The Boom is Over. Long Live Art!

Some real gems:

Every year art schools across the country spit out thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They are backed up by cadres of public relations specialists — otherwise known as critics, curators, editors, publishers and career theorists — who provide timely updates on what desirable means.

Many of those specialists are, directly or indirectly, on the industry payroll, which is controlled by another set of personnel: the dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and — crucial in the era of art fairs — event planners who represent the industry’s marketing and sales division. They are the people who scan school rosters, pick off fresh talent, direct careers and, by some inscrutable calculus, determine what will sell for what.

…

And where is art in all of this? Proliferating but languishing. “Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.

Just read the whole thing.

Everyone has been asking (well, no one, but you get the idea) what kind of tools I used to create the new website. Part one is and has been for a while, SlideShowPro. There are different versions, they have a standalone that creates web galleries from Lightroom, plus a standalone app if you don’t have Flash.

I used the Flash version to build a swf. You can customize nearly all aspects of the component, and it can show video and play sound as well. What I am using is a pretty stripped version paring down to the essentials. As far as complexity goes if you follow the instructions you can do it. Big-However, you have to be willing to stumble around and solve your own problems, hunt, google, etc. But the information is there.

The thumbgrid is a new addition also from the folks at Slideshowpro, and this adds the zooming thumbnails and also the mouseover navigation and tooltips. A nice touch is that no matter how you size the stage, the maximum number of thumbnails are calculated and fit for you. You have control over scaling of the zoom, scroll speed, spacing, etc. 

None of this would be all that helpful if you couldn’t update the site yourself with new images. That is where Director comes in, and is the backend to SSP.

This is a screenshot of a webpage showing me logged into my Director page. I am hosting this on my own server, along with the images. You can also buy a Director package that includes image hosting, and possibly more importantly, includes maintenance upgrades and new features as they become available. You then tell Director to “serve” images to your website where the swf resides, and they are displayed. But Director will do more than this, it can serve images to any website or blog where your SSP swf or other javascript/Ajax generic slide show is running. This is how I am able to serve images to the page on my blog, iPhone, where a non-flash type slide show is visible and visible on iPhone. Essentially a parallel site.

What you see above is an Album view, and I can drag and drop images to reorder them. You can upload images, add captions, rotate and delete images also. Albums can be included in Galleries, and Galleries are what you are seeing as my top level, Work and Assignment. You can include and remove Albums from Galleries all from the web interface. 

Finally there is Lightroom, and a plugin called Lightroom to SlideShowPro, which exports images from Lr to any Album directly using Lr’s FTP functionality.

This is the last link in the chain, and makes keeping the site up to date very easy. If you enter caption information in the metadata it can be included with the image in the upload and Director can display that also. About the only thing I can’t do is combine two images two-up like you can in LiveBooks. But there may be a way eventually. For now a sidetrip into Photoshop. (yes I have tried print to jpeg and the results are crap for some reason).

Could you get all this in a turn-key solution-yes-LB and aphotofolio will do pretty much all of this. But you have to like their designs and you have to like their pricing, which may or may not be for you. Freeway Pro was the wysiwyg web authoring program I used to design the site, it is not like Dreamweaver, it is more a layout program that generates code behind the scenes. It is easy to use. This code may or may not be editable by other programs like Dw. But that is not an issue for me.

Should I have been spending the time doing other thing, promoting, shooting new work, etc.-well, yes, but there are always things you should be doing. I got a lot of satisfaction (and a fair amount of aggravation) from doing it myself. 

When my first website went up in 2001, there were few packaged solutions for professional photographers. So I had to do it myself.  Now there are several, and some competition in price. Starting out now, as I said, I probably would not go the self-designed route, the choices are too easy you could say. But there is something about a custom designed site that communicates more about the photographer I hope, an approach, or approachability. That is what I am aiming for.

It had to happen. Once you go serif you are stuck.

And a gratuitous change in title, no doubt my google ranking will slip. Yeah, right. Eventually I will get around to crossdomaining the writing/wrighting issue. I know you don’t know what I am talking about. Neither do I.

Also, an iPhone compatible version of my site served by SlideShowPro Director onto a page on the blog:

No more flash cul-de-sac.

You don’t know how much work it takes to get to this point. My advice to new photographers is don’t do your own websites…for example, Flash 10 now behaves differently with respect to security. What this really means is that everything needs to get updated just to work, I’m talking WordPress, which publishes this blog, the Slideshowpro components I am using on the website, which include Director, and the new Thumbgrid. Oh, and while you are actually updating your site, you better update the site! Which was the point right?

I like it much better, and I hope you do too.

What you might notice; I have separated out “Work” which includes work produced on assignment and personal work, from “Assignment” which is published and unpublished editorial, and soon, Corporate and Interior images.

The idea here was steal from the best. Nadav Kander has things organized this way. The first thing you see is “Work”. This is what I do, and will (perversely) keep doing regardless of who is the client. There is no differentiation between Editorial and Advertising and Corporate clients. A picture is a picture. I hope this will allow me to focus what I do as “what I do” and be category neutral. It includes what I used to call Project work. I am not going to call them projects any more. To me it seems tentative and grasping. I just make work. You can figure out where it belongs. That doesn’t mean there aren’t titles to the work. Here I stole from Adam Bartos, who simply has a list of Projects as his portfolio. The whole site design borrows heavily from Raymond Meier, who’s site I think is really one of the best out there. 

A first for me is serif! Adobe Caslon for the name and text. Not since the beginning days of NY where it was all Clarendon for me have I had a serif font anywhere near my branding. Helvetica Neue, Gill Sans of course, CityOf, which is a variation on Futura, and lastly an outline version of Interstate. Here are some old sites:

Please don’t say you liked the old ones better… » Read the rest of this entry «

I submitted this under editorial, a story for New York Times on single dads who have elected to have children but not through marriage. Steve Harris conceived Ben with a surrogate mother and donor egg. The playpen in the office allows Ben to visit his dad at the Law office, however I am pretty sure the Nanny is always nearby.

I picked this mainly because it is funny and attention grabbing, it is not however the image that ran. What can you say, it’s a crapshoot…

Under personal unpublished I submitted this excerpt from the series “Flyover States.”

This was the description:

“I would like to go back to a time when a solitary aircraft flying overhead was an object of wonder and beauty instead of suspicion and dread. The aircraft are purposely rendered small and visible only in high magnifications, dissolving into grain,  passing or intersecting a boundary between existence and disappearance from sight.”

I played with the idea of having dyptics where I would actually enlarge the section in question to show how the image dissolves into grain, or in this case, noise. Unfortunately digital images as pixels do not enlarge the way that film images break up into grain. Very quickly you get square pixels. Someone needs to invent a stochastic image sensor.

It is very hard to look at these pictures and not feel something awful might happen. The military has used silhouettes as enemy aircraft identification training since the dawn of flight. Yet the silhouette of a bird carries no such connotation.

Yes I know I don’t have a hope in hell of winning PDN. YMMV. » Read the rest of this entry «

This was one of those assignments where you are sent in blind except for the headline. I knew the story was about the psychology of the workplace, which for most self employed photographers is something they know absolutely nothing about. Well, except that my ID and SuperEgo don’t throw away their leftovers in the home office lunchroom refrigerator…

Immediately upon arrival and setting up I find out that the individual portrait idea I had was not going to fly: the crew was a team and needed to stay together. No individual portraits. 

I would like to say I came up with this solution all on my own but we all know where it is cribbed from. Sometimes it is helpful to be able to invoke the deity of “Avedon” to support your harebrained schemes. 

I think it splits the difference, individuals in a group. Thanks to TAG creative for letting me in the door.

Full story here. BTW don’t be shocked by the color in the article. I get paid just the same. » Read the rest of this entry «

Check out this story in the New York Times this past weekend. I am not sure what to call in since there are two titles, one for the print version and one for the video version.

That in itself should tell you something about what is going on. The print version was called “Home, Hangout, Departure lounge” and the video version was called “Project Apartment: A Family of Friends”. They are similar but different. Initially what the assignment was was to go profile Daniel Vosovic from last season’s Project Runway and his roommates and “habitat” on the LES. A sound recordist was going to take audio and a slideshow was going to be produced. Somewhere along the way the sound got way-laid and I was on my own, or so I thought. On sunday the story is published and I see video, in other words, they went back and shot more footage, this time for the video.

Recently Vincent Laforet wrote a column on convergence on how the new Canon 5DmkII was a “game-changer” for the industry. I have no doubt that across the country, weddings and porno shoots will never be the same. But I digress:) When you look at the two features you see very different approaches. Mainly you see very different lighting. I think it was unfortunate for the video folks, they probably had to go late in the (very short winter) day and had no ambient light, either that or they chose to exclude it entirely and use their own for colour balance reasons, or expediency. For whatever reason, the effect is stark, what is a tiny, cramped, albeit colourful space is transformed into the average bare-bulb lit New York tenement interrogation room. So much of what I see online as “new” multimedia is actually just bad TV. I wonder what the video producers got paid to go in there, shoot a hours worth of footage, and then cut it together? Not nearly enough I am sure, probably a lot more than me. And what looks better? (ok go easy)

Truth be told it is a lot harder to shoot multimedia pieces than it is to do what I did. The issues multiply, colour balance, sound, moving camera, editing, B-roll, etc. I can make it appear as if it was a sunny day almost anywhere I go, if things don’t have to move. Motion does not have that option, they are locked down to the framerate of the camera and the ISO. Evidently the the new 5D in HD mode is auto exposure, with an exposure lock. A limited flexibility. More if you opt to spend a lot on fast prime lenses. And the sound recording on the 5D is really only good enough for background sound, not for interviews. So what am I trying to say? Besides the fact that after I get the camera you will be subjected to my poor attempts at video?

I think the idea everyone had for “convergence” was this idea that a single photographer or videographer could hoist a camera and capture both, stills and video. And that that could be a huge cost savings. What I think you see is that while it might be possible to take hi-quality stills from a video assuming you can overcome the lighting issues, which I don’t think you can exactly, not unless you want to haul around a 10K on a crane to all your Manhattan locations…taking video from a still shoot is another thing entirely. Basically we styled the still shoot to look good as stills. Every picture can be a “picture” and not just something on the way to something else. To video the still shoot is very boring, it is just behind the scenes of a still shoot. And while the current demand for behind the scenes seems to be insatiable, I think it will grow old soon. Please not another Victoria Secret show backstage!

We are still in this fractured place where neither approach is working very well. Traditional media printed on paper is on life-support. Online media is straddling the line. The multimedia pieces are hit and miss. Some of the best in my opinion are the information-presentation interactives, “charts and graphs!” But with pizazz! I think audio slide shows of stills are very effective as a bridge piece between print and online. Look at Magnum in Motion. Video has a way to go, it would be better if they had no responsibility at all to the printed piece. Motion is it’s own logic, and has it’s own expressive language that I think is getting wasted a lot of the time on some of this stuff. Basically I think what you are seeing is we are painfully reinventing the wheel online, enduring a lot of bad video that we used to criticize TV for (funniest home videos?-that was the “tube” before the “you”). Call it whatever you want, convergence, user-generated content, interactive, but the bar is low. I think the utility to advertisers is that it can guarantee eyeballs in one location for a longer duration. Think of it as glue. 

And what of the cost savings of having one person shoot both still and video? Not sure about that either. Good video is expensive, just like film. It is more complex to produce, execute and deliver. Vincent’s impressive “cologne commercial” cost him quite a bit, but not a fraction of what it actually “costs.” I hope someone picks him up for his eye while he is still cheap! The people who are really good at, the ones who can turn it around quickly, not surprisingly, are already doing it. They have jobs in television, and have had them for years. But we have resisted this other “convergence” of media, between print and television for a number of reasons, some of them very good. Monopolies, hegemony, diversity to name three. If I had to predict where this is all going, I might be tempted to say economic realities will force print media to merge totally with television to achieve economy in production costs. Martha Stewart paved the way long ago. She achieves high quality in both areas. And can decoupage with the best…It may only be a matter of time. Or as Woody Allen would say, we all have to sit through the Ice Capades, again.

Update: Canon’s Chuck “Santa” Westfall says that the sleigh bearing the new 5DMKII-will-save-us-from-armageddon has left Canon USA’s village and should be bringing the camera to good little girls and boys by the end of this week! Prediction-Holiday Video Ennui Up 1000 Percent. 

But does it know how to roast a turkey?  » Read the rest of this entry «

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

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

What am I talking about?

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

This article today highlights what has come to pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just trying to be ‘truthy.

NB: another similar post here

» Read the rest of this entry «

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another word of the day-

cra·ter  krāt′ər

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

Just tryin’ to be ‘truthy.

» Read the rest of this entry «