“The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.

…

But things have changed. “With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself,” wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it’s made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply.”

Walter Isascson, Time Magazine

Lincoln, Darwin, and the Penny

February is the cruelest month. It is also the month of my birthday, and other brilliant people like me, Lincoln and Darwin to name two. I’m sure there are plenty of other stupid people too. 

Recently Walter Isaacson, now there is a segue, wrote a piece in Time magazine about saving newspapers. Good thing he wrote it too, Time magazine was all of 56 pages, I guess getting a ringer in can keep the team in the game.

He traces the development of media online, from the early days as magazines and newspapers tried to figure out how this was going to work. All of them ran up against what I have called the TV mentality, or the idea that what is on the screen should be free, or monetized by advertising.  I think there has been a confusion between the ideals of the internet, that information should flow freely and be universally accessible, and how it has turned out, the conflation of the TV mentality with the idealism of the internet. We are stuck at the point where now the information itself is free, because the TV model of advertising supported content has failed online. You can thank Google for that failure as Isaacson observes, by making ads ubiquitous and essentially meaningless the value of those ads is driven down, as is the available pool of advertising dollars.

Notice the distinction I am making, the internet is not, I believe, about making ideas “free” from an intellectual property standpoint. It is about making access universal. The internet was invented by scientists for communication. The ideas that were being shared were paid for by colleges and universities in grants and endowments. What appears to be a Star Trek universe without money and everyone doing what they are supposed to be doing for “The Enterprise” is nothing but. (see what I did there?) The only way that research gets done is that people who are free to work where they want to work are paid in money which is the tool that makes it possible. Even pure research eventually gets monetized, thank goodness for my space pen that writes upside down!

So we have a confusing set of behaviours. We want to encourage freedom of access to information, as in a library. We are going in with the freedom of browsing as associated with the television. The internet is like a Library turned into television. There was never more confusion in school than when the Library was involved. No one understood the arcane language of attribution and citation, the latin shortforms cf, ibid, etc, and the fact that you couldn’t just copy whole cloth out of the encyclopedia for your term report. But you could go borrow a book for free. So you can see there the tension between the Star Trek world of pure ideas and altruistic behaviour and the capitalist world of citation and plagiarism. Just how are we supposed to behave?

The internet takes intention and makes attention-a shopping mall takes attention and makes intention-

You can browse a library, a mall, and the internet. But they are not the same.

The mall and the internet are strikingly similar, both are highly organized around the pleasure of looking, and not being looked at, at least that we are aware of. The mall takes the concept of the market square, the commons, and tweaks it ever so slightly from a public place of exchange for ideas, politics, art, and commerce, into a private space of commerce only. It is not the site of political discourse or free speech. The browsing function is enhanced so that the citizen becomes dissociated from the citizenry so to speak, they become passive buyers. The mall stimulates (or overwhelms, in the case of children’s breakfast cereals) your senses, feeds you, controls the climate, and allows you to sample (touch, hold, fondle) a variety of goods without feeling obliged to buy; big open doors, wide aisles, open merchandise. Hopefully the seduction entices you to buy. Attention is converted to a buying action. 

 The internet, conversely, is more like TV, it takes intention, the intent to do something, to go somewhere, (Microsoft, Where do you want to go today?) and changes it to simple attention, random browsing. The architecture of links is what does this. Before you know it, you are reading about Yak herding in Bhutan. It is more like the library in this case. Or Strand Books. Go in looking for one thing and come out with something different.

Now you could argue that the internet enables some buying activity, but in the case of music, it was a painful transition. The iPhone App store has been a breakout success. Subscribing to media however, has not taken hold. All we really want is to be held in attention. Don’t ask us for money. We can’t fondle the goods. We can only scroll and click. It is primitive. (Scrolls?) Speaking of fondling, you might locate the success of the App store in the pleasure of the iPhone itself, the Steely Dan of Trojan horses (I can’t believe I actually wrote that) as far as online buying goes. This is something Apple gets right in all of its products, the seduction of form. Apple turns attention into intention in all of it’s products. 

Understand the behaviour, define the Marketplace

So the basic unit of the internet, the click, has a value that we have not yet figured out. It is a new behaviour. It is a kind of decision but it is the forestalling of decision. Channel surfing, web surfing. This is the problem. You can’t create a marketplace if you can’t monetize the behaviour. For now we have adopted the TV model wholly and simply- sell eyeballs and clicks back to advertisers. Apple seems to be on to something because they have transformed the “click” into the “Touch”-meaning they get how browsing is pleasure, and pleasure can be converted into purchasing action. But Apple is the aberration in the marketplace.

And the marketplace has been hijacked by the telcos as Isaacson writes:

“Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web’s trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.”

(Aside- Text messaging is the cell company’s dirty little secret. There is no physical reason why text messaging should cost anything. Text messages are routed within communications that the cell phone makes to identify itself to the network. It is part of the overhead, unused bits that pass regardless of the users intervention. That is why they have a maximum length, the size of the space available. There is no incremental increase in network load no matter how many text messages are sent. It is the opposite of actual voice and data traffic. Yet we pay for it. It is like monetizing your breath. There is no doubt that the telco’s are going to have to bear a share of the burden of change.)

Until we redefine our behaviour online, it will be difficult to establish a true marketplace. In that it looks like a traditional marketplace, it has failed. Meaning brand retailers and consumers. The real growth, the new behaviour, has occurred with what has been interestingly defined as “user generated content”, which reinforces the distinction between “us” the consumer, and “them”, the corporation. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. I should be able to hang out a shingle and sell my content online. But in the absence of a true marketplace, this is difficult. 

“Snark” media has managed to carve a very lucrative toehold in the dying carcass of mainstream-media. You can’t just grab a photograph from the NY Times online or Getty, write a funny comment and post that as “content” somehow hiding behind fair use. NYT paid for the wire photograph, so why should Gawker get to run essentially the same picture under the guise of criticism or commentary when really they are creating an whole other category, David Denby calls it “Snark” or at the very least, a funny diversion. If Jon Stewart does a piece lampooning an issue, you can bet they get clearance and pay for whatever they use. It is unclear what Gawker pays for and what it simply credits back without paying for. This is an example of how the TV mindset of selling eyeballs back to advertisers is failing online. The only way that the Gawker model works is if the content is free. They get to sell the attention back to the advertiser. Profit. One you have to pay for that content then you really are no different from a mainstream source, creating your own unique content with the associated “burden” of paying creators. Less profit. 

In a true marketplace the online behaviour of browsing clicks and links would have value on some level other than as pure attention. As in a real marketplace, eventually you have to buy. It is a measure of how desperately we cling to the infantile pleasure of looking that we are so frustrated by online links that go behind paywalls! Just look at that angry face! Baby wants his toys! Why does mommy take them away! Grrr! Whaaa! Seriously, perhaps this is a function of a normal maturation process-we have been calling it web 1.0, web 2.0, so grownup! Really we have Web-Two-Year-Old. That is where we are. The web as playpen. Part of this is enormously creative, the play aspect. But eventually you teach the kids how to set up a lemonade stand at the end of the driveway. Ok so its not Darwin, but it is an evolution. (I was stretching for a title)

We find ways of paying for things all the time. Call it redistribution of income. Ouch! It comes in the form of tax law that gives breaks to small business, write offs for business purchases like subscriptions, and luxury taxes. There is also a vast pool of money contained in the simple rounding of our purchases to the next dollar. Banks are now starting to toy with working with schemes that capture that. The Lincoln Penny is powerful. Redirecting that money online for clicks is not unimaginable.

It may take the death of printed media to force a normalized online buying behaviour with respect to Newspapers and magazines. Or it might just take a simple tactile device like the iPhone to drive purchases. The Kindle does not seem to be there yet. I think the maturation is in colour, bandwidth, and form factor. And interactivity, although that has been poorly defined up until now. People seem to think that this “problem” is too hard, which I think is to ignore that the problem is simple, but our behaviour is immature. We have been caught up in a bubble of growth that was not sustainable. Time to pay.

The internet may also become partly a utility. We are already heading towards a world of utilities. Consumer banks will probably become like utilities, says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” (interview with Charlie Rose). The chaos created by bank failures would be too great to allow the possibility of say, one day, not being able to get cash out of a cash machine.  So we are moving towards a form of bank nationalisation. Add this to the other functions of a modern society that we have come to expect, healthcare (ok now?) law and order, and banking is obviously an essential service. The internet may be another. 

Have I solved all the problems yet? I guess I’m saying there is no problem. Or no problems that a little upheaval can’t solve.

Maybe it is all that time in Omaha near Warren Buffet…but look around-

Its a bubble that can’t go on much longer and I have to say I was right when I said it made no sense to begin with.

What am I talking about?

Two years ago here (november 2006 in the archives if you are interested) I got into a a little dustup about online usage and appropriation of images. Most people said I was not getting it, they pointed to all the seeming good that was coming out of sharing work online for free. I said, be careful what you trade for. Be careful what you encourage in this space.

This article today highlights what has come to pass.

Print media is contracting month over month and year over year. It has nothing to do with the quality of the content as some have argued. It has mostly to do with what is free and easy and convenient and available online. 

Most magazine articles are photographed beautifully, written and researched, and exhibit a depth far beyond what is available online. They may be a week behind or a month behind, but that is not really the problem. They are being outpaced by online competitors that pay nothing for content they steal from other websites.

Online media can get by with half the staff and half the investment because for the most part they are not actually “creating” anything, they are just recycling what others have paid and are losing money to produce.

The analysis in the Times article is interesting, the quote is “The answer is that paper is not just how the news is delivered; it is how it is paid for.”

Think about this for a moment, it is also true of all printed media. Now compare that to “screen” media-and in this I am including television because it is the nearest neighbour. What is on the screen is “free”. This is the attitude. It is monetized through advertising or to some small extent by subscription-cable fees. But the real money is in distribution, cable networks, ISP’s monthly charges, etc. You pay for the delivery method primarily not the content.

So the internet has been a free ride so far, but there is no way that this can continue. There is no way that printed media can continue to subsidize the growth of online media. Online has to pay. Otherwise there is no money for editors and reporters and art directors. No money for foreign bureaus and investigative reporting. If you want to see the future of online media, look at Gawker, Myspace, PerezHilton, and Youtube. About the lowest scrape of the barrel out there. This is what “user-generated” content is all about.

Others may think that I don’t get it, but I think it has never been clearer now that we live in a gross expansion bubble, where nothing has real value because nothing is real. Earning money on the leverage of other people doing real work cannot continue. The attention economy nor the endorsement economy is not enough. » Read the rest of this entry «

I have been motivated to think about the ways in which the current de-leveraging going on in the financial markets will affect photographers. Of course I really don’t “know” what will happen, but I can apply some general ideas and float some theses.

The first thing is that while everyone sees the legislation as a bailout, what is really happening is that the bill is trying to soften the de-leveraging going on right now. Essentially, you had Wall Street investment banks that after many years of de-regulation, going back to the late 80’s, it is not just the current administration that is responsible, these banks were leveraged thirty and 40 to one, whereas commercial banks like the ones we deposit our pay cheques into were limited to something like twelve or fifteen to one. What this leverage meant was that profits were leveraged against profits, paper against paper, and there were no “real” assets against those bets. So now you have a situation which is akin to a margin call, and banks are all hoarding real capital to hedge their bets. But this de-leveraging, the ratcheting down of value against real capital means that wealth is being destroyed. The economy is shrinking. A separate part of this confronts the wisdom of printing money to refloat boat so to speak, but I really don’t want to get that depressed right now.

So what has this to do with emerging photographers? I like to think that over the last five years, the credit bubble helped create a large “supply” in the workforce, those just starting out. And the advent of digital photography also lowered the bar to entry, it was just plain easier to learn enough to be dangerous. So you had a bubble of new photographers entering the system all at once, enabled by the digital bubble which as I have discussed is itself fueled by the credit bubble, and all connected by the www and made accessible through the www. 

You can think of the term “emerging” as a kind of leverage itself. It is a term that is euphemistic at best.  I think the term was a way to sell new photographers into the market at a faster pace than the market was actually responding, but you didn’t notice this in the frenzy. And by frenzy I am speaking of the explosion of blogs, contests for emerging photographers, and also the “leverage” (read onslaught) experienced this last year at openings and festivals. Wall to wall. Way beyond the actual growth of the industry. Everyone has always wanted to be a photographer, as a cliche, but this was different. 

I think it is also no surprise that the number of rep firms have swelled beyond all proportion in the last decade, the supply of new photographers (and new ideas, as well, it is not all bad) was a downpour, and reps provided the kind of gatekeeping mechanism that editors, whom have been reduced in number, used to provide, at least in editorial. And the marginal cost of adding another shooter outweigh the burden on the rep, at least in a bubble. It is another form of leverage. But contrast this with the contraction in the industry experienced after 9-11, when lots of us didn’t work for a long time, and I believe we now have a definite oversupply of talent and and paucity of work. Which can only go down further as the economy collapses.

The conclusion is that the industry has to go through another contraction, 9-11 style or worse. It has already shed some baggage, notice how many labs are suddenly not there? Film is no longer the license to print money. Digital was the license to print money, as I said in the last post, but I think that may be coming to an end. I think there is no way we cannot shed “workers” in the coming recession, and by workers, I think you have to always look at the newest, least experienced, least seasoned, least tolerant of repetitive downturns. I have been through two already. (ok, so this is really a sales pitch, yes I will be here after all of this is over) But as I always said, “emerging to what?” 

Just trying to be ‘truthy.

NB: another similar post here

» Read the rest of this entry «

At a recent function, er, party, Noah Kalina encouraged me to write more, by saying some nice things about my “truthiness” (my word) in the blog world, and I said to him that I wanted to write a piece on “bubbles”-about how we like to create these speculative bubbles and let them get out of control and pop. It is a theme that I have always been interested in. 

The first project I did on Malls (yes those cliche parkinglots TB) primarily dealt with the un-sustainability of a culture dedicated to consumption. Suburbia is a kind of bubble in many ways, a retreat into an ex-urban safe zone, a place where consumption is encouraged, is the norm, and also the site of never ending expansion. It has taken my whole life for that bubble to pop, and you are left wondering what’s next?

I think the easy credit (and by easy, I mean starting with web 1.0) of the last 10+ years, lets call it “moniness” which is like “truthiness,” has fueled the primary bubble in consumer photography, and this has had an impact in professional photography too. It makes little sense for an amateur to spend between three to five thousand dollars on a full frame dslr and a lens or two when 90% of their needs would be served at well under a thousand dollars. But easy credit makes this possible. My first real camera in 1981 was all of 350 dollars. It wasn’t until I left assisting in 1996 that I even contemplated spending several thousand on a camera that was meant to make money, not be a hobby. But today that kind of expenditure is “normal.”

I believe the entire transition from film to digital has mainly been possible because of the consumer credit bubble. In the pro ranks, the medium format digital manufacturers have supplied credit, trade in programs, almost anything including dancing bears to get you to pony up for a 35k capture device. Very often the cost was either diffused onto the client in the form of rental fees, or never fully paid in a leasing arrangement.

I’m not questioning that for many photographers, the differential between shooting 4×5+polaroid+processing and a 35k capture back was marginal, if you had enough volume, it paid for itself in a year, or heavens, on a single job. But there are other costs too, computer upgrades, software, storage, etc, and the total uprade cycle being closer to 36 months, whereas film cameras had much longer life spans and required no RAID in the closet. Without the credit bubble, I doubt this wholesale switchover, which I peg from 2001 through 2006, five years, could not have taken place. At least that is my thesis.

Which begs the question, if a bubble created this, is it sustainable?

Already we have seen Hasselblad drop it’s prices 50% in a single stroke. I am sure photogs having recently bought an H3 at full price are fuming. And then Canon’s recent “game changer” the 5DMK2 lowers the entry point further. Not all equal, but converging on better than medium format-large format quality at a price point near 10K.  Will the medium format back manufacturers like Phase, SinarBron, Mamiya, and Leaf be able to share space with Canon, Nikon, and now Leica in the mega-pixel space?

For me, I think the recent price drops by Hassy confirm one thing in my mind, that the margins on these products were astronomical to begin with, at least on the manufacturing side. Could someone please justify 20-30k on a digital back based on cost to research, develop, market, etc? What is the worldwide number for sales of these backs? Tens of thousand, or more like hundreds of thousands? I understand that Canon sells millions of units, tens of millions, but the spread seems too large to me, and couple that with the credit bubble mentality I feel like Phase, Leaf, etc were stickin’ it to us pretty good. Just because they could. You could get the financing, the financing was probably repackaged and sold off as securitized debt, whether or not it got repaid was another story, you follow on with another upgrade and even tho you had not paid the full amount for the first back, you paid half again for the second, and so on. Then there was the resale market for used backs. Again, I have to wonder, where did all these secondary vendors come from-the “digital integration specialists”, almost like boiler-rooms of sales agents for these backs. I can hear Jack Lemon already–”The leads, the leads!” These were in addition to all the known pro camera retailers, an entire workforce from nowhere competing for this business. I’m smellin’ bubble friends.

Another word of the day-

cra·ter  krāt′ər

We know what that means too. It is a moniness-pit.

Just tryin’ to be ‘truthy.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Liz Kuball bid adios in this post and it twigged something in my mind, a paragraph she wrote:

It is so easy, when your Google Reader is always full of excellent photographs, to feel as though the rest of the world is producing constantly, consistently, at a level you’re simply incapable of. It’s almost as if all the photographers whose blogs I read have become one photographer in my mind, and that one photographer never stops, never has to work, never gets sick or lacks inspiration. I know this isn’t true, of course—know that they all have their own struggles, that they all work hard to produce the work they do. But when all you see are the beautiful photographs, it’s hard to keep that in mind.

I have been turning this over in my mind since the Various debacle, what to make of the apparent future of photography. Not to rehash the whole thing, but I think that for me, what sticks out about Various Photographs was that is was very representative of where we are now, our taste, speaking of the internet world. Some would say it is wonderfully diverse, and perhaps it is, we now have available a tremendous mass of work, all made equal in a sense by the computer screen, 72 pixels is all you get. It is like submitting to galleries 35mm slides, the old saying, it makes good work look bad and bad work look good. What you end up with is this constant flow, and I think that is something that Various Photographs is trying to dip a toe into, this stream, to take a temperature, stir up some eddies.

Liz gets at it, how this stream affects you if you are making work. Never before have we had this kind of volume of work available. When I was getting going in Toronto in the early 90’s it was book stores, even that was overwhelming, although the volume of books has only increased.

I was visiting home last week and on the way back the rental car had XM satellite radio to keep me company, so perversely I listened to the comedy channel for 8 straight hours.  I do not recommend it. But I realized how similar the experience was to looking at photography and blogs on the net. It is one reason, the main reason, why I do not feature other photographers work on my blog. There are other places for that. But even then, I question the effect it has. It is like the satellite radio. How is it possible to make comedy unfunny? By massing it together in a continuous stream you realize that very few people have anything truly funny or new to say, and in fact will repeat themselves over and over in the same genres and topics. Careful here, I am not saying anything to the individuals, I am saying the stream defeats the purpose. Well, my continuous listening does that, but made possible by the stream. It is the effect of consumerism, the construction of a world dedicated to making it easy to consume things.

What the internet has done is turned photography, all of it, into another consumer product. Of course it hasn’t, but that is the effect.

We should not be so eager to treat the world like a box of chocolates.

I think what you are seeing is a generational thing amplified by the www. In the development of a photographer or artist there are stages that you inevitably go through, fascinations, being naive to certain things, unaware of what has come before, excitements at the discovery of an artist previously unknown to you, all of these things from the perspective of someone starting out are very different experiences compared to someone who is battling mid-career issues, etc. There are commonalities, like finding inspiration, finding places to show, sharing experiences. But it is this particular time, the confluence of technologies of digital photography, the www for sharing, a boom in consumer credit allowing amateurs to purchase gear that only professionals would have bothered with in the analogue days, all of this has brought an unprecedented number of photographers into the arena at exactly the same time and often at the same phase, that early discovery phase that used to go by fairly unnoticed in art schools around the country. And asking the same questions over and over. Of course there is nothing wrong with this per se, except as it has manifested across blogs and the www. So you see the consequences, a great deal of burnout, bad work, and this somewhat toxic flood of imagery.

Charlie Rose was interviewing George Will last night and they were discussing the Barack Obama nomination, and that task ahead for him. The charge has been that he cannot connect because of his “elitism” and Will neatly deconstructed that. He said in politics it is never the question that the elites rule the masses, but it is the question of “which elites” will rule. You hear so much talk about relating to the “common man” and often politicians like to portray themselves as the “common man” as much as possible. Well, I agree with Will here (perhaps the only thing I share with his views), I want an “uncommon man” as a leader, really, that is what we all want but do not acknowledge.

Similar goes for photography, photography may have it’s common charms, but I really don’t need a flood of common imagery. It is the uncommon we need more of. » Read the rest of this entry «

Various Democracies

Photography as Collection

The exquisite corpse: the future of photography, it is not about any one person’s work, it is about the mass. 

How collecting other work saves you from making your own?

These were all titles I considered for this follow-on piece. I am trying to put it in a bigger context. Where are we going in photography? Or where did we think we were going because we misunderstood the past…

By Tim Barber’s own admission, he functions more as a collector than as a curator. The web creates the possibility of bringing together unlimited numbers of photographs and the attraction is to ffffind something in that mass. I think this is where some confusion sets in. I think it is one thing to see collection as a valid strategy for curation (which it is in my opinion) and another thing to see collection as a valid strategy for making work. The trouble that TB gets into is that he conflates the one with the other. See it is perfectly fine to work in the typological mode, which is essentially being a photographic collector of types. The Bechers, Sander, etc. But they are not collecting ANYTHING, they are curating what they collect. Water Towers, Professions. 

To curate a show based on the photography of EVERYTHING, in other words to be a collector of photographs of anything is where you can get into trouble. The defense is that photographs can BE about ANYTHING. Yes, a photograph can be about anything, but it doesn’t necessarily follow it is a good photograph…

It makes me think of The Democratic Forest by William Eggleston. Thousands upon thousands of photographs. When asked what he was working on lately Eggleston responded, “I have been photographing democratically.” There is a lot in that statement.

This the “rationale” about Various Photographs, and the basis of a lot of photography, that it is somehow “democratic” because it is an artform that nearly anyone can do. And further, that this should be a good thing.  I have a friend who is legally blind, who reads text at a distance of about four inches, but who makes the most astonishing photographs I have ever seen. In the sense that photography is universal, you could say that photography is democratic. Anyone can take a picture. The act. Looking at it that way you can say anyone can paint. The act. But we are not so accepting of that, although David Letterman has some great Elephant paintings to show you. So there is the act, and there is the intention. An elephant can make a great painting but he or she cannot intend to make a great painting. At least as far as we can tell…

So what did Eggleston mean when he said he was photographing democratically? My sense of it is that his democracy was of the subjects within the frame. Do not read that as “all subjects are equal.” You can read that as “you can photograph anything.” But it is not about “the subject” it is about everything in the frame. 

His “war with the obvious” was not about showing us the beauty of the ordinary, which is how I believe many people take it, his war was with “obvious” subjects. A single object depicted in space in the center of the frame. Eggleston’s democracy was to see everything and depict with equal weight all objects in his frame. This is why he talks about the reproduction of Bresson’s Decisive Moment, typical of the era in that it was flat,  open, and low contrast, it depicted all elements in the frame equally, whereas when he saw the originals they were standard prints. It was the democracy of the reproduction that made the pictures work. Go back to read the afterward in the book and you will see what I mean.

This is the problem: how do you see THE FOREST for the trees. How do you see it all at once when you are looking at details. I believe the garden variety understanding of Eggleston’s importance is misunderstood, we think of him as a photographer of the mundane details (this is what Eudora Welty says in the introduction) that reveal existential meanings and the presence of life. My understanding of The Democratic Forest is the opposite, the book begins with a photograph of a solitary tree and a dedication to “The memory of my aunt, Minnie Maude Schuyler”, followed by a photograph of a map of the United States and world globe titled “Memphis, at the Travel Agent’s.” You don’t even need to see these pictures to get the implication-this is the war with the obvious, a dedication to a late loved Aunt who would not understand what was to follow save for this lone tree, an fitting photograph of a simple lovely subject dead-center in the frame. But that was not what he wanted to show, The Democratic Forest is the problem of how do you see the FOREST, all of it, the map of the United States and The Globe, and depict it from Memphis Tenn? How can you be simultaneously everywhere and here? How does a picture make itself out of the world?

So I am back to Barber. His show demonstrates what we have done with the legacy of Eggleston’s Democratic Forest. We have been concerned with people up trees. And the mundane, and the ephemeral, but I don’t think we have absorbed, or maybe we have abandoned the lessons of Eggleston which is to make pictures democratically, not “of everything” but of everything equally. In other words, photography is not about “the subject.” It is about the total, the picture, the picture “problem.” It is people AND trees if that is your bag.

Why do I think Various Photographs is problematic? 

It adopts the view that authorship is incidental, that photography can be characterized as collecting, and that you can photograph “anything.” 

It is the reverse: authorship is everything, photography is not collecting and it is not about photographing “anything,” it is about treating everything in the photograph as equal.

How do I know I am right? When you come out of looking at that show, or any similar collection like that you do not want to take pictures. Your reaction (my reaction) is, god, everything has been photographed. You are exhausted. Subject matter has been exhausted. Which is why it is not about the subject. To photograph everything is not to “see” anything. This is the sickness of the collector. It is impossible to collect everything. Collyer syndrome. And collection is only a substitute for understanding. If we could only collect, catalogue, name, describe, everything then we would know and control and understand. To dissect the exquisite corpse.

By the way, one version of an “exquisite corpse” is a drawing divided in three completed by different individuals. Maybe the single line of photographs was never intended…?

I’ll leave it there. My intention is not to tear down but to challenge. I write about what I react to, and what moves me strongly. In terms of the future of photography, whatever that possibly could mean, and Various Photographs, there is something there to consider. I think many people who saw the show saw “the photographs” and to them it looked like what they have come to expect from photography now, at least on the web. That met expectation, at least as I gauged it from the people at the show, the Saturday crowd, the more everyday crowd, not the photo-crowd, that met expectation is very much a barometer of where we are. Perhaps it is the failure of one kind of photography and the success of another. Perhaps photography has become “democratic” by becoming what many people wish, as opposed to photography being democratic by nature. » Read the rest of this entry «

Aside from Roger Ballen’s now legendary shadowland monologue, and Simon Norfolk’s making cream corn of an unfortunate festival goer who asked “that question,” (more on that later) Tim Barber’s “Various Photographs” exhibit merits some discussion.

It was apparent from the git-go that someone was not happy, I missed out on the early brouha but it seems the show is not hung the way Tim envisioned. Donald Rumsfeld to the rescue: you go to hang with the space you have not the space you want…

I think TB backpedalled a little too soon, while a single line would have been different and more like his website, I don’t believe the net effect would have been much different. He says it himself, it is a “mish-mash” and whether one row or three, there are a lot of pictures to look at, all sized and framed exactly alike. Three rows creates more narrative connections between different images, so I am not sure what the fuss is about. More likely it was an apology for curation, or curation 2.0 as we are supposed to call it.

Tim’s stated mission was to create “an accessible neutral venue” for a large body of work from all over the world. In this he succeeds completely. He also wanted “an exquisite corpse” and I can see that also.  There is always this populist democratic streak in photography, an anti-elitism. I think it is just the same old process where the new overturns the old. But this dogma comes up again and again, this kind of neutrality, objectivity, democracy. I think it is completely misunderstood.

This is obviously Tim’s show. If there has been a complaint that the NY photo festival is too much about the curators, I respond, so what? We NEED curators, now more than ever, and Tim’s show represents what you get when a curator abnegates responsibility. The point of curation is not to be neutral or accessible, the point is take care of the work and assume responsibility for revealing its meaning. So point one, you have to stand by what is on the wall, regardless. There is no spilled milk here. I think it is extraordinarily irresponsible to distance yourself from what you have done because of contingencies beyond your control. So what, get on with it. 

The real issue is the work on the wall and does it stand up and what is the effect? There are great individual images in the show. But what does it mean to create a group show of hundreds of photographers? For me what happens is the net effect is to de-authorize, horrible phrase, the work. It negates authorship. Suddenly a McGinley could be a Cox, a Kane could be a Traegeser, a Heller a Sutherland, and X could be a Y. What you are seeing is Barber’s own hand, you could interchange this show with a number of his own person galleries and be none the wiser, there would be smoke clouds, random livestock, people in baggy underwear and bloody noses in both. So he strips the work of the original author and substitutes his own imprimatur, and then takes the back door out by saying it is accessible and neutral, and oh, by the way, not what I intended.

I don’t believe it is fair to the people included in the show to be honest. It is reductio-ab-absurdum. One of the panel discussions was Curation 2.0 with Jen Bekman and Laurel Ptak. Guess who was wearing the ironic trucker hat? And really did not have a presentation to make. It was embarrassing compared to many other presentations. And this was one of the festival CURATORS. Breaking news, there is a responsibility there, take it.

Other embarrassments….

Katherine Wolkoff’s presentation on her work also springs to mind, this is one example of you not wanting to hear an artist talk about their work. And maybe we should not expect artists to do this, I don’t know that it is their job after the work is up (but see SN below..). Basically she is really enamoured with a pseudo victorian scientific sensibility coupled with the opposite Romantic sensitive artist streak and throw in a little 60’s environmental crunchy-granola for good measure. Yes it was that painful, sensitive and tortured. Just go see the pictures…

Kathy Ryan misattributes Simon Norfolk’s love of painting and gets a soft glove in the face…but don’t worry, they will hug it out…

Did I hear Rothko invoked again? I thought this was a photography festival, but it seems to be a painting festival. NOthing boils my blood faster than hearing that olde chestnut proffered about how much better a picture is because it evokes a painting…Dammit please can we just have our own medium thank you? I don’t hear people saying that book was so much better or that sculpture was so much better because it was based on a frick’n painting.  So SN got up there and said, I don’t like painting, and these examples I am going to show you are crap, which they were. I am being hyperbolic here, I do know that good work evokes and speaks to other work, there are resonances, references, riffs. Can I just for once hear someone say that picture is better because it is based on a Coltrane track? Then it would just be a reference, and not rationale. Painting and photography have nothing in common except they are a flat thing hung on a wall….and you need your eyes, altho I suppose the blind can enjoy paintings by touch. Oh no, another way in which photograph is deficient…

Simon Norfolk’s presentation was very smooth, this guy has a mind you don’t want to meet in a darkened alley. How this guy gets access to the places he does is a miracle. He basically makes you want to give up photography because the rigor of his ideas sucks all the oxygen out of the room faster than a fuel-air explosion. I think we all felt our innards leaving our mouths at the end.

Two things: he says he does not want to see another photograph of an orphan baby in a refugee camp because he was told that if he bought the bracelet and donated to this other thing and supported the whatever that he would never have to see another orphan baby photograph. In other words he thinks that the emotional confrontation photography sometimes employs is a dead strategy. He prefers the cool intellectual “unpacking” of the black box, although his rage is white hot. His own emotion on the subject tells you the weakness in this argument. To see his work without his own calculated tirade is actually less effective. SN is as much the picture as the picture. I wanted to suggest that he go on the road with the slideshow like Al Gore, because it was a great display. I think you need the emotion, you cannot help but begin in emotion. SN chooses to then take that and sublimate it to a more rigorous intellectual photograph, but I don’t believe it relieves us of having to witness pain, and I think we are on worse ground if we do.  Anyway that is just his choice. 

Second thing: that choice became the subject of an unfortunate question, does the aestheticization of suffering (in either mode, emotional or rational) diminish and exploit suffering? This was the the first question posed after the fuel-air bomb went off. SN ripped him a new one. It is a sensitive point, the charge that creating beautiful photographs of destruction somehow trivializes the evil underneath. He said, well, do you feel that way about this work, and the questioner blanched, and then SN asked the entire audience if anyone else felt that way, and I had the perverse feeling that I wanted to raise my hand simply because it would be fun to see what happened. There was no way you were going to have this argument with this man, the old admonishment, never argue with someone with a microphone applies. The vehemence of the response suggests that it has been thought about however. So there are two parts to this, there is SN’s own personal commitment to his work, which is unassailable, and there is the responsibility that art has in the world at large. Is it enough? What is the function of beauty in photographs of conflict? What is the function of photography itself? I think it circles back to painting sorry to say. There were painters and illustrators sent to most of the major american conflicts, the World Wars, the Korean War, Vietnam, possibly even BushOne v. Hussein and BushTwo v. Hussein. I don’t think anyone ever criticized these artists for making battlefield drawings or paintings, or suggested that it was somehow exploitive. Yet photography is always criticized for precisely this insensitivity. But can you remember a single War painting in the same way as a Nick Ut? 

SN employs his own “shock and awe” in this, by creating seductive work he gets you to look, and then he hopes you consider and think. In this way he is no different from the orphan baby photographers. Essentially this is all you can do with photography, or art, regardless of how tragic, awesome, sublime or liminal it is. What is unfortunate is that the photographer in making the work also assumes the responsibility of how it gets received and used in the world. Different populations will regard the images differently. The context of a coffee table book is different from a gallery wall is different from a personal slideshow and artist talk. Yet the photographer somehow has to control it all and that is impossible. His own explanation was the best I have heard, that going out in the world making pictures causes him to come into contact with people, and their stories are horrific and he feels absolutely responsible to act based on those realities. It is amazing that such an emotional man can create such cool work.

If you are still with me, I thank you for hanging in this long. I want to go back today and see the rest of the typologies exhibit so I might have more to add. » Read the rest of this entry «

Went to see Stefan Ruiz last night at Aperture and he talked about his book “Portraits”.

He signed the book for me, although the “R” in Ruiz got wiped off. I have the only book signed by “Stefan uiz” in existance. Actually, I don’t have it, since I had him sign the wrapper as a lark. I have since discarded the wrapper meaning this is the only photograph of a Stefan Ruiz book signed “Stefan uiz”.

I like this work a lot. There is a lot of space in the pictures and a straightforwardness that I seek in my own work sometimes. And the lighting style provoked some thought.

For the past couple of weeks I have been mulling over an idea that I have had for a while, that there is a style of photography that I might label “reproducible”. It has to do with what I see on the newsstands over the past few years, and conversations I have had with editors about the quality of their paper stock. Time and time again I have heard “that won’t reproduce on our paper” with regards to some dark melancholy photograph I have made, or just recently when I wanted to run a story in black and white in the New York Times I was told the same thing, “black and white does not look good on our paper.”

Huh?

This is the “Grey Lady” we are talking about right? But it is not unique to them.

I think some of the best feedback I ever received from an editorial board was after a job I shot for Fortune too many years back to admit to. In a fit of desperation or you might say after exhausting all my ideas of “good” lighting I decided to arbitrarily put lights up in a kind of north-south-east-west fashion. In other words I was not going to let the subject dictate the lighting. It was just going to be “light.”

Technically this isn’t NSEW, this is more copy-stand like Stefan Ruiz. I was still trying to be nice. Depending on the room configuration I could usually get two or three lights going. But soon this was not enough, and I decided to break the “fourth wall” as it were, and put the remaining light in:

For one of the last issues of George Magazine, see, I am dating myself…

W:

To me, things were getting better. You could see less despite having more lights. Compounding the issue was that I decided to print the negs on Ilford Multigrade Fibre Matt. Yeah, some kinda wonderful…

A party for W magazine-this has flash on camera triggering strobes in the room.

More for Fortune, on risking retirement funds on the stock market. Love that flash glare in the patio door:

And the nadir, same story, but the editor asked, do you have any lighter frames?

I think a lot of this has to do with colour vs. black and white. Magazines Hate Black and White. I think it says, “you couldn’t spend the money for colour?” or “this is olde.” But I think most of it has to do with reproducibility. The paper is so bad that you cannot print anything with any depth. And printing is a significant cost of making a magazine. So do you think there is a style evolved out of the necessities of printing on bad paper that could be called “reproduceable?” » Read the rest of this entry «

This is the follow up post to the first Sartorialist post. I went thursday to see the prints before the Jurgen Teller opening.

I remember going to see a show many years back of Patrick Demarchelier’s work. It was really awful. Beautiful prints of beautiful people shot beautifully. Stripped of their magazine setting, it was completely coma-inducing. Sometimes that happens, the work is made for a context and and cannot function outside of that. Something similar is happening here, although I feel much more protective of the Sartorialist in this example than Demarchelier. In other words I would rather see the Sartorialist succeed than see PD get his gallery rocks off.

What to say? The things I like; I like that the prints were a nice smallish size, I thought it was a good choice not to try to make these heroic prints you see everywhere. There was another gentleman in the gallery at the time and he was pressed up pretty close to them looking at the details. Small prints can create a kind of intimacy between the work and the viewer. Trouble is there was not much connection to be found. I really got no sense of the people in the photographs, somewhat as I had expected. My impression is that the web is good enough to convey what this work conveys, a sense of style in an instant. And the web is actually better in another way, the fact of the comments and community around the work feels much more interesting than seeing a collection of average prints in a white gallery space.

About the prints, they were fine, suffered a little oversharpening, a little of that digital thing were primary colors were oversaturated relative to everything else. As a group they looked cohesive which tells me a very good printer spent some time getting them all together.

On the way out I overheard a group going in and one said “ok, so the thing is, these are real people..” as an introduction to the show. I think now in photography we have come to expect that what we see is not real on some level, either from retouching or styling or the endless repetition of stars and famous people, the idea of photographing real people is somehow now exotic, and the exotic now commonplace. I did not have the heart to stop and explain that many of those folks were fashion editors and stylists. Certainly real but not “real.”

I wish there was more to say about “the work” but it was not the kind of thing where I come out of the gallery and feel really motivated to go out and take pictures. That is my benchmark when I see a show or a book, how juiced it gets me to want to do my own thing. Certainly others might feel motivated.

I’m going to conclude in a way that perhaps most of you do not expect. I think that overall the Sartorialist, hyperbole aside, is creating a wonderful thing if you just stick to what it is-a fascination with the details of style and dress and manner. Clearly he loves these things, and the people too. I would love to see more of that, more of his affection, more humour perhaps, more attention to the emotional moment. There is always somewhere to go. The invented can become authentic. » Read the rest of this entry «

This is going to be a two-part piece, a before and after. The before is now, me writing about The Sartorialist from what I know of him on the web, which is all that most people would know of the work. The after will be later this week after going to see the prints in Danziger, the current show.

I think it might be useful to make this distinction, between the work on the web and the work on the wall, because it is the apparent basis of the rabbit that Schuman and Danziger and to a greater extent perhaps, the internet, has pulled out of a jauntily tipped fedora. More on rabbits at the end. So how does one take a photographic novice, add three years, a blogger account and a ton of legwork and get “the leading photographer of the blogosphere” and “the first real fine art photographer of the digital age?”

Gallery hyperbole aside, I want to consider the following: what is it? Is it fashion photography, portrait photography, documentary or street? How do those elements mix? Is the translation from the web to the gallery wall successful? And the larger picture, the emergence of the attention economy.

But this is an appreciation so let me be appreciative, it is fun to read the blog and see through his eyes his development as a photographer. There is a post from shall we say “late career” Sartorialist about an english gentleman and he writes “I always am a little in awe of someone that can stand so still when they are having their photo taken.” and you can see that he is aware of these things, certain moments in photography that occur. I like that he adds these kinds of comments, to me it indicates that he is sensitive to the process. And also, if you look at the whole of it, from beginning to end, the pictures do get a lot better in the last year, and not so much from the subject, but from his attention to figure/ground relationships. It is very hard to make good portraits on the fly, in uncontrolled situations, so when you see those that work, and work as photographs, it is great.

But that is my question, is this portraiture, fashion, documentary, street, fashion illustration, or what? Maybe this is a synthetic question, by his own standards the Sartorialist was primarily interested in creating an inspirational style notebook. But there is no denying with the gallery opening that this has gone to another level, a level where we are being asked to consider this work as something more. So what is that? My feeling from looking at the blog over and over is that these are not portraits in the sense that they are conveying a subjective human quality about the sitters. All of the stylistic elements of portraiture are there, the indicators that make you think these are portraits, but the more I dig into the work the more I am left with the fact that it is primarily the style of the surface we are being shown. In other words, it is photography in service of style, and and not the other way around. So then the question is, is that a judgement of the work, or is this the limit of the format to begin with? I think it is the latter, although it needn’t be. I think it is a question of priorities, and when style is the priority, everything else will tend to diminish. You see, I think it is possible to create a compelling portrait of someone in a fraction of a second, that is what photography can do. Especially street photography. But then the photographer is not really paying attention to the things that The Sartorialist is paying attention to, style, detail, coordination, pattern, color, etc. The street photographer is paying sideways attention to that, and keeping aware of everything that is going on trying to synthesize something from the chaos. I think these are different kinds of attention.

So is a portrait not a portrait when it only describes surface? Is that what I am saying? Actually no. I think in photography all we can do is describe surfaces, all we have is light on surface. But it is the surface that reveals a depth. And the depth is the dimension of human emotion, conflict, joy, reaction, anger, etc. There are moments here, a few. But taken as a whole the sitters display either a consistent good humour or sometimes a fashion-y pout, learned no doubt from fashion photography. There are some where you do get to “I am here,” which is a good place to be in a portrait, and a hard place to get to most times. I hope when I see the prints there is more of this in the edit. It does make me think of Vincent Gallo in Buffalo ‘66 when he is taking the photo-booth portrait with Christina Ricci and he admonishes her not to smile-”We are spanning time!” he says, as if we could somehow get back to that kind of innocence. But that is something that has been lost in photography, today it is almost impossible to replicate the kind of Mike Disfarmer look which is not a look but a confrontation in reality. Everyone is thoroughly familiar now with the “affects” of photography. I think sometimes you can see it in school portraits of young children, I have some of my nephews, and a standout features a particular grimace, an untrained smile, it is entirely natural and beautiful, it is a kind of anti-smile, the smile you make before you know what you look like to others in pictures and have assimilated that.

Invoking Disfarmer means also invoking Sander, and the NY Times article made that connection. So I am not going to equate what others say about the work with what The Sartorialist says or does. The comparisons to Sander are pretty thin, that work was made in an entirely different mode, and without the hindsight that photography itself renders, the patina of nostalgia. In this case looking like a duck and acting like a duck is not the same thing as being a duck. I think it shows how our aspirations for photography have changed, Sander was working in the scientific, encyclopedic mode, and at a time when science was regarded as the inexorable way towards enlightenment and the future. His work was to be a catalogue, a kind of phrenology of social types through which objective and accurate knowledge could be gained. Today photography aspires less to record reality than to transform it and escape from it.

While others have worked in this vein before, (I am thinking of Jake Chessum, for New York Magazine. I think Jake’s work is addressing individuality more than style, at least that is my opinion of it. It does not have the attention that the Sartorialist pays to a cuff, a hem, etc. So they are very different in that sense..) I think the biggest difference and lesson is how The Sartorialist has successfully capitalized on the emerging attention economy. Basically, as the amount of available information grows, our ability to pay meaningful attention to any of it decreases. In advertising for example, this means unfortunately that our commercials are louder than the surrounding programming! How I hate that! In the attention economy it is a competition for eyeballs, and there are winners and losers. Looking at our media it is clear that the winners of the attention economy are those that address our aspirations and dreams, to be famous, to be beautiful, to be rich, to be desired.

The blog mechanism is a key component, plus the community of people who comment. This is an interactive ecomony, very different from the static magazine page. I think in that aspect it is the potential and the limitation of the format. The attention economy demands a certain kind of transaction be performed to maintain itself. You see this on many blogs, the commentary is in the majority favourable, the attitude definitely shies away from any negativity or controversy. You could regard this as sunny humanism or servile flattery depending on if you are a cup half full or half empty type. Judging from my writing you might think I would opine the latter but I think it is more complicated than that, or at least it serves my purpose better to regard it that way.

As this transaction gains momentum, the attention economy creates a new kind of wealth which is manifested in “persona” like stars, pundits, the notorious, etc. The persona of “The Sartorialist” allows you to invest in the aspiration of what he is creating. It would not work as “Scott Schuman’s blog.” (guess I am S-O-L) And surrounding this figure of The Sartorialist are the fans, those who leave comments and those who don’t to the tune of tens of thousands of blog hits a day. This is a “real” thing in the sense that it creates a new kind of property, and it has a value. Besides the value of the advertising revenue garnered from the site, there are very “real” prints are being sold in a very real gallery. I think it is even larger than that. If you buy into this idea of the attention economy it has the potential to displace the conventional forms of revenue I have just mentioned.

This brings me around to the art-world connection. Danziger said The Sartorialist was “the first real fine art photographer of the digital age.” This statement is revealing. I know it miffed a lot of photographers to hear that. I can only imagine what the other artists in Danzigers stable think of the project. But if you take my argument above, I think this is representative of how the attention economy has transformed the traditional economy, in this case the art gallery. I might be tempted to re-write the statement to be “the first real photographer of the digital age,” which is to state the reality of the new form of wealth created by the attention economy. The fact that he said “fine art” before photographer shows that there is still some insecurity there, the fact that we have to pay lip service to fine art in the gallery context. I don’t believe there is any way we can justify the work as fine art, and this has nothing to do with photography per se, which is the usual nervous-making aspect of these things. The fact that these are well made photographs does not equate them to fine art. And I don’t believe I am saying anything negative here with respect to the photographs, I am just saying this project is of a different sort as I have described. Maybe someone else has coined this phrase, but it seems to be “attention aesthetic” is a good way to describe the style of The Sartorialists photographs. The photography only has to be good enough to create and keep your attention. It is not a photograph or a question of fine art but a kind of a conversation, like when people say “you know?” It gets you to react, to confirm you are listening.

So in this way we can see the gallery show was not the culmination of a project, as is the tradition, but is a way of extending the conversation, extending the attention. It may seem that it refers to all the trappings of the art world, but that is only superficial, and perhaps unnecessary. Danziger definitely had to placate a traditional mindset which is why it conformed to the mode of “gallery opening.” And the little bit of bait in the form of price, 1200$ and the quote “I have not seen those prices in 10 years” does leave a hopeful note that you too are getting in on the ground floor. Speaking of ground floors, the line outside the gallery at the opening (which I did not attend) was evidently beset by other hopeful proto-sartorialists snapping the snappy dressers. It may not bode so well for them alas. In this respect the first-to-market has the advantage, a rule that holds over from the traditional economy. I fear the same goes for the print collectors. Will their investment hold? And does this question even make sense?

Getting back to rabbits and ducks my conclusion is that this is a horse of a different color. On the face of it, an amazing coup that an “emerging photographer” could attain such heights in such a short time. In reality, a fashion merchandiser creating the next logical marketing form. And maybe not something that could be foreseen, which makes it brilliant and unique.

You will have to wait until later in the week when I have had a chance to see these physical prints for the second part. In some ways the actual show may not relevant given what I have discussed. We shall see what we shall see.

For now I will leave you with a quote I found as I was searching for definitions of “real property.” It is from the Velveteen Rabbit, a book I have not read in a good ten years, but obviously a favourite. I thought it was a nice antidote to all this stylishness;

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” [Margery Williams, "The Velveteen Rabbit"]

I think this demonstrates that kind of attention we all really want to get, that is, love, despite how we look.

Read here about attention economy and Micheal Goldhaber. » Read the rest of this entry «