Above, the title of Fred Lebow’s memoir, “Anything for a T-shirt” he is one of the co-founders of the New York City Marathon. Below, 12 that I have gathered.

So I can twist this into being about photography if you follow me…

This year is the 40th running of the NYC marathon and it will be the largest field ever, with over 40,000 runners. What started 40 years ago with 127 entrants has morphed into a World Wide event that brings the city to a standstill for one day. Running is more popular than ever, in particular the growth of the Half-Marathon distance has been huge in the last few years. And with that, has come a measure of regret for those who enjoyed its less popular days. It has never been a big money sport, but increasingly some would argue, the purity of the sport is being lost. This was an opinion I ran across reading Christopher McDougalls book “Born to Run” about “the greatest race the world has never seen.” Particularly in the venue of ultra-marathoning, the athletes do it for the love of running since the awards are non-existent and the pain so great in running 50+miles. Why else could you do it?

Over about the same time frame photography has evolved from something that no one considered worth selling in a fine art gallery to being ubiquitous on the one hand, and in a few cases, valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars on the other. Consider that dichotomy. And along the way it has lost some of it’s innocence, I think there is no denying that.  These are not the days of holing up in the Strand to read a copy of Weston’s Daybooks. Not that you can’t do that. But you will be passed by in short order by the latest Twitter update that Marcus and Idrani are “back from insolvency” or some other ridiculous thing.

What are we to make of this kind of inevitable change? Do all movements that get massively popular and more accessible become shadows of their former unpopular and scrawny selves? Is the experience of the sport or art cheapened both for the participants and the observers when the barriers to entry are lowered? Many would argue that the emergence (interesting word choice) of the popularity of the half-marathon distance has taken something away from the pinnacle of “full” marathon achievement. Also the inclusion of so many charity runners who will probably walk a good portion of the marathon is another erosion of what it means to some to complete “the” marathon (no full qualifier required).

Well by my own logic then I should not be in the New York City Marathon. And by my own deduction photography is dead. OH AUGUST HOW I LOVE THEE! Perhaps I can reorient a bit. It’s about the money and the attention. Now I am on solid ground. The explosion of the half marathon distance is a real money maker for those race organizers. I believe only Boston and NY have no concurrent half-marathon distance, while many or most of the big city marathons do, and inevitably all small city marathons do. It is just too easy to take the entrance fee when you are gonna be out there already. I am mixed on it. I do remember distinctly watching all the half-er’s finish in Long Branch, it was emotional for me because I was still proud of them for getting to the finish line. 13.1 is still 13.1. And when there are 6000 halfers and only 2000 marathoners, the crowd cheering for the halfers is bigger and less bored on their feet! So rounding the next turn I remarked to those around me, “glad we have all this room now to run” but no one seemed happy to hear it. We had it to do all over again.

Like those halfers, emerging photographers are paving a bright shining path for those offering contests, consulting, portfolio reviews, websites, tutorials, branding, you name it. Aging photographers are looking at their 401k’s and thinking, like that Masked Magician, if I can show you how to saw a pretty girl in half, or at least light her with a beauty dish hanging off a speedlight or two, I might sail off in the Good-Ship Retirement unscathed. Increasingly the long tail starts to wag the dog as the industry turns inwards to capitalize on its young. It is not a good sign when a business becomes about itself. Think Mary Kay.

It is difficult to determine what the factors are that contribute to these sudden swells of popularity. In running it might be a simple demographic shift where a large number of people suddenly reach an age where they no longer feel invincible. So heath issues come to the fore. Others have speculated that running in essence is the flight response made manifest, and so in times of hardship it kicks in. The first mass wave of jogging (that’s yogging with a soft “j”) popularity was in the 70′s, as we were slouching towards Reagan.

In photography as I have said, the combination of the consumer credit bubble, mass consumption driving digital technology downwards in price, and the internet bubble itself (which was fueled by the previous capital bubble boom-bust) created the perfect storm of cheap digital cameras and an internet to share the pictures. We are all photographers, we are all Kenyans. Overnight it seems.

I think it is unfortunate for the new crop of photographers to have to suffer the label “emerging” and the intensity of attention and expectation that this label generates. Part of it is obviously the velocity of information speed on the internet and our corresponding attention deficit. The pressure to produce attention grabbing work or work that garners grants and awards, to produce “books” and completed projects is overwhelming. In the history of photography there are many many late bloomers, a mass of undiscovered talent. But what does that mean, is that tragic? Discovery is only the first step in a career. There will always be a surfeit of work produced, but it is hard to tell if our motivation to find it and blog (and then probably forget it) is because the tools enable this, or that the tools create a demand for something new every facebook status update?  And is it fair to our youngest and least experienced practitioners to focus on them this extraordinary amount of attention and energy?  Is our concern the promotion of new work or the exploitation of new workers? When we lower the bar to access what does it do to the field as a whole?

It is clear our world is brimming with information but so lacking in direct experience, which by nature simply requires time on the planet. Rubber on the Road. The Trials of Miles. Fogged film holders. Sheet film on the bathroom floor. The marathon was created initially as an obstacle for the human body to transcend that few considered healthy or possible. But to experience that transformation you need to commit to the whole thing. Now, we have this intermediate goalpost, the “half”, which before was only an early milepost in training for the “full” distance. But half is a misnomer. It is only a mathematical half.  It is not a factor of two for the body. When we make things more accessible do we alter the potential gift in return?

…

I got excited today signing up for all the fall runs that are coming, Grete’s Great Gallop, the Queen’s and Staten Island half’s, (maybe we should just call them 13.1 k’s?) the Joe Kleinerman 10k, some winter runs hopefully in the snow of Central Park. My experience of renewal in running means that the pure experience of photography is always available no matter how many photographers you see “crossing the finish line” next to you. And I realize that to a lot of running veterans, I am part of their problem! But choose how you experience any trial in life. And getting to the finish line is not really why we run. We run to run, we shoot to shoot. Like Fred was saying, “all for the t-shirt”, he’d show up for nothing really. Just to do it. I think photographers might want to accept less now in return for more later. We need more t-shirts! Bet you never thought you’d hear me argue for less reward in photography!

The title of this is copped from John L. Parker Jr.’s excellent book “Once a Runner.” I may do a review of running books in the future. It is easy enough to understand, a koan on trials, both olympic and personal, and the miles to get there.

Something to keep track of those miles? Perhaps you are considering purchasing a GPS training device like the Garmin 405? The 405 has been out for quite a long time, I only got mine after Mac support was provided. More on that later. I got the kit which included the heart rate monitor. A wireless usb dongle is responsible for getting the data off the watch and into your mainframe computing unit.

The first question might reasonably be, do I need this? If you are coming to this blog for the first time the history is that I began running in June of 2008 it what can only be described as a full on-midlife crisis. But I digress:) The first couple of months were primarily concerned with survival. It was hot, and there was a lot of phlegm. But that will pass young Skywalker, er, runner. Eventually I got a Nike sport kit for my ipod, well, I got a nike sport kit and I got an ipod. Again, I repeat, do I need this?

I think starting out the ipod provided a welcome distraction from my gasps for breath, my flapping footfalls and jangling keys. Eventually all that went away. I apologize to all the other runners. The Nike sport kit was useful for a long while, it does a reasonably accurate job of recording your pace and time and distance. But the caveat “your mileage may vary” has never been truer. If you contemplate doing tempo workouts or intervals, the Nike sport kit will get very, very confused. It also gets confused if you run faster than about 8 minutes per mile or have very short strides. Calibration is difficult. Nike has you run a specified distance to teach the unit I presume the number of strides you make to cover that distance. Getting the unit to be accurate to less than 10% is difficult, and if you intend on covering more than 10 miles, guess what? Exactly. Not.

So enter the Garmin 405. What was innovative about the 405 over previous models was that it looked more like a real watch, the size was not too big, the controls were minimized by using touch technology, and the wireless data transfer function was added. Depending on your point of view, all the additions were great or absolutely disastrous.

Speaking from my own experience these are the pluses and minuses:

The GPS function is very accurate over the terrain I have covered, meaning Brooklyn, Manhattan, the suburbs. I have not used the watch in dense forest or mountainous areas. But it does work under the tree cover I have experienced on light trails. If you tend to begin runs from the same point, the GPS will acquire a signal quickly and hold it. Later you can even see where you crossed from one side of the street to the other, the accuracy is to within a few meters.

There are a bewildering array of functions you can use, you can set GPS waypoints or use it to navigate. I have not explored any of this. What I use it for is monitoring pace, average pace, heart rate, distance and time. You can customize the data fields that are displayed, or have the watch auto scroll through the fields perpetually. I tend to like to see heart rate and either pace or average pace. When you check pace instantaneously you may be surprised, it can vary tremendously, about a minute either side of what you are actually doing. In practice you need to check a few times to make a mental average. Or you can use average pace, but this will be the total average, so if you are doing a tempo run for example, it will include the warm up lap which will distort the total. But overall you can get an accurate gauge of your pace at a point in time, and you quickly teach yourself through “biofeedback” what your pace and heart rate are based on your own internal GPS watch, which can be very accurate. Having used the watch now for 8 months I can tell within +/- 5 bpm my heart rate, and +/- 20 sec/mile my pace. But this is for paces that I know, as you get faster you will need to relearn the differences. I can tell a 8 minute mile from a seven minute mile, but beyond that, since I don’t regularly run tempos under 7, I have no idea. Later in my marathon training I have some speedwork at 6:51/mile assuming I can get there. I think I will be focused primarily on not puking.

So this is what it can do (and more) but what about usability? Touch technology is coming to us whether we want it or not. And for the most part, the iPhone and other touch enabled devices work very well. Where they have difficulty is in adverse conditions. Moisture interferes with most touch devices and the Garmin 405 is no exception. You would think that since running is often associated with, oh well, I don’t know, SWEATING, that this might have been a dealbreaker for some. It can be.

The instructions say that the watch is not to be immersed, although you can and probably should rinse the watch off after use. But overall the water resistance of even the two pushbuttons is somewhat sketchy. Sometimes they just don’t respond to repeated pushes, stabs, jabs, or profanity. And then a minute later all is fine. Same with the bezel. The “innovation” of the 405 was the inclusion of the touch bezel, that allows you to select functions by touch and scrolling, or circling around the bezel. On “dry land” this works fine. Throw in a little sweat or rain and it is easier to leave well enough alone and just let the watch count what it is counting. Attempting to access functions while the watch is wet is difficult. Not impossible. It makes the watch less reliable and you wonder why four sealed buttons would not have worked as well. I have learned to deal with it and I think the trade off is size. The newer Garmin 310XT is waterproof, aimed at triathletes, and is much larger overall. Or that could be the improved GPS part too.

With regard to the wireless data transfer, it makes sense to remove the usb port to improve water resistance, yet the watch is not really happy in water. So now you are adding another layer of difficulty in getting the data off the watch. And to be clear, there are two exposed charging pins, why you could not do data transfer and charging at the same time like the older larger 305 is one example of how improvements are not always improvements.

EDIT: June 2011- since I see there are many webviews for this entry I felt I should update it to reflect where we are now. On an Intel mac- currently a quad 2.3 tower from 2009- with snow leopard 10.6.7 in 64bit mode and Garmin Ant Agent 2.1.9, current firmware on the 405–it works as it should. The PowerPC support was stated as minimal, and it really didn’t get off the ground. When I got the tower at the beginning of the year it wouldn’t work in 64 bit mode, only 32 bit, but then in the spring an update has made it work for me and now when I come in after a run, if I put the watch near the tower it beeps pretty quickly and is done and uploaded before I can get the shoes off.

All of my observations about the touch bezel still apply- I try not to touch the bezel too much and lock it most of the time. I have the watch info fields set to show the data I need, and so I don’t need to be touching the watch during a workout.

For interval runs you can also program in a warmup, and a series intervals with rest intervals and if you remember to hit the right button at the end it all goes as planned. The more you familiarize yourself with the watch the better it works. In the course of a training schedule it does get to be pretty automatic.

I can’t speak to the experience on a PC, but the Mac support was long in coming, and now that it is here it is fair to say you might be less than impressed. I am using the software on an older PowerPC G5, which Garmin does not officially support but acknowledge that it does work. I can report, it does work. Period. (NOTE: there is a firmware upgrade for the 405 available but good luck getting it onto the watch! I l almost bricked my watch attempting it. Be very sure you need to bother before going down this road.)

…the trials of miles, gain, loss, max, avg, calories. where does it all end?

(picky readers will notice it says 19.57miles not 20 miles. I stopped the watch outside the park to buy a water and a banana for after, but did not restart the watch on the way home. Therefore: Never stop the watch! It does have a setting where it pauses when it detects you are not moving. Like that moment you collapse on the hill…)

The wireless ANT dongle (Another Needless Thing?) does not like going to sleep and waking up. You find yourself quitting the Garmin Ant Agent program, replugging the dongle, and relaunching the program. It may take a couple tries to sync. Eventually it gets done. Transfer to the Garmin website, well, YMMV again. Garmin has been rolling out a lot of software updates lately on their server side, I have found it easier to manually upload the data. Once uploaded you get a map of your workout, splits, averages, max values etc. You can generate reports of all your runs, although I cannot get average pace over many runs for some strange reason. Sometimes the simplest things…

That might be a suitable conclusion for this user review, “sometimes the simplest things.” I started out asking “do I need this?” It turns out that that is a very interesting question with regards to running overall. I cannot say there is an answer to that. Recently I started leaving the iPod at home, and found the experience very enjoyable. But sometimes, like last weekend and last night, it was fun to blast away with the tunes. I’m not much of a data junkie, however, keeping some kind of training log is essential I think, much like a daily journal, you can find insight in the record keeping. And the data is useful, you can see improvements, you can find encouragement, you can see how weather and time of day affect your performance. Or you can keep track of food and clothing, which is just as important. Gotta go back to ye olde paper and pen for that!

You don’t need any of this to run. A simple Timex will do, plus some indication of distance which is now available on websites like WalkJogRun.net or MapMyRun.com. Or just run dammit. I have no problem with that. If you are training for a distance event, I feel these devices do give you useful data that you can use during your runs to train better and more effectively. Just don’t expect to get a runners high off of them. That was what the running itself was for, remember?

Pros: size, accuracy, durability, website improvements hold out hope for better in the future from Garmin-and after a long while they delivered.

Cons: touch bezel is a mixed bag, Mac support is thin, wireless is unnecessary–ON INTEL everything fine….

Overall: maybe you can get it used? And used to it…Not as bad as all the above.

For perspective, my last marathon training program topped out at 44 miles maximum. There were only two 40+ mile weeks in the last go round. Now I have ahead of me two more months of 40+ mile weeks, going up to 54 miles at the peak. (40, 44, 35, 46, 49, 51, 41, 54, 42, 28, 38) Aye Carrumba!

I caught a serious break on Sunday with the overcast skies and mid-temperatures. The rain was a help too. Does anyone actually make a fabric that can dry in 80% humidity? Dryfit, Coolmax? ShamWow? Cause I’m lookin’.

So it was 20 on the calendar, the first of four 20 milers on the schedule, and after this week of speedwork cut short-and cutting 2.5 off last weeks 18 miler, I was starting to feel like Ludicrous Speed as I have named the schedule was ridiculous.

But that was then, Sunday. Now, Tuesday, thinking about then, I knew that now, or then, as it was, was the time to really commit, so that soon, when then becomes now, I will look back and have done it. Because now you can’t go back to then, you will have just missed it. When? Just now. Got it?

Nick Calcott recently wrote me thinking about running the Paris Marathon, and asked how I got started. A long email followed which I have copied below. Like discussions of photography for non-photographers, discussions of running for non-runners are pretty boring. What isn’t boring is Nick’s work or his blog, 12thpress.

“Thanks for your note-I love getting random shout-outs. Plus I really like the Night Dance series and Nana’s house.

I looked at the paris marathon website faq and noted that they said they serve mineral water every 5km. Too funny. In new york they just open up the fire hydrant to fill garbage pails lined with trash bags and volunteers scoop paper cups of it up.

The first race I ran was last august this time, it was the nike 10k run–I had been running only since june but managed to finish ok. In the two months prior I was just running as I felt, often times every day, about 4 miles or so. What happened in the beginning is that I didn’t know or ignored the advice to step up training in 10% increments, and I started adding mileage too soon just to see if I could do it. I would run 6 miles one weekend, 8 the next, 10 after that, going up to 13. So in a month I think I went from running 12 miles per week to running 25, which was too much too soon on no base. so I got hurt.

Basically all the books and websites give similar advice. Runnersworld.com has a lot of free advice, and you can generate training plans based on your current level. I think what the advice would be is this: have a “base” of regular running, something like 20-25 miles per week before you start the 18 week training for the marathon. Since the Paris is April 11 that means you would start training roughly the beginning of February. And the base should be 6 months or more. So if you are running only 15 miles per week now you might want to slowly ramp that up over the fall to give yourself 4 months of base. (still with me?)

You might also want to and hopefully would enjoy doing some intermediate races in the fall, 10k’s are a great distance, and the Half is also a good distance. Doing these races will give you an idea what to expect running in races, and also about water management and food issues, race day prep, the bathroom! etc. Things that you want to have a grasp of before getting to a marathon. I did a bunch of half’s and 10′s all through my first winter running and loved them all, also loved winter running in general. what I would not give right now for a 32 degree morning! It is so much easier to run in cold I find. In terms of training for Paris you will have to deal with winter running.

So from the fall races you will get a sense of times, your 10K and half marathon times. All of the training plans online and in books predicate your training on your current fitness. This is what you were asking me. When you know that you run a 10K in 50 minutes then that will accurately predict you will run a marathon in 4 hours. Something like that. The reason this works is mountains of data over the years. So for example the plan on Runners World which is what I am using, takes inputs such as a recent 10k or half marathon time, the current number of miles per week you are used to running, and the training effort you want to exert, moderate, intense, severe, and generates an 16 week plan based on that. The plan is similar to other plans – it assumes the “new” thinking that you might not want to run every day- they have you running 4 of 7. You can cross train other days or rest. The thinking here is to avoid injury and overuse. The “old” thinking was that you just buried yourself in miles at a slow steady pace, which now is only one component of the whole training.

What they advocate now is three kinds of workouts- you have speed workouts like tempo runs and intervals to focus on speed, running form and increasing oxygen efficiency, increasing your lactate threshold and teaching the muscles to fire fast, then you have easy days where you run with low intensity to give some recovery, and then you also have the long run day where you go slow and long to increase time on your feet, train your muscles to burn fat calories stored in the liver not muscle stored sugar which helps you avoid hitting the wall (burning through all the glycogen in your muscles entirely, which happens around mile 20).

Combining these three kinds of workouts and optional cross training will give you the ability to run long, economically and finish strong without running mass mileage every day. It is better to be slightly undertrained than over trained and injured on race day. One book is Run Less Run Faster by the RunnersWorld staff.

On a monthly level you go through 3 week circuits of progressive overload and then you get a recovery week. You do this four times, and the mileage increases and the speed workouts get faster progressively. In the last two weeks of training you taper off so that you are well rested for the marathon day. Basically that is it.

You asked about picking a goal time for your marathon-it doesn’t exactly work like that. You can only train so much, so your goal time or marathon pace is dictated by your fitness level going in to the training minus what the training can reasonably hope to achieve. Knocking 30 sec/mile off is a lot. Trying to improve beyond the plan limits risks injury. All of the training plans generally hew to the 10% increment. Once you have some intermediate races done this fall and some times for that, the training plan will dictate a reasonable goal time. For a first marathon I would say completion is a great goal in itself! You only have one first, and Paris is such a spectacular course that you might want to just focus on enjoying all the sights and sounds (meaning try to run no-ipod) and maybe take some pictures. You also want to finish strong, so that it is enjoyable, so speed is not a big issue.

If you read my account of the NJ marathon which was my first, I think it was “an experience” which was owing to the rain, the double loop course, etc. I knew I could finish so it was mainly to do it. Maybe not a great first experience but I was not in pain or cramping or bargaining heavily, so by that measure it was a great success.

My second marathon will be NY this fall, and even tho I am better trained now, I am approaching this with a great deal of trepidation, no matter what, it is one hell of a long way. anything can happen. So you really have to dedicate yourself and not shortcut the training. My last track workout was sub-optimal in the heat, so I give myself a pass because of that, but it bothers me to make excuses, because there are no excuses at mile 20. You have 6.2 more.

Very long email. good luck and keep in touch with what is going on. Take the plunge and commit and you will not be sorry you did.”

best
Robert

On tap for Sunday morning:

If you see me wave. This is a new route across midtown that lets me use both sides of the island without going through lower manhattan which is a tourist mess. Last time out in Battery Park with the crowds I made a runner sandwich with another runner, think Hadron Collider and I was an electron and he was an atom. Smoosh! I think a quark fell out or that was his keys. Dunno. He got peanut butter in my chocolate, I got chocolate in his peanut butter. Enough metaphors.

Update to Team for Kids fundraising and my marathon training. We sit at $470 of $2500 dollars currently. The deadline for the the 50% was extended to August 29.

The heat has put a serious dent in my training schedule, last night was a track workout of 3×1 mile at 7:08/mile, with .5 mile rest in between and for the first time I visited the Redhook park oval to do it. Tough sledding, I kept forgetting what lap I was on-and Mr. Garmin was making it difficult to keep track-a plain old watch would have been better. Didn’t matter, my heart rate was pegged up against the wall anyway…memories of high school practices with the gym teacher exhorting us through wind sprints. In fact there was what looked to be a track club or high school group doing 400m repeats, a group of about twenty teens, the expected mix of diffidence, lollygagging and avoidance. Some seriously fast folks too. They would all start out as a group and quickly the bell curve would appear, the lone runner way out in front, the middle of the pack, and a back of the pack bunny or two. I think everyone was feeling mr. pukey nearby. These last few days have been difficult to keep to the plan-targets have not been met! It is all going awry! Chaos! I am hoping that it is the heat that is responsible and not my choice of the pursuit of Ludicrous Speed in my training goals. Trying to make a 3:30 marathon may not be realistic for me…?

Slideluck potshow came and went and I received a lot of great feedback on the presentation-thank you all. I will keep working on the project when the light returns in late September. Here is the piece:

Image left of James Worrell circa 1985, Iowa proving that the kids are alright. I am certain of meeting James before circa New York Magazine 1990′s but that feels like a world away. Anyway in the spirit of childhood athleticism he responded to the TFK challenge and made a big contribution to my fundraising. 

Both of us had slideshows in last Thursday’s Slideluck Potshow, you can see his here. 

Week 5 begins today and features an 18 miler sunday.

With apologies to Sugimoto

with apologies to butterflies courting:)

Big post monday coming with shout outs to new TFK contributors. Going to try to deliver some real tasty treats from Ajax to get all the big whales ponying up for TFK. August 15 is the due date for the first half of the $2500 fundraising goal.

Light is to film as rubber is to asphalt. Left, 700 miles. Right, 0 miles. I exist to repave the world in rubber. Sigh.

We all need an August party right now! SLPS to the rescue. 6:30 to 11:30 at Canoe Studios, 601 West 26th Street, suite 1465. Admission is free, but they are going to do a priority line for members who donate. Since there is nuthin going on this week, people are starved for beer, I’d suggest getting on the priority line with a donation to SLPS.

Featuring me-and my mini project Flyover States in full multimedia mode. See you there.

Around mile 6.

Everyone is away, nothing is doing, we are into August. The gallery openings and free booze are a couple months away, the blogosphere is awaiting the next Edgar Martins to grace the stage, and I have just completed week three of training for the NYC marathon.

Week four is a rest week, the idea is that your muscles get a chance to recover a little from the steady overload they have been experiencing the last three weeks, which culminated in a 16 mile run Saturday evening. See above.

In photography it feels like progressive overload all the time. The steady drum beat of what to do next, how to keep the little ship from sinking. But in August, you really can’t do that, no one is around to hear the sound of your one shutter clapping.

For a while I have been tempted to write in bold caps “PHOTOGRAPHY IS DEAD” as the headline to a post. Catch me in a bad mood and I still might. Still photography for me was the defining art form of the Twentieth Century. Do I need a degree to say that? You might even say that the moon landing July 1969 was the culmination of all that still photography could do, to relate the actual imprint (via another actual imprint) of man on a landscape. Somewhere in a vault at NASA, exists the actual frame that was exposed to the 1/500th of a second of sunlight reflected from the boot imprint of Neil Armstrong. He also shot the same patch of lunar soil minus his bootprint, the moment before. It shows a great presence of mind to understand that there is the moon “before” and the moon “after.” And more than film or video, still photography is the exact medium in which to contemplate this. There is the film “before” and the film “after” exposure as well. The silver salts are like the lunar soil. Grains recording our existence. Wow. Pretty existential.

You could also argue, and I will, being that it is August and there is nothing else to argue, that at that moment photography died and the moving image became paramount in the culture. It was already happening, in Vietnam, for example, the shootout as it were between still and motion, I think still imagery won that war, pun intended. But the moon landing as it was shown on TV around the world galvanized the power of the flow of images over the still. A series of stills from an alien planet in real time does not have the same power. I remember when the Mars landers started sending back panoramas for the first time, and while the NASA scientists were besides themselves in the control room, the line by line reveal of the  Martian landscape was pretty ho-hum to me. I have watched a scanner work too long to find what it reveals to be that exciting.

I know I would get a lot of argument over whether stills or film was the defining art form of the Twentieth Century. Motion pictures have shaped our culture enormously. But I feel as a pure art form the still image has evolved the most.

I think we are at the other end of the telescope now, looking back at photography and what it did and meant to us. I say this because almost all of the work I see now is essentially nostalgic, nostalgic of a time or feeling or place or process. Recently Todd Papageorge published “Passing through Eden”, a collection of images from his years wandering Central Park. The work is completely modern in conception, the unrelenting gaze of the camera making what the camera makes, photographs, but the publishing of it is essentially nostalgic. I have read that TP urges his students at Yale to contemplate working in this genre, the lyrical documentarian, camera in hand, and he says he gets no takers. I think that for photography, quote-unquote, this period in the late 60′s early 70′s was the ultimate period, the point at which art photography reached its apogee to borrow a space term. It is hard to get any better than the unblinking, unrelenting, rigourous exactitude of the black and white or colour images of Robert Adams, Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, Eggleston, etc.

This power comes from that sense that you are seeing the trace or existence of something real. Like the lunar footprint, or the image of Lincoln in the Smithsonian, you look closely and it feels as if you can touch reality just on the other side of the glass. But this necessarily limits photography to what actually exists. As soon as you admit fabrication, the power ebbs. And for me the last couple decades of photography have been bouncing along in the nostalgic, either borrowing from painting, or borrowing from the history of photography itself. Sort of like current Broadway musical theatre, a recreation of a long gone heyday.

As I said, we started this trek away from photography during that moon landing. The essential difference between a still photograph and a motion film is that one exists and the other doesn’t. You can hold a photograph in your hand, see it, understand it, confirm it’s existence. You can only apprehend a film, it exists only in your brain as the joining of 24 frames per second by persistence of vision. To see the physical film, there is no motion. It exists only in projection. And you can’t even hold one moment, except as a still, a broken fragment of the whole. This makes motion film the idea medium of what might be, of fantasy. Nothing is real, so it needn’t be. You might argue that the power of documentary film suggests that we still value the real in motion film, but I think we equally value being tricked in film, the willing suspension of disbelief, the surprise twist, the Kaiser Sose at the end. It doesn’t bother us in motion to find out it was all made up. But in still photography, it does. You feel let down. Edgar Martin’d.

Photography is dead. Slowly dying since the 70′s, on life support the last decade or so, I think you will see motion film (video) in many of the applications where the still was used formerly. And I believe the internet is the natural home of the video as print was to the still image. Stills on the internet are not as compelling as motion is. Bandwidth is the only obstacle, otherwise we’d be there now. With youtube, we mostly are there.

Of course there are those that point out that Radio didn’t kill live music performance (although how many of us now know how to play an instrument?) that Television didn’t kill Film, or Print Journalism, and that the Internet will not kill Print. But this does not mean that different mediums have not had to adapt to different, altered or reduced roles. What we are seeing now is the decline of the still image and print. I don’t see any way that it will have in the Twenty First Century, the impact that it did in the Twentieth.

But it is August. Ask me again in September.

edit: another take here on fin de siècle. My opinion, Talk was no George.