Vernacular Photography, Again

Another way to think of the difference between snapshots intended to reach across time, and snapshots intended to reach across social connections, is this.

In the film era, the snapshot was supposed to reach across time. It was a tool to trigger memory, "Remember that trip to Disneyland?" and as such is filled with temporal and spatial references. The pictures from Disneyland contain The Mouse, and The Castle. They are recognizable, more or less instantly, as "us, in Disneyland." They would make no sense without the specific objects which tie the photograph to that event, that time.

Pictures from Christmas inevitably contain the Tree, birthdays have Cake, and so on.

These days we get a lot, a LOT, of photographs with no such things. A picture of a latte is useless as a spur to memory, I've drunk a lot of lattes in my life. A picture of me at a party is useless as a spur to memory, I've been to a lot of parties.

As a tool to tell my friends "I am drinking a latte right now, and it is delicious" a picture of a latte is marvelous, however. It neatly encapsulates the moment in an instantly apprehensible object.

In this light, I am being very unfair to the photographic-safari people. These people are generally taking pictures that are rife with objects that anchor the photo to a place and time. They are excellent spurs to memory, in general, and as such could well serve to reach across time to a future self. And, indeed, I am certain they do serve this function. The wealthy gents who take these things, no doubt haul them out 10 years hence and recall their trip to Africa.

Still, I continue to hold that the primary function of the pictures is social signaling in the here-and-now. The pictures exist to say "nice latte, but I was in Africa."

Sally Mann argues that photographs destroy memory, and I am inclined to agree. But she is referring, I think, to the photos that we use as spurs to memory. The photos from Disneyland become our memory of Disneyland, the photos of Dad become our memory of Dad. I'm not sure what the photos of lunch, parties, and lattes do. I already don't remember those things specifically. I think we generally remember those things mostly as categories rather than specific instances.

Does the line between the category of things, and the category of photographs of the things, get blurred? If you're in the habit of photographing your latte, when is your idea of "a latte"? Do you think of an actual latte, or is what floats to mind an instagram photo of a latte? I don't habitually photograph my drinks, but maybe I should start.

For SCIENCE.

Vernacular Photograhy

Vernacular Photography, to review, is the fancy way of saying "snapshots".

I've talked in the past about how it's changed, with the advent of digital and sharing. In the 1980s we got 1 roll per year with the kids posed stiffly in front of: The Christmas Tree, One Birthday Cake Each, The Eiffel Tower (because we went to Europe that summer) and then The Christmas Tree again. Now we have 1000s of digital shots of much more interesting, or at least entertaining, stuff. We get the weird faces, the messes, the funny dancing, the parties, and so on. Digital is free, so we shoot a lot more, and therefore get more of the trivial moments, which are to my eye the more interesting and in some sense important ones.

But here's a little thought for the day.

The function of the film snapshot, printed and put in a shoebox or an album, was to reach across time to our future selves. Remember the trip to Europe? Remember that christmas when you got your first bike? Remember?

The function of the digital snapshot is to reach across space and social connections to talk about now. It's horizontal, not vertical, or something like that.

It's still vernacular, because the picture doesn't matter, only what the picture is of. The photo need only be a fair representation of what the camera was pointing at, good enough to provide evidence or a spur to memory. People like me still take snapshots for our future selves, of course. It's virtually all of what I do, but I dare say lots of people do it to some degree or another.

That usage is dwarfed by the horizontal "look at this thing which just happened", "this is my present, my now, look!"

There's something here that's leaking out into the world of Fine Art photographers. Just as a for instance, these guys go on safari or otherwise make fabulously expensive trips out to the ends of the earth. Frequently they come back with pictures of lions or penguins or whatever which, while technically amazing (oooo, ahh, the resolution, the colors, you really nailed the focus!) could have been made at any good zoo.

When Adams went on epic trips, he sat there and thought to himself "What the fuck am I feeling about this mountain, and how can I shoot that?" and it's not his fault that he always felt the same way. Weston went to the desert and saw the sensual curves and thought "Man, I love women" and shot that.

Kevin Raber says "I'm in freakin' Antarctica! You gotta see this!" and shoots what are, ultimately, incredibly detailed facebook photos. So we see a bunch of penguins and some ice, but it doesn't feel cold. Michael Reichmann is going to give us a bunch of lizards and birds that say "I'm in the Galapagos!" but in the end they're just supporting evidence that he was. They will look like they could have been shot at a zoo. There will be some vistas and stuff too, of course.

But Kevin doesn't shoot how cold it is on the ice, of the way it feels to walk on the layer of ice atop the ocean, or what he felt about the mass of penguins. He shoots exercises in form, he shoots to show off his mastery of the gear, he shoots to provide supporting evidence that Right Now He Is Somewhere Cooooool.

Michael will not shoot his awe at the uniqueness of the ecosystem, he will not shoot how it feels to walk where Darwin walked, he will not shoot the sensation of luxury he gets in the chartered yacht. He's definitely not going to shoot how it feels to make $20,000 in a week for helping old white dudes with their cameras. It's gonna be "Here I, Michael-al-al Riechmann-an-an-an... IN THE GLALAPAGOS ISLANDS! Dun-dun-DUNNNNN" all day long. It's gonna be high end facebook.

And what's wrong with that, I suppose? I object, I suppose, to dressing up ephemeral "look at my present, look at my now" in the clothes of "hear me, future generations, look upon my works."

Maybe..

Next time you see some dude photographing kids in public, consider some of these alternatives to 'AAAAA! PEDOPHILE!' Next time someone you know freaks out on facebook about some creep photographing children at the playground, consider these possibilities.

Maybe he's doing research on how kids play, to design a better and safer play structure.

Maybe he's doing a book on the innocence of youth.

Maybe he's preparing a report for the city on playground usage, to justify increased funding.

Maybe he's actually photographing the moms in yoga pants, and shooting the play structure from time to time as cover.

Maybe he's just messing around with his camera.

Maybe that little girl reminds him of his own daughter who died of brain cancer.

These are pretty much all more likely scenarios than PEDO! Feel free to use them on your freaking-out friends.

If you're feeling brave you could also try out 'So what? Are we now thought police?' but you may want to buckle in for backlash if you try that one out.

Ephemera

I am back and forth on this one.

On the one hand, most contemporary photography is ephemera. Something to post to my social media presence, liked or ignored, and then we're on to the next thing. Photographs persist, but down the timeline, where they might as well not.

On the other hand, perhaps one should aspire to do something else, something not ephemeral. I make prints, and I stick them in to books. That's more permanent, more solid. Wherever the book is, it's a present object that is there, not lost in some digital history, 17 clicks out of sight. It's right there on the shelf. I can see the spine of it.

But still I embrace the ephemeral nature of it. Ultimately, despite the best efforts of Ansel Adams, selenium toning, and archival washing, we're making pictures on paper, a substance not really well known for its properties of longevity. Sure, a couple hundred years or so, if you're careful. But the stuff rips, it burns, it doesn't like getting wet. We're not talking bronze here, it's not marble. It's paper.

Books? Also paper. Also flammable, don't like getting wet, and so on.

I use a lot of machine prints from down the street, 19 cents a copy. The print will look fine, most likely, when the book bites the dust. And if it doesn't? Well, that's OK too. The point is to have made it, not to have it endure forever.

So I continue to waffle, or perhaps to straddle some line. Ephemeral, but solid, physical. Ephemeral, but not too ephemeral.

Attention Seekers and Kicking It Up A Notch

I'm going to talk about girls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, so what?

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

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

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

Transparent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weightless

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

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

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

I've said most of this before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a Golden Age of Photography

Inspired by smogranch, who is awesome.

It is, it truly is.

There was a time and a place when being literate, simply being able to read and write, was sufficient to earn a living. There was a whole lot of learning involved. You had to know how to make and maintain pens made out of feathers, and probably how to compound ink. Lettering was quite complex. You might have had to know some Latin.

These days most of that has been swept aside. We buy ballpoint pens and throw them away when the ink runs out. Lettering is simplified, and the standards for adequate lettering are mostly non-existent. We write mostly on computers, anyways. You can still get paid to read and write letters for people, but it's rare and making a living at it is nigh impossible. In the first world nations, and increasingly across the globe, "everyone" can read and write.

This is considered a good thing by all thinking human beings.

There's a science fiction novella called Gunner Cade in which the title character joins the military of the future. The details elude me, but, roughly, he undergoes years of training based around The Gun, a sort of energy pistol which is the weapon of the soldier of the future. Loads of technical detail, maintenance routines, a quasi-religious set of rituals around The Gun. Later, Cade joins a revolutionary group that has acquired a large supply of these Guns, and he is charged with training the rag-tag group in their use.

At first he is daunted, this takes years! Then he sorts through his training, and trims it down to the essentials for the job at hand which is winning this battle. His training regime is thus reduced to:

Grab a Gun.
Turn it on with this switch.
Point it and pull the trigger. When it stops firing, throw it away and grab another Gun.

Mastering The Gun does not take years, after all. It takes seconds. Does this sound at all familiar?

Spoiler: Cade's side wins.

We now live in a similar golden age of photography. Everyone can take pictures. A few people think this is terrible, woe, the standards have fallen so, etc etc.

In the first place the standards haven't fallen all that much. Sure there's daylight between what a "professional" would have done and what some bozo with a cell phone does, but it's daylight that doesn't matter to anyone.

We might, for instance, see fatuous idiots explaining that the standards for prints are, really, 300dpi, and your picture will only print 1 inch across! The correct response is a blank stare and "but I just want to stick it on facebook. print? what?"

We might, for instance, see another fatuous idiot explaining that without a DSLR and a fast lens, you'll never get good bokeh, and the subject will never be really well separated from the background. One can either go straight to the blank stare and "I don't care. In fact, nobody cares, except you" or you could, for extra fun, pull the picture into an editor and hastily blur the background.

At this point the fatuous idiot will point out that the blur doesn't look like convincing focus blur. Then you get to point out that the mission is to make the subject separate from the background, not to simulate a full frame whateverthefuck and an 85/1.8 GLZ whateverthefuck lens. Did you want to separate the subject or were you just trying to justify your $4000 camera kit?

"Nobody cares, except you."

Most of the difference between self-styled expert photographers and the bozos with the cell phone cameras is pointless ritual aimed at producing effects most people cannot even see without training, and optimizing parameters nobody cares about. You don't need to know how to mix collodion, or what sodium thiosulfate is, or what the aperture setting does.

It's a golden age of photography. Anyone can take pictures. Anyone can take excellent pictures. You just stand in a good place, point the camera in a good direction, and pull the trigger.

Isn't it great?

It's a Web Of Pictures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photobooks

Is this a trend? I'm not sure. Regardless, whenever I am on some photography themed web site, I frequently see ads for photo books. Make your own book! With your own photos! Since these companies remain in business, I suppose that having a photobook made must be a thing that people do.

In fact, I've made a few books, for one reason or another. It's kind of fun. Bit of an expensive hobby and rather time consuming to do a half decent job, but kind of fun.

And, I've seen a few photo books from other people. Not enough to really know if it's a trend, a thing people do these days, Still, there are these hints.

What do people put in these things? I've seen and made event themed books. The family reunion, the annual week-at-the-beach, whatever. Some mildly special event. Possibly even little Timmy's Birthday Party, but generally a little more distinctive and rare. I have made portfolio themed books. I've also seen year-in-review books.

If we do indeed have a new digital vernacular it certainly seems reasonable that this is what would mostly go in to these things. This is consistent with the few books I've seen.

We're printing photographs, even in this digital age. The distinction is that we're only printing some of them. We're curating, at least lightly, we're picking the best of them. We're shooting a lot of frames, we're sharing a lot of frames. We're making prints of the good ones, or the important ones. If there's only one picture of Aunt Sue, well, we have to put in in the book. Aunt Sue doesn't look very good, but she was hiding from the camera all day, so, what are you gonna do? We can't leave her out of the book.

There's a 129 pictures of the kids making goofy faces before lunch, so pick the best three of those.

Probably the goofy faces, the duckface, the iPhone-mirror-selfie, these all will look as ridiculous and dates in a few decades as the 1970s pictures of stiffly posed families in front of objects look now. We're always going to be dating ourselves. I think an argument can be made that we're getting better pictures now, in some useful sense, simply because we've got more to choose from and we are choosing them.

Digital Vernacular

This posting is really a variation on this theme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Bad Article, But..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Process

This little essay should be considered a snapshot of my current overthinking of the process of photography.

As documented here I think of making a picture as having three components or aspects: Idea, Subject, and Rendering. To this I want to add the idea of Use from the previous essay.

In narrative form, then:

We make a picture by pointing the camera at something, in some direction. This is our selection of subject. The way we frame the subject, the way we expose it, and the way we handle the post processing details constitute the rendering we select for that subject. This produces a picture: a print, or a file, or some other final result. If we're doing well, this picture will, to some degree, embody an idea. That is, at this point our picture will ideally express some meaning in the general sense of that word. The picture will express some emotion, or will be attractive, or will teach something, reveal something, or whatever. It will in some way be bigger than a simple record of whatever was in front of the camera.

Finally, that idea, that meaning, will enable the picture to have some use. You'll print it, frame it, and hang it. Or perhaps you'll sell it. Or you'll share it with family. Perhaps you'll put it in a book, or use it in an advertisement for your tomato farm. Whatever the use is, it mostly the idea, that synthesis of subject and rendering to produce something at least a little bigger, which drives the use.

Perhaps one might find a use for a picture without an idea, perhaps a record photograph of some object need only be a record of the object to appear in the book about the object. Is there an idea here that drives the use? Maybe, maybe not, I shan't quibble. The point is that these notions of subject, rendering, idea, and use are things which may, and frequently do, appear in the total process. Furthermore, the relationships between these things are often as I have sketched them.

Most pictures are made today with a focus almost entirely on rendering. We worry about the lighting, the model's pose, the way the background looks. We worry about how to photoshop bad things out, and good things in. We worry about how to accomplish some visual effect or another. Some attention, but not enough, is given to the subject, to where the camera ought to be pointed. Some mild attention is given to the idea, the meaning, the emotional impact. Almost none is given to the idea of use.

Yet, use is the ultimate goal.

There are somewhat degenerate uses: many people derive satisfaction simply from making a good picture. I suppose that one might derive satisfaction simply from having a collection of good pictures on one's hard disk, pictures that one rarely or never looks at. These are uses in the sense I mean. Someone is getting some value from the picture. Still, it's a pretty thin use.

Mostly, pictures get little to no use. They're made, they're uploaded someplace to vanish down the time stream, they languish on a hard disk. Responsible photographers lovingly back up their collections of unused pictures, and store them on triply redundant hard disks, or whatever. To no purpose whatsoever.

In this era of a trillion pictures, it behooves us to consider that last stage, the use, ever more vigilantly. The days when you could simply throw a handful of drugstore prints in the box and be done with it are over. A physical box with a couple hundred pictures gets looked at from time to time. In a sense, the use of a print is a problem which solves itself, as the physical artifact presents itself randomly in the process of living. Now, that box is digital, invisible, and might contain 100,000 pictures. It never thrusts itself into our attention for a moment like a print, it lies fallow and silent, out of sight.

In truth, we cannot really use this many pictures in any realistic way. Still, we should consider the idea of use, and how one might use pictures. We should make pictures with this goal in mind.

Perhaps we can make a few, from time to time.

Use

The previous post, about my Winogrand style cafe picture, and how it is of no use to me, perhaps opens up a little area of discussion. The picture is of no use to me: it contains nothing personal, it evokes no personal memories, it does not give me any particular joy to look at, it is not part of something larger I am making. It's pretty good. It's not good enough to stand alone, really, as a piece of Art. If it were as good as it is, and not an obvious copy of Winogrand, perhaps, but it is, so no.

In what follows I will use the words use, useful, useless and so on in as broad as sense as is reasonable. I consider, for example, artistic appeal to be an example of usefulness. If I think a picture is pretty and so derive pleasure from looking at it, that is a use of that picture. Of course, if I can sell a picture (to someone who presumably has a use for it) that is useful to me. The essence is that there is some transaction here, the picture will give me something, perhaps if I look at it, perhaps if I let others look at it. I get something, be it pleasure, emotion, education, money.

Any picture I own, whether because I bought it or shot it, may or may not be of use to me.

Personal photographs, snapshots, have a personal use. I use them to evoke memories of things past, I use them as a record of people, places, events. These things are generally not of use to anyone else. Indeed, being of no use to anyone outside the family is almost the definition of a snapshot. It might be an excellent picture or a terrible one, but it is of no use to a stranger. The very idea of so-called "vernacular" photography is a re-tasking of these useless pictures, rendering them useful to strangers as parts of a larger Art Thing which comments on, or celebrates, or records, something of culture or community or something. The meaning of a snapshot is not really changed here, we see a picture of strangers and either do or do not feel some affinity. The idea does not change, but by embedding these useless fragments into a larger thing, we potentially create a larger entity which is itself useful.

More generally we have the problem of the use of a photograph. Regardless of details, perhaps we can agree that a picture that is never looked at is not in any meaningful way, useful. It may once have been useful, but now, with no viewers, it barely exists, and is certainly not useful. Thus, virtually all pictures are currently useless, having been uploaded and then compressed under the mass of newer pictures, pushed down the timeline into the past, and obliterated from view. These pictures were useful, but only for a little while, viewed by friends and family until newer pictures are uploaded into our account.

We see that usefulness has, potentially, a timespan. News photographs are also only useful while relevant. Some few are dredged up again to serve the use of summarizing the year, the decade, the era. Most news pictures vanish into the morgue and are, essentially, gone, useless.

Iconic photographs remain useful, however. We derive something from looking at them, over and over. They remain in the broader cultural memory. We think of them perhaps as timeless (although this is surely false). Prints, posters, and calendars are sold. Many transactions of many kinds constantly surround these pictures, from an appreciative and rewarding glance in a museum to the exchange of $17.99 for a calendar.

All of this stuff fits into my grand unified over-thought theory of photography, somehow.

Prints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novelty

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

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

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

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

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

I hate this so much.

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

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

That's what I'm doing, anyways.

Old Photos

Every few months it seems that someone digs up the same set of color photographs from Russia from, I don't know, a long time ago. Some chappie ran around with a view camera taking color separations 100-odd years ago. A couple of years ago some other chappie dug these things up, scanned them, and put together some pretty decent digital color pictures based on them. Every few months, they show up on someone's blog, or on some crummy clickbait "photography news" site like petapixel, and then get a lot of links, clicks, and views.

There is also the venerable shorpy.com which is really quite decent. Yet some other chappie digs up old pictures, acquires very good scans of them, and manages a well curated collection of these 100 year old, plus or minus, pictures. Shorpy gets a fair bit of traffic and interest.

There are periodic news items about people finding a collection of glass plates. Frequently these are somewhat sketchy: Unearthed Ansel Adams Negatives Discovered! Man Finds Fully Developed Glass Plates Still In The Camera (what?), and so on. Again, flickers of interest, views, clicks.

Apparently there's a bit of a thing on facebook these days, too.

So what? Well, Susan Sontag, writing in the 1970s, was at some pains to think through the fact that photographs are physical artifacts. There are slices of frozen time, turned into a flat physical object which we can hold, and touch, and which is itself more or less permanent. This permanence and physicality had huge effects on our relationship with these things.

Right about the time Sontag died, this all changed. Digital photographs are, while in theory permanent, in reality completely ephemeral. The "most recent first" viewing model of the internet, and our constant thirst for novelty, means that, absent substantial effort, photographs are buried under other photographs and lost to us very quickly. And yet we have this fascination with the physical artifacts, as well.

And yet, our fascination with those artifacts takes the form of rendering them digital, and throwing them into the maw of the great most-recent-first internet where they march down the time stream into oblivion in a matter of weeks.

I don't know what it all means, but I find it extremely odd that we have an ephemeral fascination with the permanent. Our relationship with pictures as they exist today is the exact opposite of the relationship discussed by Sontag, and we hold this modern relation with a digital phantom version of the same pictures Sontag was talking about. It probably doesn't mean anything, really.

It's very strange to me, though.

A Hate Button

A more or less common joke in 2013 is to refer to an imaginary Hate button, or a -1 button, in reference to the ubiquitous Like/+1/Favorite buttons that appear to adorn every single thing in the world wide web these days^[1]. I think it's an idea worth thinking about for a moment.

What if you had Like and Hate buttons for pictures, and what if you bubbled to the top pictures for which: the sum of likes and hates was large relative to the number of views, and the difference between number of likes and hates was small relative to their sum.

What results is pictures that lots of people react to, sufficiently to mash a button, but which people are more or less evenly split on. Many like it, many hate it.

I dunno about you, but I think I might like to see those pictures,

[1] Yes, I know that some places have up/down voting buttons, but I'm pretty sure the down votes usually make the object trend toward less visible, and ups make the object more visible, which isn't at all what I propose here.

Curation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two problems:

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

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

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

Got any ideas?

Film

I've gone on and on about how the indefinable "look" of film (and everything else) is silly. I've gone on and on about how the use of film can be a useful psychological trick, to change the way you approach taking a picture, and thereby change the result.

Since then, or at least some of that writing, I've been thinking a lot about the democratization of photography, digital photography, and how it's changed the way we relate to photographs. In the 1970s, Sontag had us treating photos as permanent slices of reality, frozen in amber. She was right. The modern digital era has changed that, now photographs are inherently impermanent. The sheer mass of pictures, and the most-recent-first organizational schemes make pictures effectively vanish into the vault of time.

So here's where using film, shooting film, can really change things up.

When you make an exposure on a piece of film, you are starting a process which results in an actual physical object, a negative or a transparency. This is in contrast to simply organizing some 1s and 0s into some information that represents a picture. I think most people get this, at some level or another, if they understand a little bit about film and how it is used. You don't need to be a chemist, you just need to have talked to that uncle about those weird strips of brownish translucent plastic that are in the shoebox with the pictures.

When I shoot film, it's to make a print. The exposure either becomes a print, or does not. Not only am I manufacturing a Thing, I do so with intent to manufacture another Thing. There is no ephemeral, temporary, endpoint. The negative is made, and will reside permanently in a folder. The successes will become prints, another physical manifestation of the picture. Sontag's commentary applies. This object is a permanent, non-ephemeral, moment in time. I relate to it as such, and will probably stick it on my wall at some point.

Not everyone shoots film for the sole purpose of making prints, the widespread use of film scanners makes this physical/digital divide a lot blurrier. Nonetheless, there is still the permanent object of the negative or transparency. Also, I think that people who scan film and then treat it like a digital photograph from that point forward are doing it wrong. They're missing the point. They're probably having a lot of fun, which is a good thing, though.

I find myself sometimes in a middle ground, shooting digital but with intent to print.

Anyways. There's more to it than just the limitations of the roll or sheet of film. There's more to it than simply slowing down. There's the inherent physicality of what you are doing, and that changes the way you think about what you're doing.