How do we maintain
a business when the ground is shifting beneath our feet? What does
that mean on a daily basis? Looking at the volume of photography out
there, most of it is not professional photography—it is mimicking
photography using new tools. This raises the questions: where are we
going and what do we need to do to get there? Opening
the fireside discussion on the first night of the seminar "Power in
Whose Palm? The Digital Democratization of Photography", Stephan Mayes,
the managing director of VII Photo Agency, Brooklyn, New York, in
coversation with Manuel Toscano, Principal at Zago, New York, spoke of
the transformation from memory to experience.
With so
many people taking pictures on their cell phones nowadays, there are a
variety of factors that are already starkly different from traditional
photography. Portability; you are no longer separate from the people
that you are photographing. You are physically much closer, but also
there is the perception that you are closer. You are a publisher, you
are actively publishing. You are freer as well; you can choose your
tone of voice and your audience.
One major difference of cell
phone photography is time. Photography is composed over a period of
time. It becomes just a moment that was referred to that day and you
don’t go back to that picture to see that picture, you go back to see
what is next. Like a referencing and index point to events in a
streaming environment. A few days later and the image has disappeared
completely.
David Hockney captured the time aspect in
photography before the advent of cell phone capturing by splitting the
image into a series of smaller images to be pieced together. This
enabled time to be a factor in the comprehension of the image. This time
factor is ubiquitous with cell phone photography. That is the
fundamental shift.
Mayes spoke of a “quantum shift” in
photography. The old fashioned photograph was a fixed document. The very
structure of image, was a fixed object. Now no point is fixed, now it
is polysemic. The image has moved from being a fixed record to being
multiple and contradictory all at the same time. We are living in a
streaming environment. A photo essay in Life magazine had a beginning,
middle and end. In a streaming environment there is no beginning,
middle and end. Photography is a medium that is deeply interwoven with
the changes that happen around us.
With the phenomenal popularity of the social media photo platform, Instagram people have been talking about how wonderfully nostalgic the images are is whilst forging their way into digital age. There is a process of layering what we understand from yesterday onto the contemporary process today.
Toscano
steered the conversation to questions about authorship and value of the
image itself and democratization. Mayes unraveled the different
elements, saying that these issues are being defined by the users not
the professionals. There is an increased responsibility on the viewer
to understand what they are seeing. Examples can be seen from Syria and
throughout the Arab world that images drive and greatly influence
revolution—but on the other hand we are being manipulated by
contradictory images. Thus the viewing process becomes a process of
education and is increasingly political. What stance do professional
photographers take in this environment? Whatever that stance is,
actually starts to become political.
With break-out questions
from the audience, concerns were raised regarding Photoshop and how it
is used in an amateur manner and bringing about gross
misrepresentation. Mayes clarified that unfortunately misrepresentation
cannot be stopped but we can respond and answer it. With the increase
of abuse of media imagery, so too comes the ability to respond to it or
to question and reflect.
With an increasingly sharing landscape
there is a rejection of authority. The public becomes curators and
authority is fractured, which is a good thing in the same way that
cubism broke up the singular perspective. There is a desire not to hear
from Time Warner—users want to hear from someone that they know and
trust. This flows into the power of citizen journalism.
However,
citizen journalists are not trained story tellers, whereas the
professional photographers are. They are not about what they see, but
more about ‘what does this mean?’. Thus there is still a role for
everyone to coexist in this visual rich landscape, where there are now
more opportunities to receive multiple perspectives, but the ways in
which these perspectives are consumed are different. There is the
streaming side, accenting a moment that is quickly looking round for
what next, and there is the reflective element which is the realm of
professional photographers.
Often professional photographers
find themselves caught up in the speedy streaming landscape and then
there are questions that are raised, such as, “Can I trust this image?,
because I haven’t got time to review it because if I don’t post it now
the moment will be gone.” However, this can only be a good thing, as it
asks of professional photographers to be more of a reflective
practitioner on every level.
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