Author: JH

I know, I know, the winter is over. But these two snaps from January are growing on me. Or rather, the question grows on me: What do you really miss when you’re out of town? Yesterday at the Met, I payed my respects to the life of the creative, at an event about blogging and fashion. “The Sartorialist” talked about “The Sartorialist”, in a strangely ambivalent mode toward the corporate world, looking animated by his own fashionable post-corporealism, but also looking, and acting, as if he just fell out of some PowerPoint presentation. A grim, and to my mind exceedingly fashion-devoid journalist from the New York Times talked about her busy lifestyle (apparently using a computer for the first time during her presentation – I’m not joking: I can picture her now, yelling at office staff for not uploading her latest insights in time). She seemed oblivious to the fact that the one screen shot on the projector during her speech featured, more than anything, an animated and rather obnoxious before-and-after ad. So much for being a visual type. The whole thing was hosted by Harold Koda for the Met. Koda, awkwardly fumbling along in front of the audience with his jokes about nerdy bloggers having a field day in the sparkling environment of the Met, successfully (oh, the irony!) made his employer look like a dinosaur wearing the wrong shade of lipstick. If anything, the whole event quickly turned into a textbook case of a corporation not getting it.

Diane Pernet (decidedly not an out-of-town character), on the other hand, did not talk much. And when she did, you did not want her to stop. She made my day. Thanks!

Martin Parr was certainly one of the few photographers that brought me to this medium. He actually had something to say, something about the world as it is today. Well, by now I’ve became interested in different subjects, and I am not interested in photographers as role models anymore. But when I ran around Berlin in the late 1990ies, with my old Canon and a ring flash, it seemed impossible to be anything but some kind of visual cynic.

And as it turns out, what Parr had to say in the 80ies and 90ies has become true faster than anyone thought. The world, I think, has been replaced by a photographed world, photographed via the lenses of the digital cameras of tourists. Are there still people, trees, buildings? Is it still possible to take a walk through Central Part and believe that one has taken a walk without it being documented on one’s cell-phone or digicam in the form of an image? Is it still possible to actually live in the world, rather than depict it?

Martin Parr’s prophecies seem all too real. At this point, our lives apparently consist of photographed moments. “Me at the Eiffel Tower.” “Me in Central Park.” “Me at the supermarket.” How much worse can it get? Was Nietzsche still an optimist?

One could argue that way too many people read things such as the “Harvard Business Blog” and think that at such places there is any clue to be found on what, for example, will happen to the “photography business”. This reminds me of stock (as in: New York Stock Exchange, etc.) analysts: It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if there was a way to somehow quantify what their consensus is at any given time, and then just do the exact opposite of what that consensus so convincingly suggests, you’d have your money tree right there. (Admittedly, this a pet peeve of mine: Analysts, amazingly, never seem to bother much with the actual quality of a product, or management of a given company; inevitably, they miss almost all of the most interesting opportunities, or only flock to them when it is too late.)

However, despite my general doubts about the value of over-“analyzing” the “marketing” end of things, and the group think that goes along with it, I share some of the sentiments in today’s piece by Rob Haggart (aka “A Photo Editor”) on the “Future Of Photography”. Few things make me as happy as the demise of the so called “middle man” in almost all creative fields, thanks to the web and related technologies, and the immediate access of individuals to these technologies. It’s like a strong photo: Strip away the unnecessary parts, and you have an overall much more exciting picture. Haggart seems to suggest, and I couldn’t agree more, that this should be *welcomed*. His piece is certainly biased insofar he comes from a strong editorial background. But I find it a good snapshot of what is going on *now* (not necessarily on what is going to happen next). You can read the entire thing here. Excerpt:

“[…] Consumers have more time and money to spend elsewhere because services that used to be complicated and costly became efficient. […] Consumers will spend some of that extra time and money with their favorite photographers if you give them the opportunity.
It’s not so crazy to think that consumers who used to pay for the New York Times and now read it online for ‘free’ will take some of that saved money and even time and spend it on books by their favorite NYT writers and photographers.
It’s not much of a stretch to think that photo essays and stories that magazines used to commission and then distribute to consumers sandwiched between $140,000 worth of ads will be commissioned by advertisers and distributed through new media channels to reach even more consumers. […] Are you making yourself available to these people? […] The audience is now in charge.”