Death or Birth (just a comment I read on Facebook)

Somebody wrote:

‘OK, Kodak’s dead…..and why is it, with the exception of a handful of shooters, none of the photographers who excelled in my generation are working, and why is it that no one really cares? I can think of 40 names, even more from the 80’s who were young at that time…. I am doing far better work that I ever was when I was getting MONTH long gigs from LIFE and I can’t sniff a good job? Seriously folks, something is way out of whack in all of this…’

Someone replied:

There are broadly two types of photographer – one says ‘everyones a photographer’ with a sneer, the other says ‘everyones a photographer’ with a tone of excitement and wonder. Or maybe there’s a third, someone who says ‘everyones a photographer’ with utter bewilderment, because I have a hard time keeping up with it these days.

But more people taking more pictures is not, and can never be a bad thing IMO. Bearing in mind photography is one of the most democratic art forms ever invented – thanks largely to Kodak funnily enough – the difference in underlying attitude is quite telling, in that it measures the photographers ideas about their audience, and their assumption as to where they are in ‘the pecking order of things’. Most of us have seen the massive trend in photography towards universality and democratization – from the iPhone, to Flickr, to people in the Middle East chucking samizdat videos and pictures around.

But there has been another trend, largely ignored – and that is the increasing tendency of photographers to cleave towards the (largely self proclaimed) ‘elite’ – political, economic, cultural.

Of course the argument would be that they’re simply following their rational economic self interest, in the light of tanking ‘old skool’ revenue streams. But its funny how it also uncannily enforces the dog-whistle tone of vanity and desperation that has always sat just under the surface of the business.

As the mass money dries up, there is a trend to aspire to be closer to the Versailles salon of the Sun King. From riding on the back of a Pentagon war machine subsidy, picking up grants from uber-hedge fund mega-predators or corporate lobby foundation fronts, becoming the in-house photographer for ‘1 Percent Monthly’ magazine, to simply engaging in a seemingly endless ponzi scheme-esque money-go-round: I grant you, you bursary him, he awards her, she judging panels him, he workshops them…and round we go again.

Until it ends up on the wall of a disused church, viewed by a hermetically sealed bubble of like-minded peers, in a southern French city where the unemployment rate is 30 percent.

Or maybe they don’t do any of that, but simply pine for a Golden Era when the non-digital barriers to entry meant they were Ozymandias, King of Kings. And of course the prevailing photographic view was euphemistically called ‘Western’, but was in fact, mostly American, British, maybe a bit o ‘French. The rest of the World was their cultural playground.

It was great while it lasted I suppose. It will never, EVER come back.

The crashing irony is everybody is talking about Kodachrome like it was fine wine, when the reality was, it WASN’T. It was Spam, and manufactured by the giga-ton to be consumed like Spam by people who would genuinely value their family snaps a damn sight more than some here-today-birdcage-liner-tomorrow feature in some glossy mag.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming this is a rant against particular photographers, many of whom are astonishingly talented genuine artists, and like many, I think its a crying shame they can’t pursue their vision with the limited degree of independence they once had.

It’s the trend thats entirely retrograde IMO, and I just think they’re on the wrong end of the curve. Its a move away from the mass audience we were supposed to engage with. It’s why for example, the two most photographed wars in history have left the majority audience virtually totally ignorant, and arguably voting for economic and political policies that will cast them into an abyss.

Thats only one of many epic failures on our part, and I don’t blame the audience at all for viewing what we pursue with a fair degree of contempt. They’re tired of being patronised, so they’ve seized the tools and made their own media. The quicker we get out of the way, the better.

There is a very small number of photographers who ‘get it’, and who are engaging with grassroots audiences as peers and fellow collaborators (instead of the Old Skool ‘Attention Peasants! I bring you truth! Now shut the fuck up and take it’ model) using the very same tools available to the audience – digital capture, social media. I think its a hopeful sign and wish them every success.

As for the rest? As I’m now working on a picture desk and training people, I’m now largely part of the audience now more than I was, and find myself tending towards thinking as they do (in my case the audience is in SE Asia).

I really don’t pay a huge amount of attention to the Washington Consensus salon-monkey media anymore. The world is just moving past them.