Photographic Proliferation
I’ve always been a fan of The Slow Food movement. For those who haven’t come across it before, it is a gastronomic philosophy which opposes not only the current fad for endless junk food and ready meals, but also aims to change the Western culture of rushing meals, rushing life and never taking time to slow down and really taste life.
The Slow Food movement is but a small part of a much wider cultural problem: SPEED.
All too often in this modern day and age we rush from experience to experience, never stopping to appreciate the world around us, rarely pausing to draw breath, constantly rushing towards some unnamed destination that we never find because we really don’t know what we are looking for anyway. Why do we live so fast? Because everyone else does. And as humans, we are pack animals – we are genetically hardwired to follow the herd. If they rush, so do we.
Photographers are no exception to the herd philosophy. In this modern digital age, there is more and more pressure to produce consistently top notch pictures at a frighteningly fast rate. Every photograph must be, if not high art, then at least pretty good. There is constant pressure to compete with the rest of the herd, endless comparisons between one photographer’s work and the next, the rush to shoot more, more, more, and the never ending pressure to move ever higher, climb to “the next level,” that final level of photographic perfection where a photographer is published, featured, SUCCESSFUL. Where he has “made it as a photographer.”
Quite what “making it” means, I have no real idea. To be published? Surely not, as millions of photographers are published online all the time. To be published in a magazine or photography book? Again the standard is meaningless, as magazines and the written media are in terminal decline and in ten years time, there will be very few left. Online publishing is the new publishing medium, and it has an insatiable appetite for the new. Every photographer will get published online somewhere at some point in their photographic career, every model will be seen. There is room for all. “Being published” doesn’t really mean that much nowadays as a benchmark of success.
Maybe a better aspiration would be to photograph something genuinely unique, that no-one has photographed before. The trouble is that almost all of the world has now been photographed at some point since the invention of the camera. Only the remotest areas of the wilderness remain unseen. We don’t need to physically visit a faraway place to learn about it, we simply have to Google it and find a photograph online. No longer are we pioneers of the new, because it’s all been done for us before by another photographer somewhere, somehow. Civilisation has been conquered, dissected, analysed and made available for all to view online. The world has been immortalised by photography, there is nothing left to see. So many new photographers are rushing to joining the herd at such a rapidly accelerating rate, that there is little (if anything) left to discover, there are very few (if any) questions left that have not already been answered before by another photographer who has been there before you. Aren’t we all just running around in endless circles chasing our own tails? What IS the modern photographer’s aspiration? Does it even exist?
Viewers too are suffering from the fast food digital age. Our brains are now so saturated with images and there is so much information out there online, infinite questions about the world that have already been answered by the camera, that there is nowhere left to go. Our brains are now so befuddled with information and images that we have become numb to anything new. Because the internet and digital photography have culturally globalised the world, we no longer have the skills to differentiate between the thousands of photographs that we see every week. To a large extent, they all look the same. Familiarity has lead to boredom. The photographic herd has now become so large that bulk mediocrity has flooded our existence. We rush from image to image and can’t take in any of them properly because our brains simply aren’t wired to handle that much information. It is also difficult to judge how one photograph is more novel than another because we see so many. We are rushing again – always rushing at ever increasing speeds to the next landscape, the next nude. Click here for the instant gratification. Click again for the next. This is animal pack mentality. This is our human nature. We really can’t help this because that is how our human brains are designed. We are victims of our intellectual limitations.
Instead of heightening our senses, instead of teaching us about the world, about beauty, art, and human nature, modern digital internet photography is doing the exact opposite. It is deadening our senses, making us numb to the new, stopping us caring about being explorers and innovators. The herd is being permanently damaged by its insatiable greed for more.
How can we change this? Is there some way to retrain our brains to differentiate, or are we destined to become increasingly confused and numbed by the billions of photographs that crowd our thoughts? How can a photographer break free from his herd and create something that is unique to him, a piece of work that answers some question that hasn’t already been answered before?
We need to learn to move away from living in this photographic white bread world, slow down, and learn to really taste our new gastronomic creations rather than just living off endless junk food. We need to move from fast food to slow food. The question is how?
Images are of Pirate Maiden
The Slow Food movement is but a small part of a much wider cultural problem: SPEED.
All too often in this modern day and age we rush from experience to experience, never stopping to appreciate the world around us, rarely pausing to draw breath, constantly rushing towards some unnamed destination that we never find because we really don’t know what we are looking for anyway. Why do we live so fast? Because everyone else does. And as humans, we are pack animals – we are genetically hardwired to follow the herd. If they rush, so do we.
Photographers are no exception to the herd philosophy. In this modern digital age, there is more and more pressure to produce consistently top notch pictures at a frighteningly fast rate. Every photograph must be, if not high art, then at least pretty good. There is constant pressure to compete with the rest of the herd, endless comparisons between one photographer’s work and the next, the rush to shoot more, more, more, and the never ending pressure to move ever higher, climb to “the next level,” that final level of photographic perfection where a photographer is published, featured, SUCCESSFUL. Where he has “made it as a photographer.”
Quite what “making it” means, I have no real idea. To be published? Surely not, as millions of photographers are published online all the time. To be published in a magazine or photography book? Again the standard is meaningless, as magazines and the written media are in terminal decline and in ten years time, there will be very few left. Online publishing is the new publishing medium, and it has an insatiable appetite for the new. Every photographer will get published online somewhere at some point in their photographic career, every model will be seen. There is room for all. “Being published” doesn’t really mean that much nowadays as a benchmark of success.
Maybe a better aspiration would be to photograph something genuinely unique, that no-one has photographed before. The trouble is that almost all of the world has now been photographed at some point since the invention of the camera. Only the remotest areas of the wilderness remain unseen. We don’t need to physically visit a faraway place to learn about it, we simply have to Google it and find a photograph online. No longer are we pioneers of the new, because it’s all been done for us before by another photographer somewhere, somehow. Civilisation has been conquered, dissected, analysed and made available for all to view online. The world has been immortalised by photography, there is nothing left to see. So many new photographers are rushing to joining the herd at such a rapidly accelerating rate, that there is little (if anything) left to discover, there are very few (if any) questions left that have not already been answered before by another photographer who has been there before you. Aren’t we all just running around in endless circles chasing our own tails? What IS the modern photographer’s aspiration? Does it even exist?
Viewers too are suffering from the fast food digital age. Our brains are now so saturated with images and there is so much information out there online, infinite questions about the world that have already been answered by the camera, that there is nowhere left to go. Our brains are now so befuddled with information and images that we have become numb to anything new. Because the internet and digital photography have culturally globalised the world, we no longer have the skills to differentiate between the thousands of photographs that we see every week. To a large extent, they all look the same. Familiarity has lead to boredom. The photographic herd has now become so large that bulk mediocrity has flooded our existence. We rush from image to image and can’t take in any of them properly because our brains simply aren’t wired to handle that much information. It is also difficult to judge how one photograph is more novel than another because we see so many. We are rushing again – always rushing at ever increasing speeds to the next landscape, the next nude. Click here for the instant gratification. Click again for the next. This is animal pack mentality. This is our human nature. We really can’t help this because that is how our human brains are designed. We are victims of our intellectual limitations.
Instead of heightening our senses, instead of teaching us about the world, about beauty, art, and human nature, modern digital internet photography is doing the exact opposite. It is deadening our senses, making us numb to the new, stopping us caring about being explorers and innovators. The herd is being permanently damaged by its insatiable greed for more.
How can we change this? Is there some way to retrain our brains to differentiate, or are we destined to become increasingly confused and numbed by the billions of photographs that crowd our thoughts? How can a photographer break free from his herd and create something that is unique to him, a piece of work that answers some question that hasn’t already been answered before?
We need to learn to move away from living in this photographic white bread world, slow down, and learn to really taste our new gastronomic creations rather than just living off endless junk food. We need to move from fast food to slow food. The question is how?
Images are of Pirate Maiden
Labels: Philosophy, Pirate Maiden
posted by Lin at 11:25 AM
11 Comments:
Great post Lin, you echo many of my thoughts about where I'm going with my photography. The answer for me I think is that I want to satisfy myself. I want to produce some photographs that show, to me, some eye for a composition and level of skill with the camera/print. Validation by an adoring public wouldn't be bad either - not likely but I'll take it if it comes....LOL.
I have come up with a photographic idea I haven't seen before, and would be pretty rare in any event because of the skill sets involved - since it's my candidate for the Dirty Show there are some other skills involved also, and a certain mindset on the part of the models. Will be doing that shoot this Saturday, I hope my skills are up to my "vision."
Right on the ball. I share the same thoughts and I think it's becoming more obvious as time goes by. People's expectations have risen inexorably with the speed and accessibility of the internet. Sadly, all this speed leaves no time for quiet reflection; merely it is cast aside in the pursuit of more stuff.
Peter B
I just finished writing a post about fake infrared that may or may not show up this evening. It is an area that bugs me. Not because it falls short of the intended outcome, but I am a stickler for calling a duck, a duck and not a chicken, and the misuse of terms in the photographic community is starting to drive me nuts.
And when you are 3/4 nuts to begin with, you don't need the added pressure.
It took a stroke to slow me down and it was quite effective. But I can see you’re point we all need to slow down and enjoy life and treasure the moments we have. This digitalized age does nothing to help, we keep needing more and more instant gratification for us to feel our lives are complete. But we can tell mediocre work from the truly inspired because it doesn’t come along very often. Maybe the story has been told before but it’s given a new twist by the model’s work and the trust in the photographer that spurs them to creative new heights. I remember when I first stated in this business forty years ago being told that there were no new photographs to take. Creativity is what you make of it and that’s the art we all aspire to attain. Few of us will succeed but we all can try.
Another aspect of the "need" to photograph something new: An increase in the number of "documentary" photographs that capture the mundanity of existence -- some of it proclaimed "high art" (see, e.g., Cindy Sherman or Alec Soth), but much of just, well, plebeian.
Add to this the increasing tendency to produce over-manipulated, sometimes abstracted, and all too often painful-to-look-at "new" photographs, and it seems sometimes like photography is presently going through the retreat from reality that characterized the abstract expressionism movement.
I am a computer junkie. My online gorging borders on gluttony. I just paid a higher monthly fee for faster service. Now. I want my messages and comments. Now. I want the e-mail to fly faster. Is there no end to the way we can commit the 7 deadlies?
Lin, what a wonderful post. I think you are spot on once again. I'm guilty as anybody when it comes to following the trend. I am finding that slowing down is not an easy thing to do. We think of downtime as "wasting time", even though I do understand that downtime has a lot of value as well.
Thanks for the reminder..
It occurred to me that with just a few word changes your post could describe any aspect of our out-of-control consumerism (prior to the depression... oops, recession, of course). For example, "We are rushing again – always rushing at ever increasing speeds to the next McMansion, the next golden-gated community."
Interesting...there was a piece on Slow Food yesterday on Nevada Public Radio.
"How can you say that you're not responsible?
What does it have to do with me?
What is my reaction, what should it be?
Confronted by this latest atrocity
Driven to tears
Hide my face in my hands, shame wells in my throat
My comfortable existance is reduced to a shallow meaningless party
Seems that when some innocent die
All we can offer them is a page in a some magazine
Too many cameras and not enough food
'Cos this is what we've seen
Driven to tears
Protest is futile, nothing seems to get through
What's to become of our world, who knows what to do
Driven to tears"
-- Sting
Yes, indeed, with digital photography so apparently EASY, everybody has to prove that they have something to show the world.
It reminds me of two stories I've heard. One of my photo instructors was teaching a workshop in Tuscany, and the group went out to photograph one morning. The instructor asked one girl how she did, as the latter was editing photos on her computer. The student said something like, "I've managed to edit my good photos down to 270." The instructor replied, "Well, in that case, you should be teaching this workshop, because I got three."
The other story involves the late, great Helmut Newton. He was hired for a fashion job, and when he submitted his photos to the client, he gave them only five. The client had expected somewhat more than this, and told this to Newton. His response: "But you only need one."
As for me, I'm still swamped with film to develop, so I don't plan to take any more photos until at least May of next year.
Bravo! No point in hurrying.
-Don
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