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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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… » Read the rest of this entry «

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… » Read the rest of this entry «

A whopping 5 comments my alltime high-I RULE! Well, I thank you all for noticing, mainly thanks to Andrew. I wanted to post-forward a comment that Olivier Laude offered on an older 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/

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… » Read the rest of this entry «

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… » Read the rest of this entry «

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. » Read the rest of this entry «

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. » Read the rest of this entry «

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.