Issue 113 | Sept 9 - Sept 23, 2022

Inflection Point

“I am not ready for anything to happen.” -Sylvia Plath

Hello dear NYC Photo Community, photo friends, and photographers! It's been a while.

I hope everyone had a light and love-filled summer of picture-making and conversating and warm golden moments. 

The photo world was active this summer as more waves of technological change rolled through. If summer 2021 was the beginning of NFT madness, summer 2022 was when AI image generation arrived on the scene with miraculous powers to generate powerful and vivid images from text prompts. I think how this technology impacts photography will be foundational, and I'm just beginning to wrap my head around the implications for photographers. 

The other significant tech change was Instagram following through with its promises to fully embrace and elevate video on the app in hopes of catching up to TikTok's lead in social videos. You couldn't look at Instagram this summer without being bombarded by endless and almost exclusively short video reels. It wasn't a great development for folks whose primary love is still photography. Nevertheless, some photographers found innovative ways to play the new game, making slideshows or interesting process videos. Others began looking for alternate social apps where still photography might reign supreme - Flickr, Vero, TryGlass, and others. Sadly I think Instagram lock-in is so strong that widespread adaption of a competitor app is unlikely to happen soon. 

There is at least one thing I still appreciate about Instagram - the way it became an easy-to-use photo sketchbook and simple archive for some of my work. 

There's no doubt that Instagram, for all its flaws, has been able to insinuate its way into my practice, and I thought it would be interesting to consider some of the ways the app has influenced the kinds of photos I share and the way I share them:

Size: Because images on a phone screen are so small, I found myself sharing photos that are mostly close-up or medium-distance shots. If the picture is too far from the subject, or the subject is too small in the frame, the images seem less likely to 'work' on Instagram.

Aspect Ratio: My DSLR makes photos that are 2x3, my phone makes images that are 3x4, and Instagram displays portrait-oriented images at a 4x5 aspect ratio, so I often end up cropping images to the 4x5 ratio. It's a better fit for Instagram, but I like the ratio. It has an appealing sturdiness. 

Filters/Edits: Even if I've edited a photo on my desktop computer, I might still further edit the photo on the phone before posting it to Instagram due to the size difference. For example, images that look acceptably dark on a big screen seem too dark when re-sized for the small screen.

DSLR v. Phone: Often, I'll find a subject and make pictures with my 'good' camera first, and if the subject or time allows, I'll make a few more very similar images with my phone. Usually, I'll post the phone versions of the image, just to get a quick sense of how others feel about the image, which makes sense for a phone app.

I'm fascinated by how all these minor digital tweaks and compromises create a series of variations and partial duplications to the point where I'm no longer sure which of the image variations I've made is the canonical version of the picture.

Whether your photo was initially produced on an 8x10 film camera or a phone, it becomes endlessly malleable, unreliable, and contingent as a digital file.

A photo of yours, like a photo of mine, might have a color version and a black and white version, it might have a filtered version, it might have a cropped version, it might have been edited differently depending on the file size, it might have a phone version and a DSLR version. It might even have a film version. 

To give it a musical metaphor, you could look at some or all of these variations on a singular image idea as being like demo versions/alternate takes of a song we know from the album release. Only with these endlessly multiplying digital copies and variations there is no album release. It's all demo versions, all alternate takes.

Multiple possibilities existed in the film days too. I remember making slides and finding a gadget I used to print those slides on Polaroid film, and then finding that I could transfer the emulsion from the Polaroid print of the slide onto watercolor paper - a Polaroid transfer. Each new transformation of the slide gave me a psychic charge. But each step in this sequence also represented an investment in money, materials, and time - experimentation was not cheap, and that cost imposed a thoughtfulness on the process.

Now endless variations and alternate takes can be freely and instantly conjured with the tap of a phone screen. One response to this fact of modern life might be, "So what? We've all worked to one degree or another like this for years; it's just how things are now. Who cares?"

True, and maybe I'm guilty of playing too much with these image editing apps and techniques, but lately, I've felt like all these endlessly proliferating images have become an unstable and disorienting hall of mirrors. There's no 'this is the one version of any picture because any picture can be endlessly modified. I've lost my way. I feel like my instinctive rejection of the endless variations on a single theme on sale in NFT collections was telling me something.

Perhaps as artists or aspiring artists, it's a good thing to reject the simplicity of the final image and embrace this complication. We can accept that all life is change and endless variation and abandon the illusion that any canonical version of any image we make will ever or could ever exist. 

But at the moment, as image editors become more powerful and AI image generation steps onto the scene with such boldness and certainty, it feels like we are at or fast approaching a real inflection point between the old world and the new digital worlds heading our ways.

Perhaps in this state of inevitable and foundational change, it's time to take one final stand for the world that used to be. Celebrate the physical one last time. Make prints of photos. Those prints will be the canonical versions of your photos. Make a photo book, and how the photos look in your book - that's how you want them to look. That is the final version. Quit tweaking. Our souls need to finish things. There will be plenty of time for change in the years ahead. There are no stopping things now. We're the last of the real world generation.

Have a great couple of weeks ahead, there’s a lot to do and make pictures of these days and I'll see you all again on September 23!

***Important Note: I'm teaching TWO upcoming online classes with StrudelmediaLive***Sunday, September 18, I'm teaching a one-session mini workshop on how to approach strangers to make street portraits. You'll leave the workshop with the tools and confidence to start making street portraits of your own, or if you are already making street portraits, some great new ideas for extending your practice.
Learn More / Signup: [here]

Starting Saturday, October 29, I'll be teaching a five-session online class called 'Questionable Pictures' that will explore the written and unwritten rules shaping the photography we create. Inspired by the book Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2021), we'll explore different ideas around aesthetic and style conventions and subject matter (what can we make pictures of and what shouldn't we make pictures of? Who comes up with all these rules anyway, and how can we subvert them?) By the end, we'll be a class full of rebels, celebrating all the rules we broke along the way.
Learn More / Signup: [here]