Life As a Stock Photo (5 July 2011)

I reblogged this bad stock photo on tumblr and was set to be content to leave it at that, but I continued to think about it.

As you can see, it's a picture of fake patrons at a bookstore pretending to shop. The Economist's blog picked it up to illustrate a post about Borders' bankruptcy and the loss of book stores as quasi-public space. I assume the photographer used fake people because you would possibly need to get permission clearances from genuine shoppers if the photo was not documentary? (Somebody out there who knows how this works, please let me know. Comment or email at horning at popmatters.com)

One of my many suspicions is that stock photos such as these will be easily replaceable with far more genuine looking photos from social media pages. This seems like a SEO-generated page, but it gets at another question I have:

Stock Photography companies have lost some of their market share in the digital age, but Flickr is not the biggest cause. The creation of digital cameras has resulted in more people taking and sharing pictures as opposed to the old days of film when there were only a select few in the photography business. Also, non-commercial licenses means that businesses can not use those free photos.

So digital cameras make it easy for aspiring photographers to try to enter the business of selling photos; indeed Getty has a partnership with Flickr to try to help amateurs commercialize what they share (and drive labor prices down).

But wouldn't it be just as easy for publications to search a Facebook database for a photo and pay them a nominal fee for the rights to it (and drive the photographer's wages to zero)? Is there anything in Facebook's terms of service that explicitly prevents the company from doing that, given that it asserts ownership rights over the stuff people upload there? Or is there a non-commercial licensing regime that protects you from having your photos appear in contexts where you don't want them? Must users rely on Facebook's good will to keep that from happening?

I already felt that simply by sharing anything on Facebook, it ended up recontextualized in ways I couldn't control or understand and this made me feel inordinately and perpetually defensive. When he quit Facebook, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber noted that "one of the things I like about the Internets is that I can present myself in different ways. This isn’t the result of a lack of integrity – you need to present different ‘selves’ if you want to engage in different kinds of dialogue." That makes perfect sense to me; I think my lack of context control was making me opt out of many potential dialogues altogether. I also feared that all the decontextualized communication was collapsing the boundaries that need to be in place for friendship to thrive. If you start seeing what friends do in their alternate contexts, they can seem less likable, or deceptive, or just not as focused on me as I narcissistically prefer them to be and can pretend they are without any evidence to the contrary. Facebook lets you see your friends consistently at their most preening, posturing, needy, and self-exploiting -- not generally their best sides, but in a Zuckerberg world, their only true side with "integrity."

It would be terrible if Facebook resold images you shared without telling you. But it would be even worse if they offered to cut you in, I think. Social media makes it seem natural and validating that one could consider selling one's snapshots to marketers and publishers so that they could be used for some commercial purpose. Social media invites you to turn your own life into a series of stock photos.

Vancouver Riots (17 June 2011)

I think this photo tells us a lot about the riots in Vancouver after the local hockey team lost game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals at home.

(Image: Anthony Bolante/Reuters)

Here we have a photographer taking a picture of a bemused-looking videographer as a car burn picturesquely in the background. The destruction was devoid of political purpose, but this photo seems to convey it as a collective expression of the citizens' desire to put themselves into a recordable moment. The semi-iconic photo of a couple making out in the street as the world burns (authenticity questions -- addressed here) reinforces the impression that the riot was primarily a stage set for striking images of quirky individuals expressing their dynamism in the streets rather than challenging anything about the existing order. Rioting, we learn from these images, is mainly about getting good souvenirs of one's participation. When rioting, you should be sure to be fully yourself and make sure you take lots of pictures. (It's worth looking at these photos of the riots in Greece for a contrast. That is how "bad riots" go down in distant, less privileged places, as opposed to the party out of control atmosphere here in the first world.)

That seems like a pretty good way of ultimately neutralizing the political potential of riots, not merely because it reduces the collective aspect to pretense rather than the end result (solidarity is not forged but dissipated) but because it embeds street protest in the heart of a self-surveillance ideology. Writing for McLean's, Andrew Potter makes the point that "Any proper discussion of the riot and why it occurred has to start with the recognition that rioting, especially for young men, is a huge amount of fun." Rioters just need to know that a bunch of other rioters will be around -- they need a known occasion and an accepted focal point for where to start, flash mob style -- and then they are off: "Particular events, like Stanley Cup Game Sevens, become natural social focal points for “reliable riots” — or reliable opportunities to riot.... Once a city becomes a known focal point for rioting, then a bunch of people show up to just to riot (indeed, they will even travel great distances to do so), precisely because they know that a bunch of other people are also going to be showing up to riot."

The best way to fight that, he notes, is to use images and video of the riot, some of which can be culled from social media, to prosecute enough people for their behavior to make subsequent rioters think twice. Potter writes: "The Vancouver police are currently gathering videos and images of the rioters and crowdsourcing their identities. They won’t catch everyone, but they will probably identify enough people that it will serve as a huge deterrent to future riots."

I think there is something generally applicable about this apparent contradiction, in that we apparently enjoy the perks of self-surveillance and exhibitionism as emblems of our spontaneity enough to forget how they may eventually be used against us.

The Situation Room Photo (3 May 2011)

The instantly iconic photo of the Situation Room reminds me of Thomas Eakins's masterpiece, The Gross Clinic.

As Rex Hammock points out, the intensity of the Situation Room photo has something to do with Hillary Clinton's eyes, which make a stark contrast with the woman's eyes we don't see in The Gross Clinic. The faces of Gross and Obama make for another evocative comparison, though the bloody scalpel in Obama's hand is only implied by context.

Detroit Ruin Porn (20 Jan 2011)

John Patrick Leary's essay in Guernica magazine about Detroit "ruin porn" -- images of decaying, abandoned buildings; of familiar contemporary types of places turned eerily desolate -- is well worth reading. As Leary notes, these images tap into an archeological fantasy that allows viewers to imagine they have survived the apocalypse, rather than confront the truth that they are living in the midst of it, the turbulent and unruly transition to a globalized, postindustrial order. Ruin porn allows us to believe that we are not the victims of the chaotic upheaval; it even offers the hopeful sense that all the requisite suffering is in the past. Leary points out that one rarely sees humans in these photos.

So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city.

Viewers have no stake in the city's survival or the ongoing struggle to halt the decline; instead the ruin photos drive us inward and invite us to regard what we see as the majestic and irrevocable result of cosmic entropy, an emblem of the vanity of human wishes. Time is cast as the enemy, as the photos depoliticize the consequences of so much negligence and malfeasance, of exploitation and broken promises.

Of course, if one really wants to enjoy the apocalypse as sublime entertainment, one should plan to visit the recently reopened Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion (sometimes translated, more fittingly perhaps, as the "zone of alienation"). "It is very moving and interesting and a beautiful monument to technology gone awry," says Mary Mycio, who wrote a book about the zone. Who doesn't want a monument to out-of-control technology? It lets us think we are always ultimately in control of it. Detroit's ruin porn seeks to cast the city as a kind of zone of exclusion, an anomaly, a disaster area that can be cordoned off form the real America of prosperous innovation and heroic entrepreneurs and can-do strivers. But the reality is that entrepreneurs and innovation always leaves a trail of destruction somewhere else, and these images, as Leary suggests, fail to evoke the causal chain.

No photograph can adequately identify the origins for Detroit’s contemporary ruination; all it can represent is the spectacular wreckage left behind in the present, after decades of deindustrialization, housing discrimination, suburbanization, drug violence, municipal corruption and incompetence, highway construction, and other forms of urban renewal have taken their terrible tolls.

The photos license our indifference to the entire question. Leary writes that "ruin photos suggest a vanquished, even glorious past but, like the ruins themselves, present no way to understand our own relationship to the decline we are seeing," but they probably do worse, they suggest such understanding would be an irritating distraction to the decadent beauty.

Ruin photos speak to our desperate desire to have our world re-enchanted. We want the banal structures and scenes of our everyday life dignified by the patina of decay, so that we can imagine ourselves as noble, mythic Greeks and Romans to a later age and, more important, so that we can better tolerate the frequently shoddy and trite material culture that consumerism foists on us, see it once again as capable of mystery. We carry our own personal zone of alienation wherever we go, but seeing the familiar world of our everyday life in ruins externalizes that alienation, makes it seem as though we've exorcised it like a devil. We become larger than this life, than these dentist's offices and deserted boardrooms Leary notes in the photos. We will survive it all, we will outlast the mediocrity that made us.

Family photos as entertainment (11 May 2009)

Over the past few days, several sources have linked to this site, Awkward Family Photos. I couldn't resist looking through them, but I wondered at the weird enjoyment the site offered. I felt sort of ashamed looking at them, creepily voyeuristic. It's not clear that the people in the photos were the ones submitting them to the site (though that is probably the case with most of them) and this ambiguity makes me feel mean to be snickering. The site seems to want to capitalize on the premise that we all feel somewhat uncomfortable with our families, in the midst of them, being forced to surrender our nonfamily identity to merge with them. After all, aren't all staged family photos awkward? How could they possibly not be? What is comfortable and natural about family life is fluid, inherently casual, intimate, hard to define and convey. With formal photos, someone is always imposing their ideal or the image they wish to project to the outside world onto the rest of the family, who must subordinate their individuality. Worse, some of the other family members might rebel against the conceit of the photo and make embarrassing gestures at rebellion within the camera frame when the only successful rebellion would be to refuse to participate at all. So family photos inevitably become a record of these failed attempts to truly break away, or to truly accept one's family for what it is. It's very unlikely that there will be an occasion at which everyone who is obliged to pose is at peace with the circumstances and with their role in the family. Perhaps familial love is all about that tension -- between wanting to escape and wanting to be perfectly accepted.

So I guess the familiarity of that awkward feeling of not fitting in but also not opting out anchors our reactions to Awkward Family Photos, which then either provide comforting confirmation that everyone else's families are odd and awkward also, or give us a chance to gloat over the people who seem to have it even worse than we do. But generally, it is best not to judge what is going on within the obscure internal logic of other people's families. A lot of what seems perfectly natural to us in our own families will look to others like what's happening in the photos on the site.

Ain't gonna hang no picture frame (13 Jan 2009)

Rob Walker recently posted about Polaroid's efforts to survive in the digital-camera era. It now intends to offer the PoGo, a digital camera that comes with a built in printer. Judging by the AP review Walker cites, both the camera and printer are somewhat rudimentary, yielding small, low-res prints. This, Walker suspects, will prove to be a feature rather than a bug, since "the imperfections and limitations of actual Polaroid pictures were, in a way, part of their appeal."

This got me thinking about photos as artifacts, as specific objects that acquire a patina. Part of what makes photos worth saving is not their content alone, the image itself, but also the history that the object itself accumulates as it becomes like a heirloom. And as printing an image becomes more onerous and unnecessary, old photos seem to become valuable in and of themselves, as souvenirs of lost technologies, like old 78s or rotary phones. I wouldn't want to take the photos I have in box, scan them all, and throw them away (as I did with my CDs after I ripped them to my hard drive). The physical collection has a gravity to it that would be lost and would probably become inconceivable if it were digitized. Handling the objects seems to affect the feelings I have about what I am seeing. (I feel the same way about my long-since-scattered record collection, sacrificed because of NYC-apartment space constraints.) Paging through photo albums, too, is utterly different than scrutinizing image pools online. (This line of thinking makes me wonder if I should print my blog out and bind it, stick it with my college notebooks.)

With actual printed photos, there is a sense that something delicate and ineffable has managed to survive, a small miracle amidst the rampant image destruction we experience in our disposable culture. They seem to have an occult power, as pictures in lockets sometimes seem portentous, mystically imbued with significance. Digitization, though, puts photos in the same category with flickering TV images, meant to be consumed and forgotten after being experienced as entertainment. A physical archive seems to put them in a category with paintings, which invite us to take the time for contemplation. Digital photos are pushing prints further into the rarefied realm of fine art, the audience for them will most likely become reduced to those with the appropriate cultural capital -- the aesthetic appreciation training and so on.

Anyway, as a result of all this, I find digital-image frames strange and sad. Would you really stop to contemplate an image in a digital frame? Particularly one that will rotate new images into view like the billboards on bus shelters rotate ads? A certain contempt for memory seems to be built in to this technology. It encourages us to regard nothing framed as permanent, and by extension it prompts us to consider every impulse we might have to frame and preserve a particular image as provisional. The disregard for permanence embodied in such devices as this may establish a kind of material base for institutionalized forgetting. (I typed that sentence a few minutes ago, and now have come back to this and have no idea what I was getting at. Talk about forgetting.) History could be effaced, 1984-style, but worse, we could be convinced by the sorts of things we have in our culture that we shouldn't even bother with memories. (When people from my high school who I never talked to contact me through Facebook as though we were friends, I have this sense that memory is already under attack -- technology affords such interconnectivity that it seems to undermine the finality of choices made in the past, as though they never happened.) There may be no reason to automatically assume that memory preservation is inherently important to us. Given the right conditions, and a certain kind of society fixated on novelty, we could end up with every incentive to try to forget as much as possible, and have new images in our digital frames on a quarter-hourly basis.

Photographs as heirlooms (22 August 2007)

With the digital cameras relatively cheap and ubiquitous, it may be that the printed photograph will start to assume some of the qualities vinyl LPs have taken on in recent years. The new ones being made seem hokey and anachronistic, while the authentic old ones have acquired an aura, have become rare, on the cusp of vanishing completely. Of course, there will always be fine-art photography, and people who school themselves in the arcane arts of the darkroom, but it seems that we should be beginning to mourn the death of the clumsy amateur snapshot, now that any images haphazardly captured digitally can be cleaned up after the fact by anyone who has downloaded Picasa. Already, the idea that we once had strips of negatives to go with our pictures seems as peculiar as the idea of having recorded answering machine messages on little tapes; yet the analog qualities of the film medium seem more recognizable than ever, more legible -- odd to think that photography was once regarded as a near-transparent medium, now that digital photography has supplanted it, providing even more convenience and immediacy. Since we have arrived at the end of the photographic-film era, we know that the amount of legitimate snapshots -- ones taken in full knowledge that snapping the shutter had real consequences in the the physical universe, that an image would be burned onto a surface, and film and money would be wasted if the frame was poorly composed -- is now officially finite; this makes that corpus of browning pictures in family albums seem exceedingly rare, much more like heirlooms, irreplaceable antiques. Our children will have absolutely nothing like them to pass on to their children. Sure, they'll have digital archives of many, many more images of themselves and their loved ones, but somehow, I can't help but feeling (with the bias of one whose way of life is rapidly becoming moribund) they will have captured less. Already it seems like real pictures, from film, have more soul -- just as the scratches on a jazz record make the music seem more intimate and true.

Now that there is no cost to capturing a digital image -- if the image bores or doesn't turn out, it can be deleted without a second thought. This has the effect of making old prints of accidents, mistakes, and faulty exposures seem suddenly precious, as they have become an endangered species. I have always been attracted to these discards -- pictures of just streaks of color, or of an accidental landscape, or of someone's finger over the lens -- but now I feel like there's even a greater urgency to gathering them up. (I used to find such shots on the street routinely, in drug-store parking lots or inside library books; now I never come across them.) When no one uses film, no one will make these serendipitous images of nothing in particular and nothing intended that somehow, because of that, capture something integral about the ephemeral nature of our existence in our media-saturated moment in time. I can't be the only person who feels this way. Maybe I should do a search for the sites of people who have scanned in their botched, blurred and poorly developed snapshots and made photo sets out of them.