Taking

It has been remarked many times, in many contexts, that stealing intellectual property is inherently different. If I download a copy of a movie, the studio still has the movie. If I take a digital copy of song from your computer, you still have the song. This is all true, and is used to justify much. Let's think about it a little more.

If I steal your car, two things are undeniably true:

• You don't have your car any more.
• I possess a car I have no particular right to possess.

There is a third thing, a corollary of the second item: I could mis-use your car in such a way as to make trouble for you. I could rob a bank and use your car as a getaway car, for example, leading the cops to your house for some probing questions. I can use your car in ways that you do not approve of, and since it's yours and not mine that's pretty much wrong, no matter what.

If I steal a song, it's true that the first item no longer applies. The second one most certainly does, however. It's unlikely that I can work out how to use an mp3 as a weapon, so the corollary might not apply. What if I played this copy of the song to provide a little soundtrack while I murdered someone? How would you feel about that? What if I stole your credit card number?

Susan Sontag asserts in On Photography repeatedly and correctly that Photography is an appropriative, aggressive, act. One takes a picture, there's no denying it. We can natter on about making it, and that's also true. We do make these things, there is a creative act. A photographer is an artificer. A photographer, however, is also a thief and a taker. When I take your photograph, you lose nothing, but I gain something. I have your image now, an image which I may or may not have any moral right to, which I may or may not have a legal right to.

What if I take a picture of the tree in your front yard? You still have the tree. I have made an image, through my labor (albeit trivial labor) I have made a sort of a copy of your tree. I possess this image. Most likely, you have no problem with my possession of an image of your tree. What if I make 10,000 images of your tree? Are you still comfortable? Oh, you're comfortable with the 10,000 images, it's my standing around on the sidewalk every day that creeps you out? I forgot to mention, I used an extremely high speed camera, and took 10,000 images of your tree as I walked past yesterday. It took 20 seconds, and then I left town never to return. I'm not a stalker, I just happen to have 10,000 images of your tree on my computer's hard drive.

What if I made 10,000 images of you as I walked by?

It is this, more or less, which makes the ubiquitous photographic theme of poverty and pictures of homeless people so problematic. The "information wants to be free" crowd would point out that the homeless guy has lost nothing. The thinking human beings among us will point out that the photographer has gained something. The photographer has an image, an image to which he or she has no particular moral right; arguments to the contrary boiling down to nothing more than a bald assertion of that non-existant right.

The corollary also applies. Even if the photographer's use is simply to post the photograph of the homeless guy on a tumblr blog or something equally superficial, it is entirely reasonable that the homeless guy does not want his image held up as an object of pity, of freakishness, of thank-god-thats-not-me-ness. We can pretend all we want to that we're just educating people about the true nature of poverty, but that's not true. Homeless guys are freaky and cool looking, and that's why we take their picture.

Eliza

A long time ago there was a computer program called Eliza¹. You typed a line of text at it, and it replied with a line of text. You could have a conversation with Eliza, in this fashion. The remarkable thing about Eliza is that, at least mostly, Eliza could have a conversation with you without remembering a single thing. You'd think the computer program would remember something about what you'd said, and would be crafting responses based on where we are in the conversation, somehow, wouldn't you? Well, not always.

Eliza: How are you today?
You: I feel sad.

Eliza picks up on "I feel sad" and produces a stock response:

Eliza: Why do you feel sad?

The important thing here is that it doesn't matter how often or when you typed "I feel sad", Eliza will always respond with "Why do you feel sad?" or a randomly chosen similar phrase. Then you might proceed:

You: I'm sad because my mother is sick.
Eliza: How do you feel about your mother?

Again, Eliza will ask you how you feel about your mother any time you say anything about your mother. Had you typed "mother mother mother bat bat cow" Eliza probably would have asked you how you feel about your mother.

This works because, while Eliza is not remembering anything about the conversation, you are. You don't type "I feel sad" at random, and you don't type "mother mother bat bat cow." You type things that make sense. Eliza merely needs to be sufficiently vague to evoke a suitable response, and sufficiently on-track to give the sensation of a coherent conversation. Eliza's responses are loose enough to permit a wide range of responses, but specific enough to evoke responses that are more or less within her scope for reasonable response. The looseness prevents the sensation of a canned and uninteresting conversation. The specificity allows the conversation to remain seemingly on track.

The results are a little loopy, but surprisingly convincing.

Why on earth would we care?

There are certain parallels between how Art communicates and how Eliza does, it turns out. If you squint a bit. Photography has arguably a bigger problem than other Arts: a writer can simply write down words that say what needs to be said; the painter and sculptor construct things, and have more flexibility in how they stimulate you. The photographer is, ultimately, stuck with what is in front of the camera. It's all matters of degree, however. The basic problem is that a static piece of art, a thing that cannot "remember the conversation," is trying to communicate with you.

The lesson to take away from Eliza is that a truly successful communication can be achieved when the Art makes statements that are vague enough to stimulate a response, but specific enough to create a coherent conversation. A photograph can state a question, but the question should not be so specific as to pre-determine the answer, and not so general as to allow anything as an answer.

A photograph that opens a broad question just leaves the viewer puzzled. Macro photographs of stuff open the "what the heck is that?" question, all too often. The viewer walks away. A photograph that answers all the questions it poses isn't very interesting: Here I Am In Front Of The Eiffel Tower isn't very interesting. We might wonder, briefly, who that person is but then we realize that it is the photographer, or the photographer's girlfriend. The conversation ends before it begins.

A photograph that asks us "What is that guy doing?" and allows a modest collection of answers is interesting. If he's doing something specific, but with an unclear motive ("I wonder what he's looking for?") we have a good degree of specificity. We can write a little story about what he's doing, we can check it against other details in the frame, we can back up and write a new story. We are left with a little wonder and mystery, but a mystery that is connected to something straightforward and un-mysterious. Parts are given to us, a whole is left for us to complete. The photograph begins the conversation and nudges it along, we maintain all the context, and a personalized conversation occurs with the image. All that we are and have been informs the context we're keeping as we interact with the piece. What we bring, as much as what the photograph provides, makes the conversation interesting.

[1]  This is not strictly true. Eliza had, I think, a mode of operation that works as described. However, newer implementations of Eliza-like systems exist which work exactly as described.

This is going on your Permanent Record

I am reading Susan Sontag's collection of essays On Photography. In fact, I am at least partially re-reading it, since I know I've seen some of this stuff before. I just can't remember when or where. Anyways, I will probably write up a little review of this book in a bit (only 40 years after publication) but not today. The capsule review which will suit for now is that it's a very sloppy little book full of very bad thinking and very good ideas.

At the moment, two ideas stand out to me. The first is that photographs make all things photographed equal and equivalent. This idea happens to be wrong, but it's an interesting idea and it's not completely wrong. The second idea is that Photography (with a capital P) creates a parallel reality based on our own but different. It is an edited version of reality, captured in a set of instants. This idea is pretty much correct, and even more literally correct today than it was when Sontag wrote about it.

Consider the way we document our lives in photographs. When Sontag was writing, a family might take a few dozen to a few hundred photographs each year, of themselves and their lives. These photographs existed as small prints, compact physical objects, which were embalmed in shoeboxes or photo albums. These albums and shoeboxes provided, and still provide, a Permanent Record of sorts. These things can be riffled through in a few minutes, perhaps an afternoon. A true fanatic might have accumulated enough material to present a couple of days of work to flip through. This Permanent Record was of course limited, incomplete. Large gaps exist, where the camera was broken, there was no film, dad was sick, or a shoebox was lost in a move. While Sontag is wrong in that not all things photographed are made equal per se, there is an equalizing effect in placing the last photograph ever taken of Grandma in a shoebox with a handful of out of focus pictures of long-forgotten toys.
This collection of prints is a parallel reality, it is a version of the story of the family or the people. It is false as much as it is true. It is fragments which, less and less, evoke complete memories.

Let us consider this photographic record as a line of footprints in the sand. Permanent, but easily erased by the caprices of nature, by the hand of man, by accident, malice, or folly.

Compare this situation with what we are doing today, digitally. We take photographs at a much faster pace, generally, than we did when we used film. We no longer need to change film rolls, we can shoot 200 exposures of our child's birthday party with a mere 200 button presses. We no longer require development and printing, we get instant feedback. So the rate at which images are produced has, of course, shot up. These images are much more durable, in theory, than prints, being digital 1s and 0s stored in the cloud. A JPEG could, in theory, endure forever, unchanged and perfect. On the one hand, our photographs are more permanent than ever. On the other hand, two factors conspire to make them effectively more ephemeral than ever.

First, the way we share photographs is largely chronological. In order to satisfy the desire for novelty, sharing services show our most recent images first. This keeps our friends clicking on our stream, which keeps the ad revenue up, which powers the whole machine. Second, the sheer mass of images we produce makes riffling through anything like the complete record utterly unmanageable, no matter how the images are presented.

Together, this means that photographs made today and yesterday are handy and convenient. Photographs from last week are maybe a click away. Photographs from six months back, those perfectly preserved JPEGs, eternally embalmed on disk drives in the cloud, might as well be on Mars.

Instead of a patchy, incomplete, and slowly fading record of our entire lives, we now have a much more detailed photographic reality that stretches into the past like a very short comet's tail. A few days, a few weeks of history easily, perfectly accessible in crystalline clarity. Pictures of our lattes, our hamburgers, our children, Grandma's birthday. They're all there, practically accessible for a few days or weeks after the event and then, practically, gone forever.

The footprints in the sand have become the wake of a boat, stretching back a ways, shrinking and vanishing until, quite soon, no visible trace is left. The analogy is selected quite carefully. What has happened is not truly a change in kind, it is a change only in degree. The pace has picked up, photographic time moves much much faster, the torrent of images gushes rather than trickles.

Sand dunes, photographed over years and then sped up, behave exactly like waves in a fluid, because they are. The wake of a boat, footprints in the sand, they vanish in the same way and for the same reasons, but at different time scales. The effect is that we've seen a change in degree but not in kind that is so great that it behaves almost like a change in kind.

Sontag foresaw this, I think. She died in 2004, when the current trends were probably becoming quite clear if one were paying attention. Possibly she was too busy dying to pay attention. In any case, even in the 1970s there were hints. The production of trivial images was proceeding at a high rate, and it was clearly not going to slow down. Sontag did think of the photograph, in those days, as synonymous with the print and it it truly the transition to purely electronic media that has enabled the staggering pace and corresponding increase in time-scale we've seen today.

I think Sontag knew that something was coming. She would surely be unsurprised by the world of flickr, instagram, facebook. I think she would have been saddened.

Haiku

I would have sworn I've written something on this before, but I can't find it.

By haiku here what I really mean is american haiku which is really Jack Kerouac. There's a strong connection to the traditional Japanese form, but it's not quite the same thing. These poems are short, usually 3 lines long, and the paint an intense picture. An important element is that syllable counting does not appear, so there's less fussing with exact word choice to make the counts work.

One of my favorites from Kerouac:

Drunk as a hoot owl
writing letters
by thunderstorm

Now, Kerouac was kind of an asshole, and he might be overrated as a writer, but he could write some haiku.

There are really two separate threads of resemblance between these poems and photographs.

The first thread is how they affect us. Well done, each one creates a strong visual impression (the photograph more literally, obviously). One could say something fatuous like "a good photograph is the visual realization of a haiku and vice versa," if one wanted to go down a slightly strange path. The successful visual creates a mood, a sense of place, or perhaps it invokes questions. Why is Jack drunk? To whom is he writing letters?

The second thread of similarity is in how they are made. Writing a longer poem, one might labor over it, changing a word here and there, adding a stanza, striking and replacing a poor line. This is rather like a painting. The piece is polished and filled in, details are tidied up or replaced. The piece exists for a long time before it arrives at a finished form. Contrariwise, a haiku is so short that an edit is really just another haiku. Kerouac's books of haiku make it clear that he wrote the same or similar haiku over and over, the labor was in writing a new one that was related to the previous one but -- sometimes -- better. Each tiny poem is written in a matter of moments, almost an instant in time.

In the same way a photographer takes a picture in an instant, but then takes another one, and another. The ideal image is approached as a series of steps, each step a complete image in its own right.

Interestingness, Stickiness, and Photographs

To a degree, this is a follow to this post.

What is stickiness? For our purposes I will define it to be a quality of an advertising-containing medium (e.g. a magazine, a web site, a mobile app) which allows it to hold the attention of a typical viewer. It is a measure of the ability of some advertising delivery system to hold your attention and deliver advertising. Interestingness is closely allied to stickiness in that we tend to find our attention held by things we find interesting. Sticky isn't quite the same, there are elements of novelty and constant stimulation involved, and so on, but the two ideas are quite closely related. To be precise, in order to make a sticky system, you must find interesting content to fill it with.

We are interested in many things, but one of the most interesting things to us is people. Not every person, just some people. We are interested in, first and foremost, ourselves. We are also interested in friends, and other people against whom we measure ourselves, people we judge, people we like. There are people with narratives we find interesting, for whatever reasons. Each of us, in turn, is interesting to zero or more other people. A celebrity is, more or less by definition, a person who is interesting to a large group of other people. Magazines have long known that photographs of people who are widely interesting (i.e. celebrities) help make the magazine sticky and thus make it an effective medium for delivering advertising.

We like pictures of celebrities because those pictures compactly communicate to us about the celebrity. We can see how fat or thin they have become, who they are hanging around with, whether they look good or bad. We can imagine larger narratives based on a photograph (and aided by a good caption or accompanying story). Her hair is shorter, why did she cut it? We can measure ourselves against the celebrity. Look how fat he has gotten, while I have remained less fat! We can take pleasure in their successes and failures.

We like pictures of some members of our social group (the ones we are interested in, to be exact) in precisely the same way. What we like even better than pictures of celebrities and our friends, though, is pictures of ourselves. We are all basically narcissists. We especially like pictures of ourselves in which we look better than the other people in the photograph, but generally we'll take whatever there is.

We also suffer from the impression that everyone is interested in us. This is why we take photographs of our food, our coffee, our new outfit, and why we share them. Although many of us are interesting to some tiny little group, we generally overestimate our interestingness. Mostly our photographs, our "personal nows," are interesting to other people when they intersect with the personal nows of the other people. In simpler terms, people like the pictures we take, of them. So, when we share 100 photographs of coffee, food, shoes, and our friends, our friends mostly like the last category. This gives us a little positive feedback, and reinforces the impression that our friends love our pictures and by extension, us. We get the impression that we are interesting.

So where does all this go?

Social media is, essentially, an advertising medium in which the content is provided for free to the advertisers by the targets of the advertisements. Roughly, social media is a method by which the cow can be persuaded to butcher and pack itself. A magazine is static and limited in size, it must use content that is broadly interesting. This is why they use pictures of celebrities and stories about celebrities. Social media is built on the observation that a digital medium is neither static nor size-restricted. Social media can then use any old content, great masses of it. As long as some small fraction of it is interesting to some people, the potential for stickiness is there. The technological problem of social media is therefore to present to each viewer a sifted collection of the shared crud likely to be found interesting. To first order, this boils down to:

• Permit tagging photographs with the names of the people in it.
• Notify people when their name has popped up in a photograph.

This creates the cycle of positive feedback which keeps all of us uploading more and more photographic (and other) content, which can in turn be fed into the "who is this interesting to?" grist mill, which in turn drives the stickiness of the social medium in question. This drives the advertising dollars, and if all goes well someone makes a great deal of money. Note that the people making money are not the people providing the content.

This all works astoundingly well. A well designed social media platform is mind-bogglingly sticky, precisely because of the personal nature of it all. When the interestingness feedback loop is working well, new content flows in at a furious pace, providing interesting content as well as the necessary elements of novelty and stimulation. People simply cannot leave their God. Damned. iPhones. alone.

There are of course other forms of content: text, video, likes, +1s, and so on. Photographs are simply the content that is most interesting to me and presumably to you, gentle reader. Photographs are also particularly of note because they cost virtually nothing to create and share, but provide such rich content to the people who find them interesting.

Internet Memes

This post is closely allied to this one.

There is a phenomenon current on the internet, variously called "memes" or "lolcats" and probably a dozen other equally silly names. Essentially, one takes a photograph and applies a caption, or title, or a line or two of dialog, to produce a "funny picture." A common format is that of the motivational poster, but sometimes the text is simply pasted over the image, and there are a handful of other common layouts. There are as of this writing web sites that will let you select or upload a photograph and supply the text, which will then produce an image file with the resulting funny picture.

So what? This is all silliness, and far and away the vast majority of them are dumb and meaningless. Still, a lot of them are quite funny. Essentially none of them are intended as anything other than a throwaway joke. The photographs are not even good. Never were, and still are not.

What makes this interesting is the lesson it provides in how a line of text can completely alter the way we see a photograph.

A common special case here is that the same photograph may be used for many different titles and captions. Each time a successful result is created (successful in that it is funny and novel) we're seeing the same image in a new way. We're imagining the amusing kitten or the querulous owl saying or thinking a new funny thing, the narrative implied by the image and text is imagined anew.

Consider, then, for a more serious work of art, how a new title, or a new accompanying text, might cause one to reconsider the photograph. Take a favorite photograph from a favorite artist, and imagine different titles for it. Imagine credible titles, and ridiculous ones. Imagine various stories of how the photograph might have been taken. How might each affect how you view the image?

Betwixt and Between

These remarks are quite likely more about how I personally react to photographs and art than the average posting on this blog. Still, perhaps you might find something to take away.

Our theme for today is the uncanny valley, a concept from animation and robotics. Robots and animations fall into the uncanny valley when they appear almost human, but not quite. These things are rather disturbing to people - we will accept a robot that looks like a robot, and we will accept a robot that is an extremely good imitation human, but we won't accept things that are good-but-not-perfect. There are lots of cases where making something that's neither one thing nor the other produces a result that is simply unlikeable.

Item one:  Why is it so hard to take a good photograph of texture or pattern? What I mean by this is, why can't I take a successful photograph of a pattern that looks like a Mondrian, or a frame filled with chaos like a Pollack? Not to denigrate Mondrian and Pollack, but making a painting of that sort that is at any rate recognizable as a painting isn't particularly hard. I can draw some lines in a rectangle, and people will not talk about how there's no subject, and they won't be irritated by not knowing what to look at, and so on. My lines are no Mondrian, but they will at least function as a piece of visual art, good or bad. If I take a similar photograph of a non-hierarchical collection of linear objects similarly arranged, probably I will hate it, and probably most people will too. I will in fact be annoyed that there is no subject, no well defined visual center, and a few other annoyances.

Why?

I am pretty sure I am not alone in this. Photographic abstracts tend to have visual centers, leading lines, and so on. They are abstract because the objects in the frame are not easily identified, not because they lack the traditional functional elements of a photograph. Of course, there are probably exceptions?

My working theory is that the problematic photographs of this sort occupy a middle ground between an abstract representation of texture, color, line, and a representation of a thing. The viewer is ok with the painting, because we accept that paintings needn't be of anything. A photograph, by its nature is always of something. Surely, our mind declares, the photographer was looking at something. What is that something? Why was the camera pointed in that direction? Show me!

Surely, of course, there are elements of tradition in play here as well. We see almost exclusively photographs of identifiable things. Most of the rest are at any rate of things, even if we cannot identify them. So, photographs of nothing are weird and unpalatable to us.

Item two:  One of the easiest ways to ruin a good photo is to treat it as something it is not. If you post-process a candid to look like a formal portrait, the odds are good that everyone will hate it. It is now a bad portrait, and a bad candid, it falls into a zone between the two. It is twice as bad as a bad photograph, since it is two bad photographs. If you print a dramatic and moody piece in tones of entirely pale grey, you will likewise push it into a zone where the image cannot decide if it is a subtle tone poem, or a powerful and dark mood piece. Viewers probably are not going to like it. The cues conflict, we don't know what to make of it.

The best photographs have been allowed to be what the are. Sometimes this is quite difficult. If the image is out of focus and motion blurred, one is tempted to try out massive detail-recovery procedures rather than letting the motion be blurred and letting the photograph be what it is. If the photographer had in mind a formal portrait, but shot a back-stage candid, she might fight the image and ruin it, rather than accepting it as a superb candid.

Pick a side, join the battle. Fight! Fight! Fight!

But first, pick a side and commit.