You should know I really love Robert Adams’s work. His vision enabled my vision, and gave it value. There is a debt there.
And you should know I am a crusty old fart.
There are three issues I want to raise, and then maybe some other people can chime in because I would really like to hear what other people think. I am boring myself…Let me start off by saying in my best Arnold S. manner “that I love with all this writing on the internets about the art and the photography and the introducing of peoples to the new ideas and artists and things of that nature…” Yes. Sharing all of this does make my experience richer and give me a sense of feeling that there are others who value these things as much as I do. I agree with that. So it’s not about that, or “restricting” what people choose to share. That cat is out of the bag. There are no meaningful restrictions in practice that I can see.
My point was about how all this so-called sharing was devaluing work, especially on the “screen”, and that if the screen was to become the future of more and more work, we might think twice about this. The screen is not free, we pay for it, but the money never goes to the content creators, it just goes to the various toll keepers and aggregators. Media. So we should be careful what attitudes we encourage in this space, because you know for sure big business is careful about how it is represented in this space. They only want to share in this space if it earns them hard dollars. So why are we so keen on giving it away for free, and not defending egregious practices? Our work in this space has value, but it is almost entirely represented by what we get in trade, advertising, exposure, etc. And the part that is most valuable is the “traffic” really, not anything to do with content, just the amount of traffic that goes by. The technorati ratings.
If this is not devaluing work, reducing it to whatever keeps eyeballs and helps ratings, I don’t know what is? This is the equation however, post, and make it interesting. How do you do that? Great content-where does that “content” come from, because it has to come from somewhere, someone has to have made it-and in this sense, content is “stolen” when it is appropriated to illustrate something else, when it is stripped of its context, repurposed. Now it serves to keep eyeballs for a millisecond longer, and maybe long enough to read and digg, etc. Because, excuse me, this is about attention, is it not?
Well I have been trying to get attention too. We all do, Guilty. A little history; it has taken me years, literally, 15 years in some cases to put together work that you can now flip through on my website in a matter of minutes. Some of that work comes from a time when I shot during the day, came home and processed the film in the bathroom by hand, and made prints over the tub. We are talking weeks before anything remotely interesting emerged from all that. Some of those pictures are hard won. Many are failures.
One of my favourite books is “A Fortune Teller Told Me” by Tiziano Terzani. He went a whole year without riding on planes on the premonition of a fortune teller, and his story of travel around on ships, trains, buses, and foot is the byproduct. The real story is how he reclaimed a space in his life to reflect on what was meaningful to him, and the time gave him that gift.
Can we imagine going a year without the computer? I ask this because it seems we cannot anymore. We are busy digging this and cataloguing that, tidbiting our way through life and paying attention to very little. So its great that we can publish a hastily written piece of writing and use a glorious photo at the top. One that was probably hard won. Because those are the good ones. Garry Winogrand, my patron saint said something like “Photography is largely about failure” and he is obtuse but correct as usual. It seems so easy from the outside, looking in, a solitary figure silhouetted against a window on a perfectly blank day. But it is one of ten thousand, for Robert Adams, and one of a million nevers for a lot of other photographers, a lone success amid a sea of failure. It is not an annotation, a decoration, something to digg or collect like bugs in a jar. It is not a milepost on your personal information highway.
Robert Adams did not make that picture to serve as your convenient editorial. He made that picture because he saw a landscape being destroyed on the altar of convenience. Think about that for a moment. Our lives have become so accessorized and obsessively enabled that there is no sense other than what is happening now. Well Robert Adams was pointing to a now, the now of 1974, and he was saying, this is what we bought, the new world. The world of atomization, environmental destruction, progress, convenience. Our lives have changed so much since then, accelerated even further. We consume so much now, and I think reflect so little on value.
I am sounding like the guy who said that people should not ride in cars, they go faster than horses and it is not healthy, the human body cannot stand the speed!
What is the difference between appreciation and consumption? A previous comment posted said “I am not so sure that we artists really want to lock their art so far away from people that it becomes an elitist act simply to look at it” This is a good sentiment. I don’t like much of the gallery experience. I have to point out however that individuals can make that decision for themselves about their own work, it is an extension to make that about other’s work. But the comment about locking away is very valid.
So I am all for appreciation, but I think when it gets to “I like this” it seems to become more about the taste of the person posting it and less about the work itself. There is that HP ad out right now with Jay-Z (I think it’s Jay-Z) and you only hear him but his hands do a dance in front of the computer showing us his “stuff”-kind of like a magician, it depicts mastery in accumulation. The hands create and dismiss effortlessly. What is this about? Is this appreciation or consumption?