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Monday, January 7, 2019

Phoning it In

I haven't really been reading Ming Thein since he partnered up with Robin Wong, but I chanced to stop by and came across a recent photo essay he's put up: Forest in the City.

It struck me, looking through the pictures, that I am feeling a trend. Many of the photos Thein shares with us have that strong graphical quality and sensation of great sharpness upon which is reputation is built. But scroll down. It falls apart in to "here, have some random piles of leaves" shots. I'm sure he'd have some song and dance about how if I could just see the megapixels it would be an immersive experience or whatever, but the fact remains that he just shoved the camera out there and mashed the shutter. It's a random pile of leaves.

Next up, KAGE Collective which is some very self-serious bunch of Street Photographers. It's not all random snaps, by any means. But there's a lot of material on that web site that seems to be just "I waved the camera around and pressed the button a few times" shots.

This is different from photographs I don't like. There are plenty of mannered, carefully made, pictures that I hate. There are quite a few random snaps that I like. The point is that these photographers are putting out there as Their Work pictures which appear to have been made without the slightest thought or effort at all, by someone who's simply stopped caring.

I spend little time in the "critique" section of forums, but it has been, I think, more than a year since I have seen anyone trying to offer a truly critical response. It's all "I like #5 the best" and "nice shot" with the occasional "overexposed" and "doesn't work for me."

In the same areas, we see a little bit of those careless random snaps creeping in, especially from established forum members. If they're established enough, they can get a flurry of "nice shot" from, as near as I can tell, literally anything they throw up there.

It feels to me as if, a few years ago, we had a lot of relative newcomers to photography charging around trying to figure it out and being enthused (this part is not in doubt). Interest is absolutely flagging across the board (again, not in doubt), indicated by falling camera sales and falling web site traffic. The result, and this is where it starts being my theory, is that we have a pretty large collection of people who hanging around, having never really figured it out, and who have all unknowing ceased to care all that much.

At this point there's a large group of people who haven't put their DSLR down yet, and are just going through the motions of picture taking, of talking about pictures, of consuming media related to photography. But they don't really care much any more, and they're not even looking at the pictures of reading the media any more. They're glancing, skimming, and typing in the same responses they've been typing in for years.

You can put almost literally any shitty photos on the front page of Luminous Landscape, or Ming Thein's web site, or Kage Collective, or any number of other sites where Photographers We Officially Respect have long hung their work, and there will be a contingent who will assume they're good, and who will defend them without really having examined these things critically or even visually.

It has always been so, to be sure. There have always been camera owners who simply don't look at pictures. This era seems to have more of them, there seems to be a trend toward phoning it in, because you can get pretty much the same ego strokes as when you worked at it.

It's kind of gumming up the works at the moment.

16 comments:

  1. I've noticed that Ming 'Raymond Babbitt' Thein - The idiot savant of gammon faced corporate middle management camera enthusiasm loves a good pithily titled compendium of his sharpest images of loosely related objects to call art with a capital A. Ever wanted a very sharp high acuity 60x40 print of a random Asian frying squid penis at night? Ming's your guy. Next stop MOMA.

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  2. I think the truth is that the art phase of still photography is farther past its “sell by date” than people want to admit. Starved of income potential for work from anyone not dead or named Lik. Dull repetition of styles that were over decades ago. Faux creativity from the MFA mill. Dull, dull, dull. Moving photography (some call this video) has some potential due to the convergence of ubiquitous screens, bandwidth and the democratization of capture technology, but that will require a move away from the assumption that video requires and serves only narrative. But don’t dare suggest such a thing to the crusty old guys that congregate at places like LuLa or The Online Photographer who know for sure that cameras can only be properly used to capture 1/500 of a second slices a time. Movement! Sound?! Bah humbug. Photo books are the future ...

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    1. Well, photo books are the future of still photography! But it's a pretty small future.

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  3. My critique is that they are mostly throw-away photos with the contrast turned way up. And that's about all the critique they deserve. But I did enjoy the abstract qualities of one, the leaves labeled Z702672 copy.

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  4. And the Kage Collective looks to be one of those internet phenomenons where it sounds and looks ambitious but there's not much there. It's easy to make something look like the new Magnum, but much harder to actually be the new Magnum. It's a shame because I think there is real potential for collective photo-journalism, but the emphasis has to be on the editing and journalism side of things, and there has to be enough capital to get it going, whether from the state or private people.

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    1. I'm pretty sure that KAGE confuses "having a strong internet fan base" with "being good", which Magnum didn't.

      At this point I kind of think that many good photographers are pretty gun-shy, and avoid other photographers like the plague because they can't bear yet another conversation about cameras. This makes forming a collective of people who actually do good photography kind of tricky.

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    2. Street photography is not photo-journalism. Magnum is only "good" because it was founded by Famous Guys, that exclusive club shtick is their meal ticket, and nobody even know who you are.*

      *when they're good, they're really good, and when they're meh, they're meh with a cherry on top

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  5. I stopped looking at Ming's work, although I did drop by his website now and then for a while, now quite a while ago. What bothered me, and this is something that bothers me about a lot of people, in more than one field, is that he doesn't know much about his field. There was a picture of his, on this post https://blog.mingthein.com/2014/10/07/derivative-works-and-photography/ which more than one person noted was reminiscent of Eggleston's 'The Red Ceiling.' He had never heard of it. Now, I know close to fuck all, but that I did know, and found surprising. I don't have a big photo library, but I've got some books and I look at them as the kids allow. (Not often!). It strikes me that there is a willful arrogance in not learning at least some of the oeuvre of significant photographers and/or canonical photographs. To a degree, I give a pass for feminist artists in whichever field, who don't wish to re-hash the patriarchy, but if that is not the case, then I find it lazy.

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    1. I remember when he thought he'd invented the "cinematic style" and clearly had never heard of Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills" photographs.

      This is sort of standard, though. Photography, as learned by amateurs, has almost no sense of history. Coming from a mathematics background, a field which is taught exclusively in a very history-forward way, this seems deeply harmful to me.

      If Kevin Raber gets a new enterprise off the ground, I intend to offer him a regular column combining history with philosophy, a series intended to give the regular reader a thuhmbnail history, at least, with a thoughtful grounding in some of the important ideas of photography. As I see them, of course.

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  6. You buy a camera, you are a Photographer.
    You buy a Piano, you own a Piano.

    Too many don't understand this.

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  7. Man oh man!!! Yeah, there are way too many "owners" out there, "owners" of all kinds. And yes, they don't quite understand.
    Thanks a lot for this comment. The best in quite a while!!!

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  8. I guess I'm not into purist definitions of street photography. When I look at the amazing China work of Marc Riboud, a Magnum photographer, it is street photography, travel photography and photo-journalism. Same with Koudelka's work. Good photography is not obsessed with genre.

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    1. I completely agree. It's a real stretch to ask something like the Kage Collective to be a new Magnum. Perhaps with some exceptions, most of the old guard Magnum stable cut their teeth on real photo-journalism, filling real assignments for real picture editors that got published in real photo mags (Life, Look Paris Match etc.) that no longer exist. So today, you've got reporters with iphones and little/no training in how to shoot. Any pictorial content that isn't straight-up reporting is stock. OTOH you've got this ragbag army of 100,000s of self-styled "street photographers", some very small fraction of which exhibits any historical awareness and/or talent, furiously pumping out images. You can rage against this fact all you like [you-know-who], but it is what it is.

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    2. Oh, and rage I do, naturally.

      But my point with this piece is a little different. While it's true that I think these guys are shit even when they're trying, it feels like more and more often they're not even trying.

      And when they're not trying, the pictures do not get any better.

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  9. I think that you are mistaken about photography on Internet web sites. The pictures are actually exactly what the financing system asks for. It is just not apparent to you, because you never considered what the financing system is.

    The sites are financed by advertising. Advertising demands that a continuous stream of pictures is published. Advertising does not demand that the pictures are very strong. Strong pictures may actually distract from the adverts. Politically charged pictures are refused by advertising agencies. OTOH, pictures that any photographer can do, provided he or she had the advertised equipment are a plus.

    And that is exactly what you have: a stream of boring pictures which sell themselves on "image quality" (sharpness, shallow depth of field, high iso sensitivity, the latest post-processing fad, etc...).


    (Repost, as I don't see that my previous post went through.)

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    1. I moderate all comments, I think there is a small notation you see when you press "Publish"

      Yes, this is quite true especially for instagram and whatnot. But, I am not talking about instagram, I am talking about people who style themselves Serious Photographers and who have - in some cases - produced a lot of photography which was not phoned in.

      Ming Thein used to publish a lot *more* photography, and it was clear that he worked at it pretty hard. Now he's publishing fewer pictures, and often they look like he doesn't care and is simply waving the camera around mashing the button.

      That's the change that I am noting, here.

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