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.

App Land

I'm going to prognosticate. In fact, I'm predicting the imminent death of the internets. Well, not quite.

One needs neither wisdom nor courage to speculate that the web will be different in five years, in ways we can't imagine now. Change is a constant, in this game. The tricky bit is in guessing what the change will be.

Here's what I am smelling in the breeze. The increasing dominance of Mobile as a thing (fucking around on your phone, instead of on a computer) is leading increasing toward Apps and away from general web browsing. Don't let the bastards lie to you. An app is generally pretty much just a web browser that only goes to one web site. It's the holy fucking grail for web-based businesses. If they can just get you to download and use the App, now it's a gigantic goddamned problem to go to any other web sites. So, if my web site isn't utterly crappy and broken, and if I can get you to fire up my App, you're a whole bunch more likely to just stay put while I sell you to advertisers.

What's this mean?

Well, in theory it means less cross-fertilization in photographic style and method, perhaps?

Are we actually going to see anything other than the current complete homogeneity across the entire interwebs (inter-apps, whatever)? I dunno, it doesn't take very damn much cross-fertilization to create homogeneity. If you want grizzly bears that don't look pretty much like all the other grizzlies, you need to completely isolate them for quite a while. And then, zowie, white bears. WTF?!!!

There should be some more differentiation, at least. And perhaps even a little renewed enthusiasm, as people stop having it forced upon them quite so obviously that there are a billion Joes Just Like You out there.

I dunno. Cautiously optimistic. I don't see how this could be bad for photography.

Terrible for everything else? Oh, hell yeah. Definitely.

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!)

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?

Advertising and Social Media

I'm not an ad guy. Still, there's some stuff that you can figure out that's pretty obvious when you live in an advertising-steeped culture like mine. Ads serve at least two purposes. The first is to directly sell stuff, to induce you to go out and buy a thing. The second is to create an idea in you, and more generally in society, about some brand or product. BMW's advertising is rarely trying to induce me to go buy a car. BMW's advertising is almost entirely about creating and maintaining a widely held belief that BMW automobiles are of high quality, and are fun to drive. Internet ads have traditionally focused on the first one, which isn't as important, and internet ads are pretty unsuccessful anyways. The result is that internet advertising is kind of going in the crapper according to some analysts, as of this writing. I'm interested in the second one right now.

We are dramatically influenced in our beliefs by what we perceive as the beliefs of our peers and our friends. To a large extent, our beliefs are roughly the average of what we perceive as the beliefs held by "people like ourselves." If you were, for instance, to hand out plain white flyers that read simply:

People like you are saying that Geffenmacht cars are incredibly luxurious.

the result a month or so after is almost certainly that some people would think that this entirely fictional brand of automobile was quite luxurious. I don't know if anyone has done this specific experiment, but I bet it would work, and there's tons of science that says stuff kind of this sort pretty much works much better than you'd think it does. We are much simpler creatures than we imagine we are.

Obviously this is some sort of network effect. If BMW can convince many of my peers and friends that their cars are fun to drive, if they can convince people with whom I feel connected, they are well on their way toward convincing me that BMW cars are fun to drive. Whether BMW cars are in fact fun to drive is largely beside the point, although if it is true it makes the job of convincing people that much easier.

Network effect. Social network. Wait a second!

We're starting to see advertisers using "user created content", which is to say pictures from instagram and the like, in their advertisements. Of course this will resonate with the customers. These are real people, people like me, enjoying that product in a real setting. This is true. I feel this is only the tip of the iceberg, however.

Let us suppose that you want to create the idea that your new energy drink, POWJUS, is a great drink at parties. What if you could arrange for certain pictures on instagram or facebook, the pictures of parties in which a bottle of POWJUS appears, to be featured in someone's feed with somewhat greater probability. What if, when I log in to my social media network of choice, I am shown somewhat more often than random, pictures of my friends and peers drinking POWJUS at parties? This can be done with software. There will be some misses, the software may occasionally identify a cloud as a bottle of POWJUS and a herd of buffalo as a party, but we're talking about just nudging things up in the rankings a bit, so they appear somewhat more often. Some misses is OK.

I'll tell you this, if it's not being done already it's because someone's asleep at the switch. This stuff ain't even hard. It's all very well to push tweets about how awesome Coca-Cola is forward. How much better is it to push forward actual real true pictures of people just like me drinking Coca-Cola, driving BMWs, and smoking Marlboros? I can see it. It's real. It's true. My peers actually do all those things and, apparently, they do them quite a lot.

Mission accomplished! You just can't buy this kind of exposure! Oh, wait, actually, now you can.

Welcome to the future!

Truth, Photographs, and the Media

I have beaten this little drum before, I think. As of this writing, though, we have yet another scandal about such and such a press photograph was allegedly faked in some as-yet undetermined fashion, etcetera and so forth. So, I feel like it's time for another round.

Photojournalism isn't. This discussion is at least 30 years old, and probably 30 years dead, but nobody seems to remember it. Some photo is shown to be manipulated to a greater or lesser extent. Shock and dismay is registered. The photographer and/or editor are duly pilloried and Media Standards For Photographic Manipulation are dutifully rolled out to remind us that the press adheres to strict rules to guarantee that only True Photographs will be shown to you. The system has worked, Untruth has been stamped out again. Phew!

This is all crap, designed to make the Media look honest, designed to bolster their fantasy of being purveyors of objective truth. It's simply not true.

Photojournalism isn't. It isn't journalism, that is. A photograph can show you What, and maybe hint at How. It leaves out Who, Where, When and the most important one of all, Why. Photos are, by their very definition, a frame around a tiny fraction of what it true at an instant in time, removed from all context and presented to us. Truth, and journalistic Truth in particular, is almost entirely about context. It's about how these things fit into the larger world, it's about why these things are happening.

A photograph feels like Truth, because it is a literal tracing of something that was actually there in front of the camera. In that sense, it is true. Media Standards For Manipulation are all about preserving this trivial and uninteresting truth. Essentially, you can't print a photograph in the press unless the stuff that appears to be in the photo was actually there. So what?

A photograph, by the its power of apparent Truth, is as likely to distort as to reveal. A photograph makes us believe it, so if it is lying to us, that lie has far more power than if someone simply wrote the lie down.

The press loves photographs for their power. Someone writes a piece about something or other, presumably striving to be Truthful. There's still a narrative there, one or more ideas are presented. So-and-so are a bunch of Bad Dudes, or something. Whether it's True or not, whether that even means anything, that's irrelevant to the current discussion. The point is, the photo editor or someone sorts through the available pictures and selects a picture to support the story. They select a picture, perhaps, of one of the so-and-so's, in which it appears that the dude is in fact being a Bad Dude. We read the story, or at least the first bit. We learn that we're supposed to think so-and-so are a bunch of Bad Dudes and, my goodness, here is proof! The newspaper has guaranteed us that this picture is of a genuine so-and-so, and that he is indeed Being A Bad Dude. The backs up the text, and gives us a much stronger impression that so-and-so are in fact a bunch of Bad Dudes. This despite the fact that the picture shows us one (1) so-and-so out of perhaps millions, in one instant of time, apparently being a Bad Dude. The photograph is not meaningful supporting evidence at all, but it certainly acts upon us as if it were.

You can lie with a crop just as easily as with an erasure. You can lie by choosing to run this photograph instead of that photograph as easily as with a crop.