The Death of the Photographer

The digital age is changing wave upon wave of established roles and ideals in the world, and among the clearest victims in the art world is the classic photographer. Once upon a time, the photographer was a beast of expert cunning and unrivaled skill. A man of the split-second, and decisive savior of the moment. As an artform, it required the most technical know-how, time critical decision making, and even just flat out luck. You had only a few moments to get all the settings right on your camera, the framing perfect, and after twenty to thirty someodd pictures, you were down for the count until your next roll was loaded. And all this is before one even stepped into the darkroom; the coordination to work in pitch black and then the skill to burn and dodge a print before the whole thing over-exposes.

But now the job is a little different. There's no mucking in the dark now. There's no endless piles of rolls to deal with and the cost of shooting hundreds upon hundreds of pictures is all but gone. The cameras auto-focus, balance, and take a picture from a lot of the complication of getting all the right settings quickly all down to the push of a button. The process of 'developing' a photo has become more the focus than just a part of the process; now a short process has been frozen in the time bubble we call 'photoshop', which almost influences the final look of the photograph than the actual taking of the picture itself. Moreover, a final product might not even be one picture, but the best parts of many. Maybe the moment was right in one, but the exposure got fucked up or something... there's no crisis of choice now; one can just shop in the values from a better exposed one to combine them into the perfect frankenstien of a picture.

But I suppose the photographer is far from dead, more like reborn. The photographer has been put more into the realm of the painter, a realm of quiet contemplation. He is now in a state of being where the artist is more focused in bringing a piece to be everything it can be rather than the best he could do with a single moment. Welcome to the photographer 2.0.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand....

Digital photography. An odd sort of beast. It's an innovation that's proliferated over the last twenty years, and been oddly quiet in doing so. It's brought with it immense change, but its been incorporated into things almost completely seamlessly. Think about it. Twenty years ago a photograph was a photograph. Now days, there is almost no such thing as a photograph that is published without being post-processed all to Hell. From simply adjusting contrast, to intensifying and exaggerating color, to shaving ten pounds off the latest hot model... its almost as if reality's just not good enough anymore. Think one could link rise in anorexia to the birth of photoshop? Now, with enough patience, anything can be produced into a realistic photo. Enough so where what was once a solid form of evidence is just as soon assumed to be falsified to a motive. Photographs simply just aren't real anymore. Its almost as if bad pictures and short clips from cell phones have a greater sense of 'real' than anything left to be found in magazines. How ironic is that? How long ago was it that grainy images were the ones we were worried about being fake? Surely you remember amazingly bogus pictures of Bigfoot and alien spacecraft. It's positively wacky. What exactly are you supposed to trust in an age where no medium is bulletproof, despite being absurdly convincing?

As with tootsie pops, the world may never know.

The Age of Treason

As we dive head-first into the 21st century, the world is becoming a drastically different beast from what we've dealt with in the past. However, our roots are beginning to show. We're approaching the 100th anniversary of the Dada movement, which established some important questions that we still haven't resolved to date, and even some that have evolved drastically over time. Dada brought for the first time into art the concept of the 'readymade', re-appropriating something to incorporate it into an art piece. We have a more technical term for the readymade today, however: copyright infringement. Sure it's been around longer than Dada, but it's coming into its own now. Photos, music, movies, furniture designs, fonts, the list goes on. Its getting to the point though where enforcement of copyright is impossible. How many people steal a song every day? How many people incorporate something that isn't their's into a photoshop doodle, or watch a movie they didn't buy? Who would pay hundreds of dollars for a font license if they're just doing a project for school, or a local club? Imagine the size of the task force that would be required to catch every copyright infraction. It would literally need to be everywhere at every point in time. Copyright simply can't survive a this size and scale of application. It's the beginning of a concept that is a bit out of our current paradigm: completely free media. But that's for another post...

Also, as an afterthought...BLAGH! A blog. Pew pew, enjoy.