A photographic imagination

A letter to Aphotoeditor

Rob

Very interesting thread.

I agree that the right marketing materials are needed for the segment you are looking to get work in, as in Rome, well you know the saying …. I think from the reaction here this is experiment you are running is something that “pros” feel for most part valuable and certainly they respect your leadership.

However, I get the feeling in this line “It’s not that difficult to see why I would think you’re an amateur if you put your images on Flickr. That’s what it was created for and that’s who primarily uses it.” that you may be missing something of value. I would argue that by focusing on the “amateurs” and not the audience we will be overlooking a valuable and sustainable marketing opportunity. You own an audience.

This audience of “amateurs” are the same people who consume a photographer’s images in mass magazines. They are the audience. They are the consumers. The photo editors are gate keepers and curators. They are powerful filters but they are not in the case of mass magazines the audience. By perpetuating the stigma, we are keeping photographers from an audience, from the audience.

I think by not encouraging some kind of long term involvement in a photographer’s body of work that a site like Flickr can offer through the mass audience platform it provides, we diminish a fantastic opportunity to connect with the very people who consume the photographs. I am not sure if magazines can make it happen themselves they have a vested interest in their brand - not in establishing a long term connection with broadest possible audience and enhancing the value of the photographer as recognizable.

By dismissing the vernacular aesthetic of Flickr with the audience we dismiss “the audience”. I think photographers coming into the business over the next few years will have this in their DNA. A few top tier photographer’s will have other methods of direct to audience marketing. The more intimate an audience is with a photographer, the more valuable the photographer becomes to the properties that hire them.

I am not an editorial photographer but have learned much form the readers contribution here over the last few months. Thanks for this valuable resource.

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I read John Haber's "Learning to love photography" with some interest as you know I am about to open my first solo show here in NY at Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art. My work has benefited in the the digital space as I have spent the last four years evolving a body of work in public on Fotolog and Flickr.

No MFA, no commercial work, no editorial work just the time and space to work through awkwardness of the movement from technique to craft to style. Making this journey doubly interesting is that in my day job I have been able advocate reader participation and contribution rather than comment and rant because of my experience.

In the article there is a reference to the Hollywood "indies". This got me thinking. What makes sense to me in that the audience gathering power of blogs and social networks has allowed an artist like myself to develop a value far beyond what could have been done even 7 years ago. Not sure that is exactly what John meant but I think that this builds on the notion of an outside the system. I am not sure if I am the first photo artist to move from Flickr to a one man show in Chelsea, I know I won't be the last.

And that is a good thing.

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I contributed this to a conversationon on Art & Perception

My old Nikon FM collects dust on my dresser becuase the digital darkroom transformed what I had come to know as photography. It moved me from picture taking to image making. Now the only real "photographic" moment is the end stage of the manufacturing process when a Digital C-print is pulled. For me it has been important to have the "photographic" in the making of the object while disregarding the "photographic" in the image making process. So in a traditional sense, for me, there's not much photography in my process to enjoy.

What I do enjoy is where image making intersects with storytelling - you frame the world - frame a point of view. In some ways "view finder" better describes what it is. The really emancipating thing has been to find/seek/uncover the authentic - the essence of the emotional connection in the image without the "view" being my truth or something close to me. I'm always chasing that both in my own work and when I'm looking at other's work.

When I first posted on Fotolog in June 2003, I called my page "A photographic imagination". I had just read Sontag's On Photography and I wanted to put a marker down that these images should not be viewed as documents - they were manipulated and as such the images were not representative but representational.

I was also beginning to undestand how pixel based display was a great democratizer - all these screen images were made of the same substance. A Picasso painting, a DaVinci drawing, a deep space image form the Hubble Telescope or an Ansel Adams photograph were certainly different objects in the real world but on the screen they were just a collection of pixels. The playing field was leveled, the image content would be judged on it's own aesthetic and against every other image that could be displayed. The eye would decide.

From the start I wanted to give people something to think about - but not as a message or a lesson or a meaning. I think I lacked the confidence to articulate that early on. But it is there like the manipulation is as part of my whole apporach. I want the viewer active to "look into the image" rather than just looking at the image.

I am not an equipment geek. If the device captures images without a flash, has a memory card I can read and a charged battery I'd probably use it. I don't need a perfect capture, I want to make a capture perfect. I need raw materials so I "harvest" images, hundreds per day. I'll capture till I drain my battery. I hardly look at the LCD when I am shooting, I try never to stop moving. I capture everything at. low res 640 x 480. I have lost any connection to the preciousness of any individual snap.

I use Flickr to post my images because it is a distribution point and provides a publication platform and an audience. I want an audience. Of course this serves two masters because I can move easliy from presenter to an audience to being part of the audience.

At the point where I was searching for a way of working - first Fotolog and then Flickr gave me a daily production and publishing structure and a format to see a body of work developing.

It allows me to be prolific without purpose and organically find threads in the work. The dark side is that there is such a need to get the next image - almost an obligation. I realize this is a product of my own need for immediate gratification. I tend to ration the published images to one per day. The sheer volume of images posted on both of these services is a stark reminder of how insignificant any single image can be. It is quite intimidating.

I am always surprised by what people connect to in an individual image, what they are moved by. I am starting to sense a bond. It is not that I said something nice about their picture or made them a contact so they say something nice about mine. There is something we have in common, something they know and I know.

In the end to me photography is like sex, the intersection of what interests you and what you can get. This is what I can get.

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