the subjects see the camera and the photographer, and all accept him and his photograph.
That by itself is worth noting. If we pay attention in the right places, we "learn" that Japanese object to being photographed. My personal experiences suggest that in the USA there is not exactly universal acceptance of being photographed. Dan has something of a magical ability here, and I don't know how he does it. Does he simply take millions of pictures and throw the snarls out? Is he brandishing a pistol in his non-camera hand and screaming SMILE! at people? I do not know, but if you follow his activity online you will see that he produces pictures not unlike these from Tokyo, in California, on a daily basis.
He has some manner, some glamour, some way of interacting that makes this work. Even in what we are taught is the famously insular land of Japan.
So what can we learn from these interactions, from what we might as well take as our Special Ambassador to Japan, Dan Ryan?
Well. The title says it, doesn't it? Tokyo Likes You.
We see that Tokyo is filled with a humanity we recognize. These are not mysterious aliens, although to my eye they are not quite familiar.
What I feel, looking at these pictures, is the continued presence of the wall that separates my culture from theirs. There is a degree to which the person in the photograph and I would never understand one another. Of course, this is true between any two humans, two brothers will never fully understand one another, so this truly is a matter of degree. The point is, though, that a Tokyo native and I are farther apart, culturally, than I am from an average westerner, and the gap between us is in some ways deep and broad.
According to legend, to received wisdom, and things I have been told personally by people I trust, the average Japanese is not much interested in closing that gap.
Perhaps I am merely projecting, here, I certainly can point to no specific evidence in the pictures, but these pictures feel consistent with that notion, to me. The people in the pictures strike me as smiling at Dan across that chasm of cultural difference.
But the point here, the big revelation, is that it's OK. The cultural chasm isn't a fortified wall, it isn't fueled by anger or hate.
The pictures seem, to me, to say you and I, we are different, irrevocably, but that is OK. you are I, we're still human, and we share a lot. you and I, we both smile, mostly for the same reasons, mostly at the same times. like right now. hi!
These pictures do not tear down the cultural barriers, at all. They do not unify us as brothers. They reveal the wall as essentially transparent, and without animosity. At least in these moments the wall is transparent and amiable.
It's a very hopeful and positive book. It speaks, to me, to a way of relating across cultures that is neither assimilating, nor antagonistic.
Our differences do not need to be reconciled for us to like one another. We can be different, even mutually incomprehensible, and still we can like one another. It's OK.
This is maybe a lesson for all of humanity, applicable to every human relationship.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)