Questo e Quello

2011-06-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

Hmm...is the Blog Sinking into Oblivion?

I am generally a fair distance behind-the-curve; a late-adopter. I have never looked at an iPad or held an iPhone. I have never "tweeted" (or is it "twittered"?) or "friended" anyone, nor "texted". (And I try very hard not to "verb".)

That said, I have been reading on the Web that blogs (which I have been using for several years) are losing popularity (i.e., readers).

Early on, there were the Web sites and, at the same time, a wide range of Web bulletin-boards (and, before that, Usenet, come to think of it), where we could exchange information quickly and easily. But the Web sites, because they could not be easily changed and updated, tended to be static, and the bulletin-boards became so over-crowded that asking a question was about as effective as throwing a bottle in the ocean.

Along came the blog. Thanks to Google, it could be done without direct cost. Nothing was difficult, so everyone put up a blog. Only problem was for those who were seeking recognition—it was an extremely large, packed, and noisy room. Coming across anything of merit was strictly by chance, and then following those that might have value required a great deal of time and organization—like trying to read 25 or 50 books at once.

Now we are being told that people are abandoning blogs for Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr, and so forth. Since the posts are very brief (with little content to digest), they can be scanned in just a few seconds. Responses are even briefer (e.g. "like").

Sadly, it is all true; I have observed it even in my ever-so-tiny corner of the universe.

Addendum: "We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less)."

Encountered this sentence in a New York Times article by Pico Iyer, The Joy of Quiet

Reflection on Re-entry

In the late afternoon of 9 November, I returned from a five-week spell in Europe, where I divided time between Paris, Prague, and Vienna, then two weeks in Florence; traveling by train, and exposing 4,336 fractions of a second on digital film.

This will be the bulk of my raw material for the coming months and year, from which I hope to create a goodly selection of final pictures, which I may assemble into another of my blog-books.

At the same time, I have a number of raw thoughts tumbling around in my head, on topics such as forbidding photography in places, and why people have such different attitudes towards digital imagery, and why I do what I do—all of which require much refining and polishing before publishing here.

So, I have a great deal of work to do, but first I have to wait for my mind to recovery from the sudden shift in time zones, weather, climate, languages, cultures…

Accidental Thoughts

Some things change. What used to be photojournalism (W. Eugene Smith and Life Magazine come to mind) needs a different term. News illustrator, perhaps, (or the old term: press photographer would do) because the photograph is now the device to attract the reader, and the reader is needed to attract the advertisers, and it is all about profit and 'the bottom line'.

Sadly, the quality of news photography and reporting have suffered as a result. The talent and refined skills of the past have been replaced by high speed, motor-driven digital cameras with extreme wide and narrow-angle zoom lenses, often over-saturated colors and melodramatic compositions. Rather like fine dining being replaced by fast-food franchises. And it gets worse—when these pictures are printed oversize and hung on gallery walls to masquerade as art. Ugh!

illustrative device to attract readers >>

I would suggest that the term photojournalism should now be used to define those who write about photography. This, too, is a smaller field than in the past; existing now mostly in amateur blogs, yet they can draw a large audience, because the vast majority of photo enthusiasts are really interested in the equipment and process: owning, dreaming of, analyzing, talking and reading about it—as has always been the case.

Methinks (Some Things I've Thought)
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"Every photograph is a collaboration with what is in front of the lens. The photographer observes and interprets, he does not create.
I've always thought it odd when a person signs a photograph and stamps a copyright on it—thereby claiming that he created something unique all by himself. Remove everything from the photograph that he did not create, and what's left?"
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"No work of art should cost more than an excellent dinner (for two, with wine), nor should it be required to last any longer."
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"The quality (aesthetic value) of any object has nothing to do with how much work went into the creation of it, or how well it is executed."
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Words Encountered

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At the conclusion of a lecture on astronomy by a well-known scientist, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant turtle."
The scientist paused, then asked "What is the turtle standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever, said the old lady, "but it's turtles all the way down!"

found on Web and in books, in various forms

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"I think it's a sign of some sort of spiritual illumination to respond to beauty, but I think our age has so transformed art into a form of investment or speculation that many people can no longer see the beauty of an object or care much about it if they do: they see only the value, the convertibility of the object into a particular sum of money."

from Willful Behavior, by Donna Leon

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"She spent the next half-century working steadily at her art and exhibiting frequently, but she never developed a marketable artistic signature."

from the New York Times obituary for Hedda Sterne

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"Every new symbolic order requires a taxonomist to make sense of it... Without descriptions, attributions and analysis, [a painting] is just a clump of data."

from a New York Times article by Virginia Heffernan

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"...[Henri Cartier-Bresson] made some of the most memorable pictures of the human condition. His best period was from 1930 to 1950 when he traveled the world searching for a reality that could be frozen into a harmonious ballet of players enhanced by a theatrical background."

Erwin Puts, in his blog, Tao of Leica

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"I take pictures because I like to look at the pictures I take."

from The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon

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"Maybe this is where so many misunderstandings of photography arise, because, after all, to a large extent we've come to associate art with something that takes time to produce, the result of some sort of 'major' effort (where 'major' often is associated with the aspect of craft that is contained in many art forms). How then can the results of someone pressing the shutter on what might look like a whim be art?"

Jörg Colbert, Conscientious, 2009

Paris and Madrid, Fall of 2009

2011-05-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

Rambling Notes

2009-10-14T10:11:00.000-07:00

Profligatography

According to Wikipedia, Harry Callahan "... left behind 100,000 negatives and over 10,000 proof prints."

And Garry Winogrand "left behind nearly 300,000 unedited images, and more than 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film."

Compared to the older, chemical-based process, digital photography places no rational limit on the number of pictures that may be taken. The only real expense is a minuscule amount to store the digital files. And there is no limit to how many pictures you can post on the Web; the only cost there being access to a computer connected to the Internet.

So we are all making pictures, storing them away, posting them on the Web—and leaving them there to accumulate. One of the more popular picture sites, Flickr, says it now has over ~~four~~ five billion images that people have hosted there, and in all languages, it is estimated that there are over one billion blogs.

Now I'm as guilty as anyone: since switching from film to digital in 1999, I now have more than 5,500 finished, good pictures stored (but not printed)—easily more than the total of my good stuff on film from the previous forty years and more.

As I mentioned in my Paris 2007 blog post, people rarely take the time to fully digest a photographic image, most often no more than identifying the major objects in the photograph. Others have noted this as well, including David Hockney in his book, Cameraworks. However, Hockney blames the medium and tries to modify the process to force viewers to spend more time looking, while I believe the problem—and the solution—lies strictly with the viewer: they/you/we must learn to see with our eyes, not with our minds (i.e., words), and slow down.

But we, the profligatographers, aren't helping matters by flooding the blog-o-sphere.

So I periodically rip up my blogs, deleting all or most of the images I posted there. You, the viewer, will have the responsibility of taking the time to really look at the pictures that are up, because they will be gone before long.

Yet sometimes I put previously posted pictures back up, because I want to look at them again. Never can tell...

Here Now, Gone Before Long

Questo e Quello

Paris and Madrid, Fall of 2009

Rambling Notes