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.
The one thing I have learned in all these years of “blogging” is that people will always to be happy to project their own mistakes onto the technology. If you eat too much chocolate you wouldn’t blame the chocolate for giving you a stomach ache – but with blogs, most people are only too happy to blame blogs for their own failures to edit.
Maybe this is because we don’t really have any responsibilities any longer. In politics, there is no accountability any longer (we are not to blame for our earlier support for the Iraq war since we were “misled” – and you can run for president with that line [!]), and in our daily lives, nothing really is our own fault any longer (witness how everything comes with a fine print now).
But at the end of the day, our failure to edit – to make a sensible selection and to then take things from there – remains what it is, and complaining about how there is too much on offer on the web, photography-wise etc., really doesn’t address the actual problem, does it?
two things: technology is not neutral in this. That is a whole post in itself.
second: who is editing? And from what stream? My spam filter is 99.5% effective, however, what gets let through is still spam…
I am not trying to point at individuals, I am trying to talk about the ideology of the web and digital imaging. And talking about ideology is pretty unfashionable since we are supposedly beyond that.
“technology is not neutral in this” – you will have to explain to me what that means.
“who is editing?” You, as the “consumer”, will have to edit. You will have to make the choices what to look at, what photography to spend more time with, just like you will have to decide what chocolate to buy and then how much to eat in any one sitting (or what photo book to buy and then to look at at home).
For me, that’s maybe the most crucial bit of all these internet technologies: It requires us to make choices and to select from what is offered. Passivity is not an option, I think.
Without a selection you end up in the “Various Photographs” mess: A lot of everything. Pointless. Chaos. In fact, I’d be happy to argue that not only is “curating 2.0″ just marketing bogus, we now need curating “1.0″ more than ever: People who are willing to make selections and to present those selections.
And then, of course, if you’re unhappy with the selections offered by people (say, if you think the selection of photography on my blog sucks) then you can make your own selection – and the web will enable you to share that selection with other people.
But you will have to make selection.
The exercise of personal responsibility is a constant. I am assuming the individual can do that for him or herself. I just think the landscape that that responsibility exists in has shifted tremendously, and I like to examine that.
Regardless of good selection or bad selection, what has changed is the nature, volume, and character of the stream, and the ideology of those contributing to it, and the ideology of the stream itself.
I guess I will have to write another post…
I think the echo chamber effect of the blog world is indeed toxic, and I have been steadily decreasing the number of blogs I read to filter out as much as I can. I must have read about that suitcase full of Weegee photographs at least 10 times yesterday. I do enjoy a lot of the work I find online, but sometimes the sheer volume is overwhelming, and the signal/noise ratio can be incredibly low.
To approach this from the flip side, though, as a blogger and photographer who is very much in that “art school discovery” phase, I have come to think of blogging as an important tool in my development as a artist. I have a place to share my work with the world, I am connecting with other people who are dealing with similar problems, and I have to admit, the simple fact that I am sitting here trying to write something about my photographs has inspired a lot of hard thinking about what it is that I’m trying to accomplish. Part of this might be necessary because I don’t have as many opportunities to discuss these things offline. The online world has basically become my art school, for better or for worse.
I will be the first to admit that to an outsider, some of the stuff I post might be a bit cringe-worthy. I cringe at some of it myself. I need to edit more. I need to prattle less. But it is also a fairly accurate snapshot of what I am making and thinking about at any particular time, and it can be pretty satisfying to go back and look through it and realize that I am making progress.
That whole “echo chamber” complaint bothers me, though. I mean I yet have to see newspapers who post about the same incident being accused as working as an “echo chamber”. And this is not such an absurd comparison actually.
After all, the fact that *some* items are indeed widely posted can’t be taken as sign that *all* blogs always only post the exact same thing – which they don’t do at all. And then the flip side, namely that bloggers will post about the same item but offer different views, is completely ignored.
I find that very irritating, especially since it’s a mirror image of the steadily decreasing quality of political and cultural discourse in our society.
Echo chamber is a good word for it. Another idea I am going to write about is the “endorsement economy” which is a subset of the “attention economy” I have written about before. Basically the endorsement economy is a certain kind of online transaction where one offers paper thin endorsements of other work as a way to attract attention to their own. It is nice-playing-nice. You could say I am engaged in the “criticism economy” which is where I play the role of critic and photographer. Generally this does not bode well for the photographer because you are set up already, in other words you can discount the words if you don’t like the work. It gives an easy out. If people don’t like what you say, regardless of merit, they can take it out on your work. You notice that rarely does anyone say anything negative on the web and if they do it is either an out and out rant or taken as rant. Rarely does anyone actually want to get into it. I have to constantly muzzle my rantish side but it is very fun to write in that voice. But it becomes easy to knock down as we saw recently…
I think echo chamber to me is when you have the “me too effect” where (do I have to put all ideas in quotes?) someone links to something and then it just goes on and on in the “I saw this interesting tidbit” mode without adding anything. As if your/theirs was the only blog in existence. You could call it “coat-tailing” but I have used that word before in another context…but it serves to make it seem like the blogger is more of something, insert here_____; cool, knowledgeable, etc.
I’d be happy to argue that the tendency not to find negative opinions online is entirely due to cultural constraints.
But this all is getting a bit too… let’s say “heavy” for me (“ideology”, “economy”). I’m a firm believer in “what can be said at all can be said simply”, and this discussion is increasingly moving away from that – which I find unfortunate since there are some real issues to discuss. But I think those will get increasingly obfuscated in the “buzzword economy”.
you are advocating the “economy economy” I see:)
to try to bring this back to the lighter side (“economy economy”), let me just say that I feel the same way about toothpaste as you do about image and mediocrity overload. you run out of toothpaste, your intention is to go back to the store and get the same one (maybe whitening, maybe that new vanilla one your friend told you to get) but as you approach the isle and turn to the toothpaste choices, you are suddenly faced with a wall, literally a wall so high you can’t reach the top-most toothpaste. You are confronted with all this choice, and it’s confusing, and the packaging looks different just a bit different from the one next door, and one “fights cavities” (don’t they ALL do that?) which I feel turns into a kind of anxiety. You forget that the one you had before and came to get was just fine. But you want the very best, now. You pick up one, skim the back, the packaging is pleasing. Then you hold up the one you came to get. Suddenly it seems totally and completely inadequate and before you know it, you are consumed for the next ten minutes (maybe more) with this ridiculous decision and the frustration of now knowing, “do I have the best one? The very best?”.
. A good photo can resonate with us far longer than that minty clean feeling we get after we’ve just brushed our teeth. As for what to do in the toothpaste section, approach with caution, close your eyes, reach your hand out in front of you, pick up whatever your hand finds first and commit to buying it. I guarantee it’s just as good (or mediocre) as the 100s of others you could have purchased….
Now I liken that experience to what’s happening with photography- except it seems that we spend even more time picking out our toothpaste than we do really taking our time with the images (perhaps because images are so present that they become nearly invisible and we don’t have to haul ass to the store to find them?). Click, click, click- we click through them before they even have the chance to move us. And maybe like the toothpaste, the majority of the images are more or less the same and are mediocre and will never move us no matter how much we stare at them. So what I am saying is this, EVERYTHING is coming at us more than ever, be it images, comedy or toothpaste. There’s no stopping that- if anything it’s only going to accelerate. So what’s a person to do in a world infiltrated with too much of everything- most of it mediocre? We need some taste-makers and shapers out there. JM, you talked about the responsibility of the blogger to be a better editor. I agree. Because who will make it there responsibility to guide people (and the common man, at that- I’m no elitist and feel everyone should have access to the “goods” without necessarily having the deep knowledge or understanding that would lead him/her to find them himself) through the muck that is this mass of images? I think of John Szarkowski: he was the kind of curator we need now more than ever. So I guess what I’m saying is that I agree, we need someone to take it upon themselves to go back to “curating 1.0″ as you call it, JM. And we need smaller bookstores whose owners effectively work was curators. Dashwood, for example. Why do I find myself both paying a little more and enjoying my time at smaller “boutique stores” than I do a chain (and I’m now talking about clothing here)? Because when you go to a boutique store you are paying for the “luxury” of having less choice.
While we wait for the next Szarkowski to come along and for bloggers who take photography seriously to continue to refine their edit, there are individual steps we can take to prevent the desensitization and frustration we feel with image overload. Maybe get off of the computer (!!), head to the library, pick out a book and carry it home. (the very fact that you’re an active seeker of good images-as opposed to the passive “click click clicker”- will bring meaning to these images, even if it comes mostly from the shoulder ache of carrying them home). You are now faced with one book and one book only. There are a limited number of pages. Your choice has been limited by the editor already an probably by a number of other factors. Why do you like these images (if you do at all)? Look at them for a long time and really consider them. Shut off the television (more images) and turn of your iPhone (should I be texting, listening to music, surfing the web, emailing, ah!). I think this ritual, this simplification might be a step in the right direction of finding (or even making) meaning in images in a world where meaning seems to be slipping away as a result of sheer volume. The problem with toothpaste and photography are frustratingly similar. We’re lucky in that good photography has the ability to communicate very deeply and in an untold number or ways- that’s why we’re even writing about it, right (or wright?)
oops, inadvertent spelling issue: toothpaste aisle. not isle (although is there an “isle of toothpaste?” it might seem that way with so g-damn much of it out there…)
Joerg: I wasn’t trying to suggest that there aren’t excellent blogs that are producing valuable original content. It’s great if you have an opinion on something; if it’s well formed and interesting, I probably want to hear it, even if I don’t necessarily agree.
I was referring specifically to the many “me too” sites that simply post a link to something and say “I saw this on so and so’s site”. It becomes a bit of a bottomless pit, or as the phrase goes, turtles all the way down. There are some people (Joerg, I think you are included) that are going deeper and finding new and interesting work that I’ve not heard of before, and I think that is extremely valuable. But why would I subscribe to the dozens of bloggers who are just reposting your links?
The newspaper argument doesn’t quite hold up in my opinion because when several newspapers report on the same event, they usually have someone covering it in person. They send someone out to interview people, to bring back pictures and information—that is genuinely useful. I don’t really read papers that just publish everything off the wire, I can get that from Google News. Like I said, there are blogs that are offering original ideas and information, and that is genuinely valuable. But there are many more that add absolutely nothing to the conversation.
The other symptom of the echo chamber is the overwhelming sameness of so much of the work that I see. I don’t think this is a new phenomenon by any means, but it seems to be happening more and more quickly. I think it’s great that there are so many opportunities to see new photography, online and in the real world. But it seems like so much of it is just a copy of a copy of a copy, and it can get a bit numbing. I definitely agree with Liz here, that unplugging and just focusing on your own work for a while can be very healthy.
Regardless of where you get your photo links from, the point does have to be acknowledged that there are more opportunities to see photographers and photographs than ever before. And indeed, like Joerg said, we all do have to take responsibility to limit that flow of information. The problem is that now the limiting of that flow is an active preoccupation.
It used to be that we would all find any and all photographers that we liked and just devour them wholesale. That’s no longer really possible: For one, the sheer volume is immense, and hence to follow ever lead to ever photogs site is just impossible.
Secondly, the fact that we can see so many photographers out there is itself a problem. James Danziger’s recent post over on The Year In Pictures is an example of this. He points to the work of Patrick Smith and goes on to compare it to other photographers who are more well known due to the fact that they came to attention first. Previously, we probably wouldn’t have heard of Patrick Smith, and so the photographers who came up through the system would seem significant and individual and somehow special. Now, because we can see so many other photogs, it’s increasingly hard to distinguish between them all. So the fact that Patrick Smith’s work has come to our attention, and the fact that we can easily find other photographers with a similar personal vision diminishes both his work and theirs. It is hard to separate out his work, mentally, from some of the work found on the rest of the internet and is therefore hard to understand the story (vision, whatever) he tells with his pictures.
That’s the problem with Joerg’s call for a kind of personal curation – The simple fact that we see so much makes it so much harder to distinguish between them all. And blogs can make it worse. I love Laurel Ptak’s i heart photograph, and I think she makes some great curatorial choices. If I was only viewing her website, it would seem like there’s a huge amount of variety in her choices. But since she’s a part of the whole internet landscape, I’ve come to identify her choices with her own particular curatorial intent, as opposed to, say, Joerg’s, or The Sonic Blog’s, or whatever. And because of this, all of the artists she features, to a greater or lesser degree, become subsumed in her choices and not defined by their own personal vision.
And on a final note, I suppose this debate we’re having is really over whether the way that we consume photographs now systematically allows ‘uncommon imagery’ to rise to the top, the same roles that galleries/museums/curators played in the past. But a related question that no one has addressed is whether our own taste has collectively fractured so much that the definition of what an ‘uncommon image’ is is hopelessly beyond us. If that’s the case, no amount of internet curation by one or all of us will satisfy, and we’re stuck with the problem of having to look at a lot in order to see the good stuff, and consequently being overwhelmed accordingly.
@nicholas: Thanks for the lengthy reply-you are saying something like what my last two posts have said only better:)
Regarding devouring wholesale, this used to be a pleasure, you would find a book of photographs, and the presentation, the physicality and focus that created was important. Just like finding an author and wanting to read everything they have written, it occurs over time and in multiple locations. Imagine if blogs consolidated the work of writers so that you could read them like we read photographers, a totally different experience (Kindle anyone?)
and with respect to curation, or editing (@JZ) the problem is deeper than that, the selections are depicted against a backdrop with no context. This goes to digital imagining in general, the time it takes to make work has shortened dramatically, for those that choose those tools. I have no idea how Patrick Smith works, but insert any name vs. any other established photographer, the technology has a way of bootstrapping artists into comparisons that should never get made. Just because it looks similar does not mean it has similar merit, for example, what else has this person done, for how long, in what situations? etc. The fact that I can display 20 years of work on my website in some ways is a bad thing because now it lives there with work done 20 minutes ago. The perspective of time is removed.
btw, thats my dad above, an uncommon man for sure.
I was wondering about the guy in the rhododendrons.
@rx- Voltaire baby. Read up.
Nice post gardener.
Technology is the problem. Everyone now owns a camera and has website. Millions use flickr. We can now blog from our cell phones. Technology has made us lazy.
Their is no editing just immediacy.
If you own a piano, you own a piano.
If you own a camera, you’re a photographer.
I think this is so true, I like how you deconstruct and I like how liz put it
(and the toothpaste analogy of jz)
it isn’t about economy or technology though at this point that is a moot question, neither are going to change, there isn’t going to be any paradigm shift.. it’s about what WE allow to invade our senses.. I’m not a seasoned photographer, I’m not in the world you are looking at but in any photography world I think self moderation is necessary, I will go on browsing binges and it effects my work and my mind
too much goodness and since I tend to jump genres it is even worse
great post thank you for it
Thank you for your analogy which gracefully bridges the connection between photography and politics.