“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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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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.

So that last post struck a chord with some of ‘y’all so I thought I would write about process more, specifically what we can do to break out of a rut or blow out cobwebs?

Things I have done in the past in no particular order:

Use only one camera and lens. – I think 90% of my work is done in this way, get one combination and stick to it. It also happens to be the same camera/lens combo I walk around with. I have been tempted by some recent new cameras (ricoh, you know who you are) but I ask myself, just what am I going to get that I am not getting now. It fits in a small bag, goes everywhere, and I know that it will make big prints if I want. It also happens to be the same camera I use “at work”, so familiarity in terms of camera handling is good.

Switch to a different camera entirely – The antithesis, I have done this a few times. At one point having used the square for several years I switched to a rangefinder and spent the next year trying to figure it out, all for paying clients. It was, er, well, fun. But I learned more in that year than in many others. Consider putting it out there and really doing it differently.

Use them all -For a while I would take almost one of everything on jobs, and depending on what I saw when I showed up, picked one to suit. Or always ask for one more roll as we used to say for yourself on your favourite camera.

Consider “speeding up” – In other words, don’t be so damn prissy. That probably applies to you Mr. 4×5. Use faster film so you don’t have to light, or use on camera flash and run and gun, abandon tripods, use zoom lenses, etc. Anything to free up the process and get off the toilet you are on.

Consider slowing down – I have done that too, moved to tripod, large format, larger format, just to see what you would be gaining. Come on, you know you want to try 8×10, so just do it…

No time to shoot-make time – For a while last year and the year before I was beholden to another master for certain days of the week, so I decided, I have fifteen minutes of walk time from the subway to the door, why not use that time, and I did. You will be surprised what you can find, and how late you can be! Mostly I found it put my mind into a state of awareness that I became familiar with and familiar with when it was not active, more importantly. So it carried over into other instances when I was not shooting, I would feel a shift go on, and start to “see” pictures again, so I would register them with an internal “click.” I think this awareness issue is very very important and I will get back to it later.

Too much time to shoot? – lose time – Ok, what do i mean? Simply, you are not doing the OTHER things you need to be doing, like printing, editing, making book dummies, reading about other stuff, going to movies, etc. What the hell is going on! You are human aren’t you?

Stare – Ok so we are told not to stare, it is rude, but that is for normal people. Photographers are not normal. You have to stare. Consider it part of your job. Writers are famous for eavesdropping on conversations to get a feel for the rhythm of language and usage. Staring is our eavesdropping. I’ll wager that if you are stuck or stagnant you have stopped “looking” and part of that is essentially staring. You’ll never know how something looks or more importantly how it might look if you don’t just stare. You have to see how an expression changes, the points inbetween, how the light moves across a surface, how a hand looks, how people sit, stand, run, walk. The reason is that once you have an internal memory of events, you can start to anticipate those events in your photography, and be ready for them. People say about certain pictures, “how did you do that, how did you know that would happen?” and it is easy if you are a student of life, the more you see, the more you understand what might happen, and the more you can be ready for it. So if you are stuck, consider just looking for a while, taking your time to stare and wonder.

Why make “good” photographs? – I have written about this before, but I will quote my patron saint of obfuscation, Gary Winogrand:

When I’m photographing, I see life. That’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head. I frame in terms of what I want to include, and naturally, when I want to snap the shutter. And I don’t worry about how the picture’s gonna look – I let that take care of itself. We know too much about how pictures look and should look, and how do you get around making those pictures again and again. It’s one modus operandi. To frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about how – making a nice picture. That, anybody can do.

This has been my war for years. It was why in the midst of working every day I switched from an slr to a rangefinder and made a year of mistakes. You get tired of your own good pictures. Of course you look back at some of the bad ones even, and you think, well that really wasn’t so bad, what was your problem? But creativity is also about surprise. If all you ever did from now on is made pictures that you knew were “good” that would certainly cut you off from finding out another way of making “good” pictures. In other words, you have to make bad pictures to find out. So my advice is, if you are stuck, go out and deliberately try to make bad pictures. I think you will find that it is very hard to do this, and also you will find you like a lot of the bad pictures so much more than your good ones.

The majority of the work you see on flickr for example, or in Creative Arts*, or in magazines, is this way. It is hewing to “the good,” what we all accept as competent work. I’m waiting to see the anti-flickr, sort of the dustbin of photography. It used to be more commonplace in a photochemical process to make mistakes. You accidentally expose the paper, solarization is born. You over develop, you don’t fix enough, etc, all of this error produces unexpected results. Now I am not saying that we should all accept photo-101 mistakes as art, that is not what I mean. I just think there is more inspiration in our mistakes than in our victories. Some artists even embrace processes that are so finicky as to encourage this. You can see this as the anti-5D aesthetic. The problem with the current crop of digital cameras is that they are so damn good and predictable. And so boring. You can spot Canon 5D colour a mile away. It is that generic. And you would laugh if a pro showed up with an Olympus E-3 to a pro shoot. I don’t see a lot of willingness these days in photographers to accept unusual tools, they all want the CaNikon brick. And there are good reasons to use one. But do you remember, there “used to be” multiple vendors of film, multiple film stocks, polaroid, polapan, etc. Why we all hew to the norm is because of this idea that we have to make “good” pictures, meaning we need “good” equipment. So stop it already!

• Corollary: don’t abandon a process that is working because it has suddenly become inconvenient. You look at some artists and you can’t fathom why they would continue to work the way they do. Lee Friedlander is up in the mornings rocking the developer tray. Still. Well, there is “something” there very often that was hard won. Something that took a long time to develop. Those things are important too, and the last few years has seen a rush to throw out decades of existing practice. We might wake up one day and want some of that back, so don’t throw out your stainless steel tanks yet.

Confront stagnation itself – What does it mean to be stuck, or stagnant? I’ll wager it has nothing to do with your creativity and everything to do with your emotions. Specifically you are not paying attention to how you feel. And not being responsible to that. Being stuck is really just the absence of a connection to yourself. It occurs all the time, and often we don’t notice the mode switch as it happens subtly. I think men are worse at it than women because we are less attuned to watching our moods rise and fall, women get a physical reminder every month. So what happens is we lose track of what are actually feeing-the minute by minute changes in our affects. Ok, so not that often, but you know how it can go. You wake up in the morning and wow, what a shitty feeling. In the absence of a process or awareness some of us will take it to mean that this is going to be a shitty day. And it well could be for a lot of external reasons. But I am just talking about witnessing internal changes and acknowledging them. So the idea is to connect the dots between the feelings and the sources, maybe you had some bad dreams, bad sleep, left over issues, anxiety, etc. Some of this is “real” and some is just raw emotion. The point is to witness yourself over time, later in the day I have often caught myself at 180 degrees to that, calm, fine, happy, in flow, this is another “click” moment. You have to witness and acknowledge that you feel different. The more you do this the more you will see your emotions as a kind of weather, and as photographers we all know even bad weather is grounds for good photographs. You just have to wait them out and see the beauty. Paying attention like this keeps you attuned to yourself, and attuned to yourself in the world. Once you are attuned you can start responding, or being responsible as I like to say, to cultivating what you need to feed your soul. The the issue of creativity is moot, you are able to perceive and respond to your own shifts, responding to the world becomes second nature. And you are unstuck.

Participate or give back – So you don’t know what to do, at least participate in something someone else is doing, at least it might rub off on to you! Or you meet some people who are not nasty. This fall I was a TA at ICP and had a tremendous amount of fun. Teaching can be very rewarding as a way to fuel yourself or give something back. Blogs too have become a way to participate, listserves, mailinglists, etc included. I try to check in on as many as possible and contribute comments when I have time. Of course writing this folderol is very time consuming…and dammit if wordpress’s visual editor is busted. So I have to write code kiddies. Any ideas?

Abandon photography altogether – Yes you heard me. If you are really not making headway and have truly given it a lot of attention and care, maybe this is just not for you? Or maybe you have to come at is sideways and be a vendor or move to another visual pursuit. That is obviously a very personal choice, I think the point is that no one is holding a gun to your head in this, there is so much else out there to do. But it should be an active choice, a conscious one anyway. I think many photographers are products of families where the parents did not have the chance to do what they loved and instead did what they had to do to make a living. So there are degrees to this. It is a privilege to be able to do this. I think it would still be a privilege to do this as only a way of earning a living, and by that I mean using photography as a means to an end and not as a creative expression. You can choose. And you can choose to keep some of that work for yourself only, if that is what it takes. Buy a printer and make really big prints for yourself and who cares if no one sees them. There is no morality to this. Taking photography off the personal creative hot list might actually release it to something better. You could be the best pet photographer in the tri-state area!! We really shouldn’t care so much.

And the best antidote to creative stagnation – BEER with friends. At least you can bullshit about the brain cell-creativity you are killing with every pint…

Happy new year.

*don’t get me started on CA–here is party trick, take an issue of CA from 2007 and and issue from 1984 and tear out all the pages and throw them up in the air. Collect up two piles. Republish as 2008 and 2009 respectively….no one will notice…

Talking Heads
Once in a Lifetime (1984)

And You May Find Yourself Living In A Shotgun Shack
And You May Find Yourself In Another Part Of The World
And You May Find Yourself Behind The Wheel Of A Large Automobile
And You May Find Yourself In A Beautiful House, With A Beautiful
Wife
And You May Ask Yourself-Well…How Did I Get Here?

read on…

But here we are.

Incidentally, about the US vs. THEM…ah yeah. If it didn’t have a catchy title it would not be much fun would it? My intention was to provoke thought and debate about the sane and the insane in current business practices. I am copping the standoffish attitude as an affect. The THEM is definitely corporate GREED.

On a personal note, I have had the privilege of knowing a few photo editors in my career that I can honestly say I would go to the mattresses for any day of the week. They are my friends, more than co-workers, and they have literally given me my career, that has to be said. You should be so lucky.

I am hoping that the way that the internet spreads information will be beneficial. You see, I really am a dreamer…how else could I be a photographer? Already from my webstats I see the two articles have been linked across many list-serves and individual blogs. We will see what we will see. I also understand that many feel that rocking the boat is not a good idea. I think it is unfortunate that being sensible about business is confused with being “difficult” sometimes. You should always make it clear that you are committed to the work first. The money issues do need to be decided on, you need to estimate, do your due diligence, and decide, do I take this assignment or not. I hope I have shed some light on the real costs of making that decision.

Photographers now have the means to dispense with much of the infrastructure built up around photography, the labs, the rental houses, excepting perhaps studios, much of the production to final print can be profitably run from in house. If you look at it this way, we should be doing much better than we are, yet, we are not-which is another reason why I don’t actually think it is all the photographers fault, I think it is the price fixing and resulting irrational economic behaviour by all the players that have created the “income distribution disparity.” If I had my way, the photographer would have total control over all stages in the image producing pipeline. Accepting that you don’t need the most expensive P39 back for much of the territory editorial covers, and with realistic billing that recognizes my autonomy as a contractor like any other, I believe editorial would be as viable as many other area in photography. I am not going to argue with you if you can get them to pay your phony rental “receipts”, maybe it puts us on a level with other “star” photographers who book everything and show up in Armani and a t-shirt:) Or maybe it makes us look like chumps, I’m not sure.

In summary, don’t accept the old myths, that photographers “do it to themselves” for example. I think I have made a case that the current situation is a least in part the product of the magazines own doing. Rates may be the same since Dorothea Lange, but costs of third party services have ballooned. That says to me there is a lot of money in this system but no one really wants to acknowledge what it actually goes for. Do yourself a favour and take pride in what you do, photographers are not interchangeable widgets. You can use the system to your advantage, just don’t get sucked into the “gonna make it or break it” in magazines. Your career is a lot longer probably than you imagine, you will have to reinvent yourself many times. What you do for “THEM” is only a small part of the picture. Treat “them” as the niche player, not the monster, and diversify. You will be happy your kept your perspective.

Back in 97 us 12 fools in SF tried to force the business to turn editorial into a viable business by negotiating better rates with the magazines. It was called Editorial Photographers and it was a miserable failure primarily because photographers in LA and NYC did not follow thru what we were trying to do.

Photographers are as guilty as the magazines who hire them for failing to turn editorial into a business because we bought into the BS philosophy that editorial is a way to brake thru to other more lucrative parts of photography. Essentially always give their clients the stick to beat them with. We are a sorry ass bunch of fools if you ask me but as they say,”divide and conquer” and we were more than willing to jump right in. Sure that model will work for some but the overwhelming majority will fail, regardless of their talent or the efforts they put in it. I, personally have been rather blessed, but like John Loomis says, it can be gone in a hurry. We have only ourselves to blame. Way back when a part of the site was called “cost of doing business”, it said it all. AS interesting as Robert’s musings are, they are old and sad news but don’t blame others for this state of affairs, blame yourself. In the meantime, the mags keep crying wolf but laugh all the way to the bank. Those execs in the publishing, they are the ones running real businesses, we are the ones running fragile egos.

http://www.editorialphoto.com/

Later as Olivier noted anyone who is currently working for BW or Forbes has the SF12 to thank, although they later did renege on the agreement of further increases, but the higher rate has stood. I myself have never worked for BW or Forbes, I think there was a stigma that if you worked for Fortune they did not hire you, but I don’t really know if that is true.

If you look at the history of unionization almost all of the significant action took place at the turn of the century, and it was a pretty bloody affair, but in all those cases you have a group of workers and you have a “workplace” to leave, and get locked out of. Solidarity is enforced bodily at the factory gates, and everyone knows everyone else who works there, you have to work alongside each other which makes scabbing very difficult. Photography knows no such workplace, despite my calling the still life studio the “coal mine.” Enforcing solidarity is practically impossible. Another part is you have two different kinds of workforces, on the one hand a group that was immigrant to this nation, largely poor, used to all kinds of hardship and with few alternatives, the other a privileged mobile group. You can’t herd cats. Read on…
It makes me wonder tho, how do you gain leverage? It seems to me Reps have some leverage, in that they represent a consolidated group, and also a “premium” group, an “elite” group of handpicked individuals. One or two reps with enough highly placed talent could withhold their talent unless a higher rate was offered, or even make it a practice to at least bill at incrementally higher and higher rates each year. The cumulative effect would be to get some motion in rates upward, and also to provide an incentive to hire non-represented photographers who might work for the old rates. When you think about it, it is strange that this is not already the case. You want the best, you should pay for it.

Oh, I’m sorry, that was some massively good weed I was smoking. Back to what I really think…

So I want to get back to this ju-jitsu I was speaking of. Olivier made a good comment that you can use the magazine’s travel office and have them pay for all of it, which should be S.O.P. Usually they want you to cover the consumables like meals, car rental, gas and transportation, but again, if you can estimate well, you can get an advance to cover those expenses too. The goal here is to be cash-flow neutral in all of this, you cannot spend a dime of your own money on this. When you think about a travel job, either a day or a few days, the fees are only going to be 500-2000 dollars, and since you get paid half on travel days the average daily fee goes down. You have to look at the days you are away and cannot cover or double up additional jobs, run your book around, etc. If those dollars are going to be worth it, particularly on the one-day turnaround job, if you got 500+a 250 travel day, 750, you could not spend more than a couple hundred out of your own pocket. Why is this? It goes back to the cash flow idea, take what you are earning and divide it by 2 times the number of months you will have to wait to be reimbursed, in other words, you will have to revolve your credit how many times before you receive payment. Even one month is detrimental and it creates a negative cash flow. If you have to wait 45 to 60 days (total, from the moment you spend the money) that 750 gets reduced by every dollar you put out, for example, assistants-they need to get paid right away, so that takes 200 off the 750, any car rental or transport (150+car service to airport and back, 100..) boom, another 250 gone. You are down to 300 positive cash flow, and suddenly my claim of taking that NY Times freelance gig for 200 dollars in 10 days paid starts to look good, especially since you don’t leave town and there are NO expenses (har, they don’t pay’em!)

So you can inflate the expenses ANY amount you want, it still doesn’t change the basic math of cash flow. It helps to offset it, but month to month it is the same. So you are fine if you are busy, but go even 15 days without work and you have missed one or two cheque runs, and there will be a dip in your inflows two months from now when that mastercard bill for the Bahamas travel job is due, and you can’t pay it off clean, so you begin to revolve debt. Strike two.

Which goes back to my first point, don’t buy equipment-that would be also on that credit card…you see how it goes.

Here is another RULE:

Don’t takee thine own equipmentee on thine jobee!

Don’t do it. Of course if you had been following my advice you wouldn’t HAVE equipment to take. Say for example you are starting out, I know it is the biggest blow to the photographers ego to say, well, no, I don’t have my own gear, so you ‘man-up and go into hock to get a nice shiny Hassy. And those darn APE’s they gorilla-shame you by sounding SO disapproving, “WHAT, you don’t OWN your own CAMERA?” How can you BE a photographer if you don’t own your own CAMERA.” Since they don’t really know the economics of it, you can understand the dumbfounded-ness of it, I mean, I would expect a photographer to have a camera, like they always say, these are your tools, you should own them. And I agree, in a world where a workman can charge what THEY like in a rational market, of course I expect my plumber to own his own tools, how else could it be? But this is not a rational market anymore, when the basic economics of the work does not support those who do it, it is not rational to expect a photographer to arrive with anything. And you can look at it another way, the cost of being in the industry is only going up as the equipment gets more expensive and the production value of the jobs rises. Why is it going up? Well, the photographer now has taken on the burden of pre-press in the form of digitization if you shoot digital-that is something that has just been “absorbed” not to mention how the pace of image turnaround has changed, editors get their work in a fraction of the time it used to take, without paying anything extra. Additionally, the cost of production has risen as the editorial “look” has been supplanted by the “advertising” look, glossy, lit, high production value for the most part. So to expect a photographer to provide for free anything is crazy.

But the editor says, “you are being paid, that is what the fee is for-” and I just laugh. (quietly, inside, simultaneously crying and pooping my drawers..) Was not the fee for USAGE? Have we forgotten that, just how far do we expect that 500 to go, it has to cover variously, my fee for my brain (me), the usage, my healthcare, taxes, overhead, and there should also be some left over for the business to profit so I can stay in business.

Just for fun-sies I worked out the rental cost of what my last location job (my own, corporate job) in LA would have run, figures are from TREC here in NY, although my guess is that a magazine would have rented locally in LA to save the travel days. This is what I take with me:

Small format digital, couple ultra wide specialty lenses (interior shoot) plus normal lenses, laptop (optional), 6x 2GB cards, tripod, 2x speedlight, extra rechargeable batteries, pocket wizard, meter, chargers-

1600ws pack, two heads, grid spot set, 600w/s monoblock, (thanks Jon!) speedrings for all three, two med chimera, one large chimera, two umbrellas, stands, plus two compact stands for small tungsten spots, 50w x 4 lamps, 2 x 25ft extension cords, power strip, assorted A clamps, gaffer, 2x super clamp, 2 x j-hook-

Assorted gels, frost, clothespins, blackwrap, reflectors etc.

All above fits into two checked bags that are not overweight. If you rented this from New York it would NOT fit like I have it packed, NO way, so you are over your checked allowance unless your assistant comes with.

So what do you figure all that costs? -I did the math, over a 1000$, near 1200$ PER DAY depending on if you get the laptop or not.

This what they are getting for free folks…don’t even want to get into-medium format digital costs.

If magazines were forced to pay for this stuff on FOB or BOB like they do when A-Lister shoots the feature, things would come to a halt in a screeching hurry! Talk about blown budgets! But think about it-you, humble editorial photographer are subsidizing not only Si Newhouse, but Annie/Mario/A-List-whomever so that they can shoot the fabulous work they do that makes advertisers turn out and pay to be in the magazine. Because that is where the real money is going, and as costs continue to rise-TREC is charging 25$ freekin dollars for a compact flashcard folks(!) most of the money that could be available is being siphoned off by these massive budgets. Because while they expect you to have your own gear for the dinky two or three day travel job, they don’t expect A- Lister to come-with anything at all, although after 25 years at the top, you would think they could. (and they used to, back in the day, but we are talking all 80’s and sh** now).
So what can you do? Well, I will allow you to take your own camera as a backup only, and so that you can get up at 5 am and go shoot for yourself while on these jobs. You are doing that aren’t you? I have a nice signed Dan Winters piece that says “Get UP EARLY” best DAN from one of his shows. But you can’t take anything for them. When you do take it is on your own jobs, the stuff that you can negotiate and set the price for, the stuff you can decide, is this good for me? Because you have to repair it, replace it, it can’t take the abuse of or keep pace with editorial. Got it?

To reiterate, have the travel office book all travel, including hotel and car. It is in their interest to negotiate corporate rates for this stuff, which will save them money in the long run. Next, get an advance for the rest of the expenses. You should be very adept at firing off an estimate the moment you get off the phone, the costs are pretty known once you do this enough, you should be able to get into the ballpark for meals, transport, tips, overweight luggage, etc and while you are at it, add the assistant in there too. The Goal is that when you submit your final invoice, it is fees-only. Plus, even if the advance does not arrive in time before you leave, your advance invoice is “on the stack” of invoices to get approved and get paid. The more regularly you get paid the better. What is the best business in the world-a cash business, daily.

It may sound like I just want everyone to “stick it to the man” as Jack Black says, but I have only copped that attitude because it is fun, but that is not my point here. I am not Bitter Photographer. The point is to make this rational, your conversation with the editor should be grounded in this: I am not going to engage in any of that old-school shell game markup shite, I only expect you to pay what it costs, in the end, it should be to their economic advantage to operate this way, and really, there is no other way it can operate. So that old way, where I bought film and marked it up, (which is how inventory works in any other business, or where I paid for a service and charged a carrying cost as in any other business) they don’t want it that way, so lets forget it. Lets do it their way. But really do it.

The goal is be cash flow positive in all of this. Don’t think of earning money with editorial, but for gosh sakes, think of being cash flow positive. If you want to spend money to get work, take out Workbook pages, or print your own book or actually invest in your promotion. But don’t invest it into the ego-torial. Your attitude should be this: you really want to do the WORK, you want to make the picture. That is your investment, to make the best possible picture. And that is what they want. Crackerjack stuff. The money part of it has to be taken out of it, it is an absolute side-track. This is not a job to earn money, but it is a business. If you get pulled under by the money-suck you will not be able to make those pictures for them, and they will lose you, which I don’t believe they want either, assuming you are making good work.

I still think doing this work can be a privilege, you get access to people and places that can be transformative.

And you know, I think as freelancers we forget just how impersonal business can be. No one person decides that the budget is X and the pay is Y, it is the result of a long chain of optimized decisions that get implemented by well meaning folks who don’t want to get fired. There is no incentive to alter this course, there is no agenda, there is only business. We have to respond with sane business decisions, not maneuvering, negotiation, subterfuge, etc. I think photographers organizations have tried it all before, they have tried to stand toe to toe with the monster and it fails because the magazines are the result of a collective, and we are the result of an individual-”YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED!” “RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!” Well, it is true that everything I have ever learned I learned from Star Trek. Picard gets assimilated by the Borg and we fear humanity is lost, our greatest tactician is now our enemy. Little do we know that Picard will use the Borg’s own rigid structure against them, their own internal logic is their weakness. So the magazines won’t pay us what we are worth to them, fine. But they should pay what it actually costs, even as those numbers escalate. So practice the ju-jitsu, your goal is to show up at the shoot carrying nothing but a smile, and leave without a trace. It is on them. ENGAGE.

Olivier Laude contributed a comment to an older post that is a good follow up to my last post:

Back in 97 us 12 fools in SF tried to force the business to turn editorial into a viable business by negotiating better rates with the magazines. It was called Editorial Photographers and it was a miserable failure primarily because photographers in LA and NYC did not follow thru what we were trying to do.

Photographers are as guilty as the magazines who hire them for failing to turn editorial into a business because we bought into the BS philosophy that editorial is a way to brake thru to other more lucrative parts of photography. Essentially always give their clients the stick to beat them with. We are a sorry ass bunch of fools if you ask me but as they say,”divide and conquer” and we were more than willing to jump right in. Sure that model will work for some but the overwhelming majority will fail, regardless of their talent or the efforts they put in it. I, personally have been rather blessed, but like John Loomis says, it can be gone in a hurry. We have only ourselves to blame. Way back when a part of the site was called “cost of doing business”, it said it all. AS interesting as Robert’s musings are, they are old and sad news but don’t blame others for this state of affairs, blame yourself. In the meantime, the mags keep crying wolf but laugh all the way to the bank. Those execs in the publishing, they are the ones running real businesses, we are the ones running fragile egos.

http://www.editorialphoto.com/

I read the EP list back then and man, it was depressing. I guess there is a resistance to hearing truth, and maybe that is a good observation since I hear a lot of younger photographers floating photography 2.0 turds like, “a rising tide floats all boats” (hint-you need a boat, remember?) or photographers need to find a “new model” for doing business. Let’s say it again, this is not a business…wash, rinse, repeat…read on…

That said, I was not entirely inline with the direction that organizations like ASMP, APA, EP were going at that time, it seemed that more than fees it kept coming back to “rights” and contracts, and my feeling was and is, none of us are lawyers, and TimeWarner is going to have some damn good lawyers who could outmaneuver any organization or individual while playing his morning game of squash at Equinox and not break a sweat. I felt that the magazines were happy to entertain us discussing rights, meanwhile, the issue was really compensation. On one level, I really don’t care how many international editions you reprint this story in where you are collecting additional incremental advertising revenue (why do you think anyone bothers with Polish Men’s Health, sorry Poland, I know you are in the Coalition of the Willing and all) as long the rates go UP. Is that such a radical idea, things get more expensive, simple cost of living in New York, it goes UP. If rates simply went up 25$ a year since I started in 1996, that 500$ fee from Fortune would now be 775$. And it was already too low then. But the point would be that the buyer could accept, as they do with any other vendor, and as they do with rentals, film, processing, assistants, etc, that costs are going to rise. Well, it ain’t gonna happen folks, 500$/day is here till we DIE. Unless…

So I know that position on rights is blasphemy, I have just farted in the darkroom, but I am not advocating work for hire, I am just saying give the magazines the rights they want because, they’re gonna take’em anyway folks! Conde Nast is going to reprint all those nice interior photos of beautiful apartments from HG and recipes from Gourmet over the last 30 years as a coffee table book, the Grey Lady is going to make calendars and mugs available, they are going to put the entire archive online (pity the writers too) for free and there is not a damn thing we can do about it…

But-

What if there was a way, a way unexplored, a kind of ju-jitsu way of using the strength of the publishing monster against itself? A shining third path? I have been thinking along these lines lately, and I have come up with some “moves” that might be useful.

We have to assume some things to begin with. Who are you? It is very hard to gain the mindset of a veteran when you are starting out, your priorities seem different. In some ways they are, but in other ways they are not, even veterans have to “reinvent” themselves, they have to start over many times, unless they are Dan Winters…:) So veterans and newcomers all are invested to some degree in doing that thing that Olivier cites, above, trying to break through to more lucrative areas of photography, or to put it another way as Bobby Womack says ‘tryin to git ovah’. So if you assume that some amount of editorial work is good, on a resume, and as experience itself, there is an incentive to take that work.

I think once you get into the mindset of not accepting everything, of not needing everything, that makes a tremendous difference. For one, it necessitates that YOU FIND OTHER FREAKING WORK! Yes, is it so bad that you shoot Corporate headshots? (I do) Is it so bad that you do PR work for publicists? (I do-interiors) Is it so bad that you heaven’s Forbid-Assist other photographers that you admire?(I do-and and it is a privilege) And would it be so bad to do variously; teach, sell prints, consult, do retouching, etc etc? No. I don’t believe so. As long as it was getting you where you needed to be. Which is not a broke editorial photographer. The point is to stay in business long enough to meet enough people, network, build relationships, build work, build reputation, have shows, do books, live your life, and be ready for the big jobs when they come. And they will come. But if you are not in business because you mortgaged your future on magazines, it’s not going to happen. Longevity matters.

So you take the call, you get the assignment, what is your approach? This is the ju-jitsu I spoke of before. You have to use the monster against itself. So the old way was called padding expenses. Rightly or wrongly, (and I believe markup is completely necessary and justified for many but not all expenses) the old way was this: you marked up film, you billed for your own cameras, you padded transportation receipts, you faked studio rentals, phantom assistants, you double billed the day against other jobs, a mountain of paperwork, sometimes an accountant sitting there trying to figure all this out (on the clock might I remind) trying to soak up as much green as possible. But even then, you maybe could get the ratio of fees (including your padding) to real expenses close to 1:2, very difficult to get it to 1:1 or even 2:1. I am talking about location shooters, still life is another story. Basically you still were carrying double the money you were being “paid” two to three months-congratulations, you are an interest free bank for Conde Nast. I have talked about this before. Any cheque you receive, divide those dollars by the number of months you waited, and that was in effect your cash flow for those months. So if you are busy, you probably have a negative cash flow at any one moment. If you are busy it seems manageable, you are carrying fifteen to twenty thousand in debt but you have an AR near the same amount. That means you are in big trouble.

So it takes a radical approach to rethinking how this could actually work, or be revenue neutral, because right now, it is a drain. So these are the RULES:

Byeth not thine equipmentee for Editorial-Never!

There is no rational reason you can argue to ever, ever buy one A-clamp for these bastards! They can rent the entire shebang-camera, grip, light, truck and tolley cart. Buying equipment (for editorial) is the number one quickest way to the shit can. And that is never more true than right now, when a P-30 back for whatever costs 25,000$. But you doth protest-I can bill it out! It can pay for itself-HA!-You had to pay for it FIRST! Every day you carry debt costs you money. Yes you amortize on taxes, but that can only get you to break-even-the point is to profit. And it is just going to get worse, new gear comes out, you upgrade, yadayada, then, the rest of it, oh, I love those Profotos, and those pocketwizards, and a beauty dish, its Beautiful! All of that will easily soak up another five to ten large. Nope. Never. Buy. For. Editorial.

Because, they will always say, and I quote “well we can’t do anything about fees, but, expenses, there we can do…” So let’em do it-let’em pay for every freakin roll of film, polaroid, gaffer roll, gel, courier fee to and from the location, after hours pickup, overtime, and by the same token, make sure you use their “Approved” vendors-they have deals worked out, yes I know you hate going in to Alkit, they know nothing, so get it delivered, And you don’t leave your chair either, you pick nothing up, you deliver nothing, you make those lab couriers come out rush to Brooklyn because that is what it takes and that is what it actually costs.

I am not saying spend irresponsibly, conversely, I am saying use their cost-control against them, if they want to work out deals with vendors to keep their costs under control, and they have the leverage to do it, we don’t, that is fine. What they get in return is the real cost of doing business, and if it starts to chaffe, so what, that is their bed, they made it-how you say-by squeezing photographers fees so hard for so long that they are no longer capable of maintaining a business and studio and keep up with technology and upgrades do service the work at the level they want it.

If they want you to go out with your Pentax K1000 and shoot tri-x, well, fine, use your own gear, because that is about what an editorial photographer can afford on their rates. But if they want the latest, if they want speedy turnaround of digital files, or even just the medium format film norm, its on them folks, it is not our job to service their infrastructure needs any more. We just make the sausage folks.

So you can buy equipment, but only to service those other jobs I spoke about, remember those? The ones that are going to free you of the need have to take this work? I think this is a way to make your purchases rational, based on what YOU need, not what THEY need. Because what they need is not what you need. You need visibility, momentum, interest. This is what editorial can provide, sometimes. And when it provides those things it becomes the job that it can be, and the privilege.

But what about all that markup I am losing?

This is the beginning of the third way…it is not easy to accept, but either your bend like the reed or break like the bough!

Next time, your cost control and your cash flow…

]]> http://www.robertwrightphoto.com/writing/photography/us-vs-them/feed/ 12 http://www.robertwrightphoto.com/writing/photography/what-comes-next-editorial-photography-in-the-new-media-age/ http://www.robertwrightphoto.com/writing/photography/what-comes-next-editorial-photography-in-the-new-media-age/#comments Sun, 08 Apr 2007 17:58:05 +0000 me http://www.robertwrightphoto.com/writing/?p=54

An excellent blog I have been reading lately, Drinking with a Dead Man by John Loomis, has been documenting the growing pains of the author in the Miami market. Always very frank, I hope he doesn’t get ‘dooced’, and me also for writing this response…A recent post about the economic difficulties went like this;

This post is about what comes next. You are comfortably in a place where you are shooting 60-100+ days a year editorially. You are being paid for your services and customers are satisfied and returning for their next jobs as well. You are traveling more, extending your geographic range of potential commissions. You have built enough flexibility into your finances to accept short-term debt fairly easily when assignments require it (last minute trips to very expensive French islands, perhaps). You are saving money, paying off old debts, planning for the future. You are running a business!

But at the same time, from month to month, you know that if a few checks don’t come when they should (should: cynically calculating they will only be late by 30 days), and if, God forbid, your car needs any significant repairs or you get sick, you are right back to the dramatic, wind-swept edge of the cliff, nervously looking at the impending due date for your Platinum business AMEX (a bill swollen by the up-front expenses of your clients) and rent check.

And this is the big rub… in photography, wealth (or even being comfortable), seems to be an illusion. If you are working a lot, getting paid handsome fees, selling a few stock images here and there, and not blowing your cash or working within a ridiculous amount of overhead, you should be making some coin, right?! Well, maybe.

I agree with many of his conclusions, but I wanted to explore more of this.

Good post, seems you are doing the math and realizing that editorial is not a business. Let’s say that again, editorial is NOT a business.

My advice is this: don’t get on the plane. Don’t take any jobs with significant expenses. It makes no economic sense. Here are the facts. Lets estimate that you can work 100 days for clients for example. If that were all editorial, and the average invoice is 1500$, that is 150,000$ in gross income. Here is where the delusion sets in, most of that is not your money. In reality, it is the fee income only, and only a part of that. Because the “business’ part of you has to make money too, as well as paying yourself.

So what is the reality? Less than half of the 150,000 is yours, more like 40,000, and out of that you have to pay heath insurance, insurance, taxes, rent etc. And you have to revolve credit cards that probably have close to 20,000 in debt at any one time, all the while waiting on cheques that come in 90+ days.

So is it getting any clearer? This is absolutely not a business. And it is two factors, the ratio of expense to fees, and cash flow as you have identified. Which is why I say “don’t get on the plane.” When the fees are near 500$, any expense money is dragging you down. Even meals are dragging you down.

So what are the solutions, well, obviously diversification is the only way, but also refusing to do those travel jobs, and also finding clients that have moved to online invoicing, where the turnaround is closer to 10 days. For example, working those same 100 days a year for the New York Times, at 200/day, sounds like it is crazy right? Only 20,000/year, But, and this is the big but, there are no expenses-mainly because they don’t pay expenses, which is funny and cruel at the same time, but with the online billing, and the direct deposit, in 10 days, that is pure profit. And it is only 2 days out of every week, leaving the other three days to get corporate work at significantly higher rates. Alright you say, why not limit yourself to 2 days a week for magazine clients-again, the answer is those jobs take significantly longer, and the expenses kill you, plus, this is not the days of marking up film and rentals, those are all gone, so there is no value beyond promotion in working editorially.

I think what is the problem is that you are a talented photographer in a satellite market. So you can command an outsized share of the editorial jobs in that market because your work is better than other players in that market. But I feel this is only hurting you in the long run, perhaps in a short run it is not so bad, a way to build a reputation, but long term, editorial, it will put you out of business.

My advice is to abandon editorial until they figure out what their model really is, how the internet is going to affect their publication strategy. Already some signs, LIFE is moving online only. Look for other publications to do the same, it is not hard to imagine Fortune and Business Week there, we are all getting our news online, it is a short step to imagine getting analysis online too. The consumer magazine space will be left as a pure marketing space, a way to promote products and lifestyles and consumerism. The things that you and I are good at photographing have no value in that arena.

It is great that you have a rep behind you, but prestige aside, the value that they derive from you exceeds the value you derive from them, looking only at it on a monetary basis, long term. Honestly, in years gone by, magazine clients would have flown a talented photographer like yourself from New York to these locations because there was a dearth of talent in smaller markets. Or at least it “seemed” that way, the internet has made it possible to find the great photographers that do exist, but it is a mixed blessing. And in years gone by, the NY shooter would have marked up film and processing, padded expenses, and maybe just have gotten by on that kind of job, plus added tears. I don’t believe that is the case anymore, costs are controlled too tightly (strangled?) there is no economic sense to sending a NY photographer when as good or better is found locally, aided by the growth in representation and the long tail of the internet in finding those shooters.

I said that the value they derive from you is greater than the value you derive from them-what do I mean? Well, the main misconception about representation is that you are working for the magazine in this relationship-really you are working for the representative, it is the rep, or the “aggregators” who make the most in this equation. The reason is that the cost of adding additional photographers in smaller markets is amortized by the value added to the agency, they get to capture more jobs and offer a more valuable service, dependable quality in more markets. When photo editing staffs are being cut, one-stop-shopping becomes more valuable. In days past, a large photo editing crew made reps less necessary, since there were more editors with more time and more knowledge to deploy individual freelance photographers. Now there are fewer editors doing the same work, and having an agency to essentially “sub-edit” and procure photographers is invaluable.

The second misconception is that editorial can be a “loss-leader” for promotion and as a way to secure other better paying work. That might have been true in the days where editorial was a break-even proposition, but now it is a significant drain on finances, and honestly, being able to stay in business long enough for the halo effect to kick in will likely drive you into bankruptcy. Jobs need to be profitable as jobs, not as leverage to other work. Hardly any other business would dare operate in this way. This is not something that anyone wants to acknowledge, but look at the magazines themselves, they refuse to lose money on any of their properties-news divisions have to be profitable, and more profitable year over year. There is a Frontline PBS documentary on the news media, and at one point the CEO of the LA Times is confronted by the interviewer with the fact that newspapers are indeed profitable right now, and have been for many years, and his response is that, while that is true, it is shrinking and that enough is not enough anymore when there are shareholders. As photographers for us to accept incurring a loss on work to get work should not be acceptable when it is not acceptable to our clients either.
There is no “middle” any more, there are only “emerging” photographers, a term that makes me laugh-emerging to what? The same rates everyone was paid 30 years ago? And there are the established names. I find it very euphemistic to describe inexperienced college graduates and even unknown veterans as “emerging” when there is no plateau to emerge to. I think PDN invented the term to replace their ageist 30 under 30 marketing campaign. When you have a situation where the emerging photographer will do anything to get exposure, and even the talented name will take jobs for nothing to increase exposure, then there is nothing left for the working pro, who in past years did the bulk of the work. (If you haven’t figured it out already, yes that is me). I think the talented middle needs to move on, leave this space to be fought over and get on with earning a living, which enables things like long term projects, exhibitions, and the satisfaction of not being exploited for their willingness to do good work. Certainly take those jobs that peak the interest, do them for free even, but ignore the shiny carrot. It is an old saw that the good old days of photography are over, they have always been “over”-we have always complained about rates, but I do believe that the accelerated pace of change we are experiencing now due to the corporatization of media and digitization of media products is moving us in a direction where the old rules do not apply, so lets not get stuck in a legacy model of business practices.

You should know I really love Robert Adams’s work. His vision enabled my vision, and gave it value. There is a debt there.

And you should know I am a crusty old fart.

There are three issues I want to raise, and then maybe some other people can chime in because I would really like to hear what other people think. I am boring myself…Let me start off by saying in my best Arnold S. manner “that I love with all this writing on the internets about the art and the photography and the introducing of peoples to the new ideas and artists and things of that nature…” Yes. Sharing all of this does make my experience richer and give me a sense of feeling that there are others who value these things as much as I do. I agree with that. So it’s not about that, or “restricting” what people choose to share. That cat is out of the bag. There are no meaningful restrictions in practice that I can see.

My point was about how all this so-called sharing was devaluing work, especially on the “screen”, and that if the screen was to become the future of more and more work, we might think twice about this. The screen is not free, we pay for it, but the money never goes to the content creators, it just goes to the various toll keepers and aggregators. Media. So we should be careful what attitudes we encourage in this space, because you know for sure big business is careful about how it is represented in this space. They only want to share in this space if it earns them hard dollars. So why are we so keen on giving it away for free, and not defending egregious practices? Our work in this space has value, but it is almost entirely represented by what we get in trade, advertising, exposure, etc. And the part that is most valuable is the “traffic” really, not anything to do with content, just the amount of traffic that goes by. The technorati ratings.

If this is not devaluing work, reducing it to whatever keeps eyeballs and helps ratings, I don’t know what is? This is the equation however, post, and make it interesting. How do you do that? Great content-where does that “content” come from, because it has to come from somewhere, someone has to have made it-and in this sense, content is “stolen” when it is appropriated to illustrate something else, when it is stripped of its context, repurposed. Now it serves to keep eyeballs for a millisecond longer, and maybe long enough to read and digg, etc. Because, excuse me, this is about attention, is it not?

Well I have been trying to get attention too. We all do, Guilty. A little history; it has taken me years, literally, 15 years in some cases to put together work that you can now flip through on my website in a matter of minutes. Some of that work comes from a time when I shot during the day, came home and processed the film in the bathroom by hand, and made prints over the tub. We are talking weeks before anything remotely interesting emerged from all that. Some of those pictures are hard won. Many are failures.

One of my favourite books is “A Fortune Teller Told Me” by Tiziano Terzani. He went a whole year without riding on planes on the premonition of a fortune teller, and his story of travel around on ships, trains, buses, and foot is the byproduct. The real story is how he reclaimed a space in his life to reflect on what was meaningful to him, and the time gave him that gift.

Can we imagine going a year without the computer? I ask this because it seems we cannot anymore. We are busy digging this and cataloguing that, tidbiting our way through life and paying attention to very little. So its great that we can publish a hastily written piece of writing and use a glorious photo at the top. One that was probably hard won. Because those are the good ones. Garry Winogrand, my patron saint said something like “Photography is largely about failure” and he is obtuse but correct as usual. It seems so easy from the outside, looking in, a solitary figure silhouetted against a window on a perfectly blank day. But it is one of ten thousand, for Robert Adams, and one of a million nevers for a lot of other photographers, a lone success amid a sea of failure. It is not an annotation, a decoration, something to digg or collect like bugs in a jar. It is not a milepost on your personal information highway.

Robert Adams did not make that picture to serve as your convenient editorial. He made that picture because he saw a landscape being destroyed on the altar of convenience. Think about that for a moment. Our lives have become so accessorized and obsessively enabled that there is no sense other than what is happening now. Well Robert Adams was pointing to a now, the now of 1974, and he was saying, this is what we bought, the new world. The world of atomization, environmental destruction, progress, convenience. Our lives have changed so much since then, accelerated even further. We consume so much now, and I think reflect so little on value.

I am sounding like the guy who said that people should not ride in cars, they go faster than horses and it is not healthy, the human body cannot stand the speed!

What is the difference between appreciation and consumption? A previous comment posted said “I am not so sure that we artists really want to lock their art so far away from people that it becomes an elitist act simply to look at it” This is a good sentiment. I don’t like much of the gallery experience. I have to point out however that individuals can make that decision for themselves about their own work, it is an extension to make that about other’s work. But the comment about locking away is very valid.

So I am all for appreciation, but I think when it gets to “I like this” it seems to become more about the taste of the person posting it and less about the work itself. There is that HP ad out right now with Jay-Z (I think it’s Jay-Z) and you only hear him but his hands do a dance in front of the computer showing us his “stuff”-kind of like a magician, it depicts mastery in accumulation. The hands create and dismiss effortlessly. What is this about? Is this appreciation or consumption?

Over the weekend I got into a little debate with a fellow blogger and photographer Raul Gutierrez about a post on his site Heading East. Let me say I feel he makes wonderful work and his writing is excellent, I enjoy every visit.
But I did not enjoy my most recent visit after being greeted by a very familiar picture, a Robert Adams from his book “What We Bought: The New World” Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area 1970-1974 Spectrum/DAP.
You can and should read the original exchange, I probably was too miffed and said some uncharitable things…basically I called him a hypocrite (nicely) for asking others to respect his work and not use it without permission while he was pimping this great Robert Adams picture at the top of his blog. I felt he was riding on coat-tails so to speak. And that he didn’t need to do that, his own work was very very good.
More constructively I took issue with the blog post because I felt that swiping images from others without permission was essentially wrong, and was devaluing all work. If I can illustrate my creations with work from the best artists, who will pay for the less-than-great? There is the idea of fair use involved, the excerpt, the review, the transformative work. I have no doubt the anyone is fully entitled to write a piece featuring someone else’s work in that context. But I am not so much interested in copyright law as that train left the station for photographers long ago. About the only one protected by current copyright law is Mickey Mouse. You probably know the story. As long as litigation is involved, only the rich will have the protections of copyright law. Fair use yes, but I was asking fair to whom?
So I likened the blog post to something like a radio broadcast, This American Life for example. There are very concrete rules governing the use of copyrighted content on the public airwaves, because they have been regulated from the beginning. Or at least until Michael Powell came along. the point is not the specific rules but the acknowledgment of a value in the “performance” of work.
All of the above is probably me being a curmudgeon.
After a while the real issue hit me; Robert Adams’s work itself and the title of his book. I had referenced it in a previous post about the effects of convenience on the experience of our lives. Every frame of that work documents the transformation of a landscape and a people by the values of a culture with a fetish for convenience. It is so hard to talk about this because it is a part of everything we do now, it is the “modern” world. I could not be writing this unless someone thought it was a good thing to transform publishing so that an individual could do it.
What I am interested in is the value of creative work and how a society rewards that work particularly in the context of the increasing convenience with which creativity can be shared.
What are we trading for? The internets come along and at this point it is clear, with flickr and Youtube and myspace the sharing of imagery is at a galactic high. The volume of published work is astronomical. This is how technology affects convenience. The more advanced the tools the easier it is to do something. All reproductive technologies have destabilizing effects on society. I cannot halt any of that. But I think it is worth examining the trade we are making for convenience. My opinion is that while the sharing of images may be at an all time high, the value of those images is at an all time low. That is a subject that could be debated as well.
A lot of people will think I am making too much of this, that there is no consequence. I think we are probably not taking it seriously enough. Look at the business models of media. If I am wrong, and it is good to share all this stuff for free, then it will have to be regarded as just a kind of leakage I would say. You see it to one degree or another in for example, the stealing/sharing of music, software, and movies on down to blog posting using unauthorized content. If we accept that the technology is going to be disruptive no matter what, and that our ideas of copyright and compensation are outmoded in the new world, then the business model will have to change. Well, who can afford to change? Big business certainly can afford to change. They have always had to deal with leakage of one kind or another, theft, shoplifting, the stealing of product secrets, and now sharing over the internet. So you estimate the leakage to be a percentage of the total and amortize that over millions of transactions. It becomes an expense, the cost of doing business. You factor in the occasional lawsuit. It’s just business. And you vertically integrate so that not only do you sell the product but you sell the transportation of that product. Movie theaters, broadcasting networks, ISP’s, sharing sites, social networking, if you can be the toll keeper it doesn’t matter how much leakage there is, it is all traffic and all monetized somewhere along the flow.
Look at the other end of the scale-you and me. How can we afford to amortize or integrate the effects of this leakage? We don’t own the means to transmit the work. We pay for that. We don’t own the tools-we license those tools from others in the form of software licenses and hardware upgrades, a kind of tax in another form. All we own is the actual content, since we are the content producers. They are our ideas. It is not created out of nothing, it is created out of the individual mind. However, our consumer mindset thinks that we are not creators, that content comes from somewhere else, and that our actions in the marketplace have no impact. I believe they do have an impact and we have no way to shelter ourselves from its effects.

So all this sharing and blogging is great, but without respect for creative works it will in the end, harm the creators of those works themselves. There is no way out of that equation given the scale, the technology and the organization of the system. All we can control are our attitudes towards convenience and consumption and be aware of what we are trading for in the New World.

After having pushed out a major update to this site, and having spent several weeks working in an all-digital still life studio, and after selling some cameras on ebay and shooting some assignments for the New York Times, I have something on my mind.

I have read other posts like this, one was called, The Modern Camera, And the Dilution of Effort by Bruce Wilson. It is mostly a lament on the ease with which one can now make pictures, as compared with turn of the century photographers using wet-plate processes. You can guess where he finds value, and I might agree if I thought his premise was correct: that the dilution of effort the modern camera brings also diminishes the results.

“AND SO WE COME TO IT: the DILUTION OF EFFORT. Photographers have only so much time to take pictures. Jackson would spend days getting one negative. That’s a great deal of effort packed into one image, but what extraordinary images he made! We spend fifteen seconds or less and what do we create? Cascades of snapshots! Piles of photographs that even our mothers won’t hang on the wall. Yep, we are creating nothing more nor less than snapshots, created in an instant, and just as interesting as those Aunt Josephine shot when the family went to that Jersey beach last summer. Shooting fast is diluting our efforts, spreading one hour of our talent into dozens of worthless shots.”

For this fellow, if it is hard it is good. The harder the better. I think I know what his father was like. I also like how he ignores the 100 years of photography between the wet plate and now. I guess he does not think the Leica contributed much to the history of photography, nor Polaroid, and those 4×5 Quickloads must be suspect too. I am not doing the article justice, you should follow the link and read for yourself, but not before I demolish it here!
I think that there is something else at work here, and it has nothing to do with effort. It has something to do with time and space. Not necessarily exterior time and space either. You can imagine William Henry Jackson or Carleton Watkins standing next to a tourist or whatever species of photographer that Wilson is worried about, (and me too) for example the Flickr-fanatic, at the edge of the Grand Canyon and both taking pictures, they both are in the same time and space, but the results would be different.
And just to tease the comparison a little more, lets forget about ability. There is no denying the immense power of some of the work of early photographers (the ones who get up early?) in large format, and in places untouched by human S.U.V’s. It is very difficult to touch those early results currently, by even the best practitioners of the art. It was good to be first. But that is not what I am getting at either.
I think the difference has to do with interiority, which is the inner space of the mind and its thoughts and feelings, and the experience of that space which is called intimacy. A longer explanation would be that interiority is an awareness of a developed and active inner psychological landscape. Intimacy with that space is the ongoing connection to the feelings and thought products in that landscape. Anything that draws us into a closer dialogue with that interior landscape in this case the tools, is better.
In one sense I do agree that it is better if it is difficult: you can imagine Action-Jackson or Watkins and their pack-mules trekking for days to get to some of these locations, the campfires in-between, the hard-tack, the lack of women…But I digress. They had time to consider the work, experience the landscape, and come to a decision on exactly what they wanted to blow a 20×24 sheet of glass. So while it was definitely hard, I believe it was probably very enjoyable, otherwise, why pack 200 lbs of gear-for the fame of it all? Yes the photographs were novelties and attracted wide attention; just imagine today Burt Rutan mounting an expedition to the Moon to make photographs! Masses of fame associated with that-but loads of fun. It would be stunning. 200 tons of gear strapped to an enormous bomb and three lucky souls. Best-week-ever.
To the point, what is missing in the experience of the modern camera is the interiority that older, more difficult processes fostered. I get no joy shooting with a digital camera, but step back to the “primitive” Leica or field camera and it is bliss. Why is this? I am certainly no curmudgeon when it comes to technology. I no more miss the wet darkroom than I miss listening to music on wax cylinders. So what is it?
The experience of working is hard to define, and is different for everyone, however I believe I can generalize a few points of importance. While the “act” of photographing occurs in “real time” the “experience” of photographing occurs in the inner time space, this place I call interiority. You could say that this inner space has a vertical dimension while time, as we understand it has a horizontal dimension. I am certain the Garry Winogrand in his millions of frames never once thought that the actual time it took to make a picture mattered. He famously answered “one-one-hundredth of a second” or similar when asked by a critic how “long” it had taken him to “make” that picture. In other words we are going “deeper” in the experience of interiority than the actual time span would indicate. Digital processes and most of “technology” attempt to replace the vertical span with the horizontal span. They give us speed but no depth. Interestingly, one of the most common complaints about “digital” photographs is that they lack “depth”. Of course this is something different, it is the result of squeezing reality through a regularized mathematical filter that “combs out” irregularity, and it is something that is reaching its extinction point in the current crop of high megapixel chips, 22mp and higher for example. Finally there is enough “data” to represent reality sufficiently to the eye.
But is there something about making a process more convenient that necessarily makes it less meaningful, less “deep”?
The history of photography is the history of one more convenient technology superseding another. This is not new. Photography has always been a technological child and complaining about the lastest thing is to miss the point of photography. It is convenient. The quickness enables a mode of seeing that is not possible otherwise. But the interiority of the artistic process is not so easily “convenienced”. There is another term for this, those who saw the transformation of the typesetting industry called it “de-skilling”. But I don’t believe it is the transformation of the craft itself that is the problem. As I said before, I don’t miss the wet darkroom, although many do. No doubt some interiority has been lost there too.
When I look at the process of photography, there is the confrontation with the facts of the world and my reaction to them. And the photograph is a “new fact” derived from the collision of the two. Again that’s Garry Winogrand’s expression for it. So the question, awkward syntax and all is; is data a new fact? Or is data the description of a fact?
It is very easy to believe in the fact-ness of a negative, chrome, or print. There it sits. And I am not talking about the factuality which is truthfulness. This is the imprint of light on a medium. It has existential weight, not to mention physical weight. I might guess that exposed film is heavier than unexposed film-by how much you ask… With digital there is a momentary state change of a charge-coupled device recorded by an array of transistors. There is no fact, only a phase change. How does the production of facts differ from the production of states?
This is an important distinction. I feel like a passive visual consumer when I am shooting digitally and not an active creator. Without the transactional moment of converting raw film into exposed images, photography becomes pure consumption. Critics used to deride photography as art because it was a “mechanical reproduction” untouched by the “hand of the artist. Sounds quaint now, and here I am deriding digital production in similar fashion. We have learned to live with endless copies, but we may not have learned to live with the absence of a physical original.
The current term for shooting digitally is “raw capture” which is an interesting metaphor also, ignoring the obvious “raw” part which is technical and appropriate, “capture” is an interesting choice, as if we might decide to let it go at some time in the future. In other words, it is temporary, provisional, fleeting. (It is also aggressive, but photography has always had more than its share of aggressive metaphors, coincidentally it is very adept at depicting war.) You can say, “I captured the moment on film” but it has still not worked its way into parlance to say “I captured the moment on digital.” Perhaps some enterprising marketer will help us with that.
So what we traded for, the New World and the worshipping of convenience, is interiority. I believe that it isn’t even a trade; the language of our interiority has become the language of consumption, not thoughts or feelings. Our most, and I hesitate to use this word-sacred-space is now a marketplace where feelings are supplanted by objects that promise and misrepresent. People talk about how the culture has become “pornographic” and geeks talk about tech-“porn” (or pr0n) and I believe this is true, but not in any sexual way. It is the misdirection of the interior space, away from the interior to the external, to the world of false promises of objects that attempt to satisfy that is the result.
Excuse me while I turn off the LCD preview on the back of my camera.
Circling back,

“WE HAVE SOMETHING TO GAIN by taking our time. Instead of shooting three rolls an hour, spend three hours on one photograph. Think about the scene. Is it really worth shooting? …Does your framing of the shot and the composition convey the feeling of the subject that first made you stop and linger on it? Do you even know how the scene or subject made you feel? (emphasis mine) If you don’t know, how can you expect your photograph to successfully convey it?”

Bruce is absolutely right here; do you even know how the scene or subject made you feel? Every little thing that diminishes that interiority is what we are trading for in this New World.
Postscript: I bodged the title together for this essay from the title of a great book by Robert Adams; “What we bought: The New World” which is similar in tone but done brilliantly in photographs.