(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

Their is no editing just immediacy.

If you own a piano, you own a piano.
If you own a camera, you’re a photographer.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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…

“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.

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.