Photos Leave Home

The Intimate Public Sphere

2005-12-01T07:48:00.000-08:00

This is a description of the paper I'm writing for Lauren Berlant's "Intimate Public Sphere" class, and which (not coincidentally) presses on with the work of my photography project. It begins...

There is something that today's ordinary photography—all of our clamorous photos of cats and parties and weddings and babies and torture, so visible of late—wants to say about itself, about its busy public life. Susan Sontag came closest to divining it, but ends up being haunted by it; haunted by the specter of a photography-become-omnipresent. For Sontag, omnipresence was the contemporary condition of photographs (that is, a new condition), and an ominous one. On Photography sets out to articulate "some of the problems, aesthetic and moral, posed by the omnipresence of photographed images." The book swerves from this theme to provide an ontology of photographs and an ethics of photography, two thematic interests whose collective effect is to exile omnipresence to a position external to photographs, something which gets imposed by a process of history. As if to say: omnipresent is what photographs have become, not what they should be. And in that becoming lies the problem of contemporary life that most vexed Sontag (the becoming-distant of culture, the becoming-omnipresent of apathy). In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag's last book, omnipresence—although the term there, and in her essays on the Abu Ghraib photographs, has become "ubiquity"—is still discussed as a condition of photography, but the ethics here soften. Maybe there is hope yet for a radical photography, for a photography which is not merely parasitic upon life. Sontag's hesitant re-valuation of omnipresence is the fulcrum for her re-valuation of the ethics of photography.

Is it clear what has become omnipresent here, in Sontag's work or in any of the recent work on photography which flies all around the subject of omnipresence but never quite lands (Manovich, Slater, Sekula, WJ Mitchell)? Is it clear what an omnipresent photography makes knowable and what it forces into secrecy? Whether that omnipresence is a becoming or a being? In any case, two contemporary phenomena, one as grotesque as the other is banal, seem to literalize some part of Sontag's concern: on the side of the remarkably unremarkable are photoblogs, flickr.com, and commercial photography sites like kodakgallery.com and shutterfly.com, witnesses to an eruption of intimate photography, out of photo albums and into visibility; on the side of the grotesquely banal are the Abu Ghraib photographs, through which banality erupts as a traumatic event. Considering these two phenomena of contemporary photography together, the work of this essay is to begin ramifying the notion of an omnipresent photography. What does it mean to say that photography is omnipresent, ubiquitous, or—the concept I would add to Sontag's terms, borrowing from Michael Warner and his theory of publics—circulatory? What potentials are opened up, for analysis, for action, if we consider omnipresence not as the lamentable state of contemporary photography, but as some part of its code, its ontology? My broadest interest is to understand how ordinary photography, considered in its omnipresence, potentializes new forms of public life and public knowing.

Ubiquity Again

2005-11-25T22:03:00.000-08:00

I keep coming back and back to this as the pivot point of Sontag's work on photography:

If there is something comparable to what these pictures [Abu Ghraib] show it would be some of the photographs - collected in a book entitled Without Sanctuary - of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, respectable citizens, grinning, beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

If there is a difference, it is a difference created by the increasing ubiquity of photographic actions. The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies - taken by a photographer, in order to be collected, stored in albums; displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib reflect a shift in the use made of pictures - less objects to be saved than evanescent messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession of most soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers - recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities - and swapping images among themselves, and emailing them around the globe.

[This essay is reproduced all over; I got it here]

The idea of ubiquity feels so highly charged in Sontag's work because it's the very quality (although I think a "quality" is what ubiquity has become; Sontag originally analyzed it as more of a phenomena) that most exercised her about photography in her first book on the subject. And clearly, in this later work, she is still worried about it. But in Regarding the Pain of Others, she starts to acknowledge that photographs can do positive political work, transformative work (they can also be made to do reactionary work; often, as Sontag describes, the same photographs get mobilized towards diametrically opposed political goals). I think her reassessment around this point is related to a reassessment of her feelings about ubiquity, the fact that images are everywhere, that they now seem to retain everywhereness as a kind of quality (like indexicality and tonality are qualities).

[This is the point I want to elaborate in a paper I've started this quarter]

Media, Culture & Society v. 26(6) 2005

2005-11-07T22:22:00.000-08:00

Finally

Photoblogs = Art

2005-11-05T08:24:00.000-08:00

New York City Photoblogger's Group Show, "New Work, New York"

Thanks to Caitlin for the reference.

Something for you Cult Studs

2005-10-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

[hey, that last post wasn't about photographs! what gives. And, hey, this one isn't either. But the next one will be.]

Anyone catch Habermas' little parenthetical definition of "culture" wedged into the final section ("25. A Sociological Attempt at Clarification") of Structural Transformation?

"...culture (which as a kind of historical sediment can be considered a type of primordial 'opinion' or 'prejudice' that probably has scarely undergone any change in its social-psychological structure)..." (p. 245).

Nerdy, I know, to have noticed it. But, interesting. A primordial opinion.

Mis-integration

2005-10-23T16:09:00.000-07:00

I love the logic at work behind Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's How I Learned (1-4); I love the work it does.

Of course, the piece works best in its own fields of engagement (art, galleries, television, popular culture, how-to manuals, &c.). But reading it opportunistically (tactically), I think this is a logic that might be borrowed to good effect in academic work. A lot of academic work uses a similar logic of dis-integration (deconstruction is probably the best known of these, but much theory, I'd say, is dis-integrative). But I can't think of any that employs, subsequent to the dis-integrative act, such an orthongonal and productive strategy of re-integration, rendered as mis-integration.

Doesn't it seem to you that the various How To compilations that Jennifer and Kevin McCoy assemble (HOW TO FEEL ANGUISH, HOW TO SPEAK IN APHORISMS, HOW TO APPRECIATE PEACEFUL MUSIC, HOW TO BE DISSAPPOINTED, HOW TO BE EVIL, HOW TO BE OBSERVANT) were there in the original Kung Fu series all along? Isn't playful mis-integration a form of criticism? I also like it as an alternative to what Eve Sedgwick calls paranoid reading, which she identifies as the most common critical tactic of academic work, which basically turns on an act of revelation (...you think it works like this, it actually works like this...). If How I Learned (1-4) is an act of revelation, it's an extremely perverse one.

[As I have so many times, I lean here on the exquisite eye of Thomson and Craighead and the exquisite curatorship of Sarah Cook.]

Chicago Touchdown

2005-09-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

So far it feels like a continuation of my recent work (classes start next week):

1. "The Intimate Public Sphere"
Instructor: Berlant, Lauren
Public sphere and feminist/queer theory have opened up critical strategies for thinking about the cultural politics of adaptation and transgression in the development of collective identifications. The first half of the course will track these two trajectories using US "women's culture" as its main historical scene: here, the course provides an arena for studying the aesthetic production and imagination of subjects in everyday life, the "ordinary," the capitalist and political spheres. The second half will focus on the articulation of sex and politics in everyday and mass institutions of intimacy. We will begin by reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and will move through suffrage and into modern and contemporary elaborations of this structure, focusing on melodrama and comedy. Seminar paper and presentation required.

2. "Public and Private in Modern Europe 1"
Instructor: Goldstein, Jan
This course will begin with a consideration of the very different theoretical perspectives of Habermas (Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere) and Foucault (Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality, vol. 1) on the reciprocal construction of the public and private spheres, or of regimes of power and modes of selfhood, in the modern West. It will then look at a body of recent historiography, some of it directly inspired by Habermas or Foucault, that treats aspects of these same general topics in Europe in the period, roughly, 1750-1914. Topic to be considereed include the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, the creation of a public for painting, and legislation on the family during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. While the course will emphasize France, it will also include material on other European countries, especially Germany and Britain. Students taking the course as a two-quarter seminar are required to have a reading knowledge of the language of the country on which they will write their research paper; there is no foreign language requirement for students taking the course a one-quarter colloquium.

3. "History of International Cinema I: Silent Era"
Instructor: Tsivian, Yuri
This is the first part of a two-quarter course. The two parts may be taken individually, but taking them in sequence is helpful. The aim of this course is to introduce students to what was singular about the art and craft of silent film. Its general outline is chronological; we will also discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.

And I'll be auditing these:

"Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies"
Instructor: Hansen, Miriam
This course offers an introduction to ways of reading, writing on, and teaching film. The focus of discussion will range from methods of close analysis and basic concepts of film form, technique and style; through industrial/critical categories of genre and authorship (studios, stars, directors); through aspects of the cinema as a social institution, psycho-sexual apparatus and cultural practice; to the relationship between filmic texts and the historical horizon of production and reception. Films discussed will include works by Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock, Deren.

"Reason and Its Histories"
Instructor: Daston, Lorraine
Description:Historicism allegedly corrodes all it touches: moral values are relativized to this time or that place; truth shrinks to a time-bound set of beliefs. Yet science, the strongest modern candidate for rationality, is dizzyingly historical. New theories and empirical finds replace old ones at breakneck speed. This course explores the implications of the history of science for ideas of reason, history, and their interaction, from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. Readings include works by Bacon, Descartes, Condorcet, Kant, Comte, Nietzsche, Poincare, and Husserl. Undergraduates admitted with permission of instructor.

[btw (big news in a small place): I've moved (back) to Chicago. I've started the PhD program in Art History at the University of Chicago. My paid time on my ESRC grant is almost up, but I'll be working on the papers for the rest of the year. At least.]

Publics, Markets

2005-09-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

Many people (e.g. 1, 2, 3) believe that publics work like marketplaces.

Dogs, Cats, Mappr, Hamster

2005-09-01T03:45:00.000-07:00

I'm working on the paper which is addressed more to a sociological audience and I'm encountering a problem in the writing which is probably, actually, THE (social, cultural, photographic) problem the paper itself is trying to describe and do justice to. Right now, there is very little about my argument this is specific to photography. It could, at this point, as easily be about blogs. And that's fine, insofar as I see much in common between online photography and blogs (I see them as part of the same political moment), and insofar as I've been writing about blogs as well. But it's a shame, insofar as I believe the public for photography functions differently than the public for blogs or vlogs or del.icio.us links or audioscrobbler or etc. In other words, it seems like I'm losing an opportunity to talk about how publics work, specifically, in relation to photographs (something which many people have addressed, although rarely in those terms, e.g. Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin are two famous photographic commentators whose central concerns were, in a way, the promises and risks of a photographic public).

I'm able to talk about photographs and photography as they exist discursively, in the various literatures about them. The problem is, I can't figure out how to talk about the specificity of a single photograph, in a way which accounts for its representational, pictorial, compositional or aesthetic qualities—when, and this is the key aspect, when that photograph is networked (posted online). All the models available to me seem inadequate. Which is exactly what I'm trying to write about: viz. how photographs function, once they are networked, once they go public. But, so, then, if I'm right about that, how do I deal with images? Specific, engaging, strange, ordinary, banal, everyday images. Like this one, my favourite photo on all of Flickr. Anything I think to say about a photograph seems absolutely impoverished by all the possible uses to which that photograph might be put, later, on down the line of its public existence. Like mappr. And hamster soduko. And flickr city.

Photographic analysis, pictorial analysis, as I know it, seems to rely entirely on representational accounts, accounts which in the main look backwards, into the past of a photo, and those just aren't working for me at all. They seem to close their eyes to all possible uses, relegating them to that maligned realm of mere utility. Or trying to account for them all in that magnanimous gesture of identifying a diverse, unpredictable, powerful readership and multiple interpretations. But what is IN an image, what an image is made OF, has to matter. Images of cats circulate differently—instigate different publics— than images of dogs.

[Thanks to not_susan for helping me "nut this out" or "...through." Which is it Australians? "Nut it out" or "nut it through"? The devil is in the prepositions you know.]

Where is the Universal, and What is its Scale?

2005-08-23T03:58:00.000-07:00

A lot of people told me that for a photograph to deserve public viewing (publicity), it had to address itself to "universal themes." Conventionally, the "universal," referred to this way, means sunsets (signifying time, endings, transitions) or an old man's wrinkled hands (signifying age or time or passage). In theory, the "universal" could be anything. In practice, it tends to gather around images which give themselve easily to an available symbolism and which (thereby) erase any trace of the personal.

One thing being said, when someone equates "universal" themes with the right to exist in public, is that images defined as personal (because we haven't known what else to call them? because they embarrass us with their intimacy?) do not deserve publics, or public viewing. Pictures of cats online bear the brunt of this prohibition now. But only slightly less vehemently prohibited are images of birthday parties or holidays in the Grand Canyon or friends out drinking. Of course, Art always redeems the image which is too personal to exist in public; if the tourist image is artful enough, we can forgive its presence before us, in our flickr stream or wherever. We say that the photograph's Artfulness gives us access to it, where, by contrast, the personal blocks this access, bars the way.

But flickr (for instance) does something interesting in this regard. It does not envelop the image as Art does, excusing its publicity by effacing its intimacy. Flickr, it seems to me, strips an image of none of its intimacy. Just the opposite: all images stay embedded within a single person's—the photographer's—narrative, or life, or "photo stream." They may escape into groups or the horizontal vector of a tag, but you can always and easily get back to the individual who took the photo and to whom, presumably, it means something (or, to whom it meant something first). But something else happens at the same time as this intimacy is preserved: through various vectors like tags and groups and memes, photographs escape into a public. Which is to say, I suppose (if we're far more liberal with our definition of "universal" than most uses tend to be), that these images, these minor, intimate, sometimes banal, sometimes ordinary, sometimes humblingly poignant images become universal. Publicly meaningful. Or just: public. And we, as a result, gain more points of entree to intimacy. The intimacy of an image or a life we don't know.

Three Perspectives on the 'Digital' in Digital Photography

2005-08-13T05:42:00.000-07:00

William A Ewing (2005): "Digitalisation is changing everything to do with photography. It alters the way we—amateurs and professionals alike—take pictures and the way we look at them. It changes how we pose for them, how we edit them, manipulate them, archive them—even the degree to which we are willing to place our trust in them." ("Movers and Fakers" in Guardian Weekend, 13 Aug 2005).

Lev Manovich (1995): "How fundamental is this difference [between digital and "traditional, lens and film based photographs"]? If we limit ourselves by focusing solely, as Mitchell does, on the abstract principles of digital imaging, then the difference between a digital and a photographic image appears enormous. But if we consider concrete digital technologies and their uses, the difference disappears. Digital photography simply does not exist." ("The Paradoxes of Digital Photography" available under "texts" heading on above site. First published in _Photography After Photography_ exhibition catalog, Germany).

Don Slater (1995): "…rather than investigating a specifically media revolution, or focusing on changes in media technology under the impact of the digital, look instead at structures of domestic leisure in relation to family dynamics on the one hand, and new forms of commodification on the other. A framework for considering photography in digital culture might then involve looking not at a specific technological transformation of photography at all, but at the circulation of images within a domestic life structured around these forces of commodification and privitisation: what emerges more and more clearly are convergences of media and communication technologies in the home and on holiday but in the form of consumer leisure and entertainment” (“Domestic Photography and Digital Culture” in (ed) M. Lister _The Photographic Image in Digital Culture_, p. 133).

"Movers and Fakers:" article on new photography in Guardian Weekend

2005-08-13T05:36:00.000-07:00

*"For better or worse, the photographer as hunter has given way to the sedentary farmer."

*this is the sentence which immediately precedes the one above: "But spontaneity, surely one of the great natural attributes of the medium (cameras really can capture things the eye cannot see), is in short supply."

Looks Like the Start of Something

2005-08-10T08:50:00.000-07:00

I like when newspapers notice new internet phenomena. I like how their reporting of the phenomena-as-news makes them look just a little bit too earnest, just a little bit uninformed (especially, I'm sure, to people who have been actively engaged in that phenomena). The alternative, of course, is when they notice it (e.g. blogs) in order to throw up a big wall of resistance—typically futile, but potent at the level of public consciousness. Of course, what we're seeing when we see something like photoblogs emerge into popular newspapers isn't the newspapers noticing for the first time, it's them deciding that the phenomena merits their attention, and by proxy, the attentions of their readers, i.e. when it becomes interesting enough (and what are all the ways *that* is measured? horrific enough, popular enough, outlandish enough, queer enough, dangerous enough...which one applies to blogs and photoblogs?).

My interest in this isn't to mock newspapers (&c.) for their hoariness, it's to say that the appearance of hoariness in respect to certain topics, i.e. their awkwardness (and when do newspapers (&c.) ever look awkward? It's their business to look natural and right and authoritative in almost every situation) seems to me like a sign that here is something to notice, that something is changing in the role played by newspapers in the production of news. Anyway, I stumbled on this today while rooting around:

"Blogs as Photo Albums," NY Times February 27, 2003

It's the first mention of photoblogs in the New York Times newspaper. Photo albums? They're pretty promiscuous, for photo ablums, I'd say.

Viewing "Vanishing Point" by Mauricio Arango

2005-08-08T04:43:00.000-07:00

Viewing "Vanishing Point" by Mauricio Arango, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Photo from the launch of the aforeposted Low-fi show. This is "Vanishing Point" by Mauricio Arango (Columbia/U.S.). You can also just see James Coupe's "Difference Engine" (UK) in the background.

Low-fi: new works by international artists using networked media

2005-08-08T03:55:00.000-07:00

low-fi (a collective to which I belong) has launched its not-really-eponymous show at Stills in Edinburgh: Low-fi: new works by international artists using networked media. I mention it here because I'm a self-aggrandising egomaniac and also because I think the six artists in the show are in league with photographers who put their photographs online, in at least one interesting way. Viz. all are quite consciously and purposively materialising networks, an act which sort of splits in three: in doing so, they are 1. revealing the pre-existence of those networks, their workings 2. materialising those networks as if for the first time and 3. sitting back and seeing what happens once the network is visible and in action (because, who can predict). Photographers use photographs and cameras and computers and software and stories and links and friends and family and places; the artists in "low-fi" use (in order of the artists, as they are listed below): world maps, newspapers, scrolls + webcams, metaphysical search engines, the most popular and most hunted African animals, coffee trade routes, and live sonic input (plus, in all cases, the internet—our uber-network). Here are the show details:

6 August – 02 October 2005
Open daily 11am – 6pm

Stills, 23 Cockburn St, Edinburgh, EH1 1BP

Mauricio Arango (Colombia/US) www.low-fi.org.uk/vanishingpoint
Cavan Convery (UK) www.low-fi.org.uk/verticalscroll
James Coupe (UK) www.difference-engine.net
Radarboy (South Africa/Japan) www.radarboy.com/zoo
Kate Rich (UK) www.feraltrade.org/courier/
UK Museum of Ordure (UK) www.museum-ordure.org.uk/Audio_Library

Low-fi commissions exist to support the production of new artworks that use networked technologies. Although these artworks thrive on the internet, in this exhibition the artists use sound, projection and other methods to inhabit the physical space of the gallery. They work in tangible, engaging and sensory ways to convey ideas about our relationships with the media, technology and digital and commercial networks.

Among the works, Kate Rich forges new routes of import while Mauricio Arango's map of the world reveals how international news media is creating new cartography. James Coupe's sound installation dispenses wisdom gathered from metaphysical travels on the net, while the UK Museum of Ordure invite you to add to their gradually degrading sound files.
Throughout the exhibition, the works react and grow in response to visitors' input - unroll familiar contemporary technologies as one would ancient scrolls in Cavan Convery's Vertical Scroll and take responsibility for the maintenance of radarboy's Big Five Digital Zoo.

Low-fi is an artist collective focused on net art, mediation and distribution systems. www.low-fi.org.uk

Writing and Loving

2005-08-01T06:22:00.000-07:00

There's an irony in the fact that writing requires two processes to happen at once:

1. learning to love what you've written (writing successive versions which are ever more lovable)

and

2. cutting the great bulk of what you've written (much of which you had just come to love).

We could call it tough love. Or simply editing, which seems to demand from one all possible versions of love towards one's own writing (from tender to sado-masochistic to abusive), plus a few of the lesser and more perverse forms.

Tate Seminar on Publics

2005-07-29T05:49:00.000-07:00

One might as well not try not to sound like a broken record when, in fact, one is.

The link below is a great resource for thinking about the contemporary formation of publics, something that I've been trying to think about in the context of internet-based photography and, less directly, any number of online activities (so, I think Lawence Lessig and Eric Raymond and McKenzie Wark are all describing features of how contemporary publics work) . At the beginning of his talk, Warner declares that thinking about sexuality needs to be at the center of any conversation about publics, and then goes on to show why this perspective is so incredibly productive. You can find a record of the talks here:

Making Public Seminar 1, Tate Modern

Special note for those of my friends who are interested in affect and generational formations. Warner's entire talk is structured around the role of affect in public life, but he really gets down to it starting at minute 17. And he answers a question about (stylisations of) generational conflict at 1 hour and 17 minutes.

Fear, and the question of what disciplinary educations are good for

2005-07-13T23:10:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about my talk yesterday (which went fine, nice to meet Tim Jordan, and to see Kate O'Riordan), so I was thinking about my talk and noticing that when I write sociologically, or at least, for sociologists, I feel as though I'm charting my progress through the argument by trying, above all else, to avoid pitfalls, rather than stepping more surely, more positively. I feel defensive; and I think the writing probably betrays my defensiveness. There are probably two things I'm defending against: 1. the kinds of arguments and maxims of sociological argumentation that I don't care to heed (in other words, steering by my own interests in tension with my tolerance for that which bores me but which is probably either important or necessary) and 2. that which I probably should know (about sociological argumentation) but don't, because I never learned it, because it's not embedded deep in the strata of my education.

All of which suggests to me a reasonable (but probably no better than reasonable) answer to the question of what disciplinary educations are good for (in other words, an answer that isn't merely defensive or territorial): they create the conditions under which one, at the best of times, can step surely through an argument, following one's own interests more than a cringing, fearful sense of all which might potentially undermine one's argument (following one's interests more than one's discipline).

Me, Talk, Public, this Wednesday

2005-07-10T02:58:00.000-07:00

CRESC, Culture and Social Change: Disciplinary Exchanges, 11-13 July 2005 [scroll down to theme 2 to see my abstract]

Come along. It's easy to sneak into conferences without paying.

Once I've given the talk, I'll try to learn how to post a downloadable file here and make the script of my talk available.

Finally Something to Show

2005-07-01T03:23:00.000-07:00

I know I've mentioned this art exhibition, Day to Day Data, opening in Nottingham on July 20th, then travelling to Portsmouth in September 2005 and finally coming to London in March 2006. As far as I'm concerned, it explores many of the themes I've been exploring and wanting to explore with my photography research. Which is why it was such a gift to get commissioned to write for it (thank you Sarah Cook and Ellie Harrison).

So, the essay I wrote for the show draws strongly, if somewhat subterraneanly, from my work on this project. I consider it my first official "output" (I wonder if the ESRC will feel the same). You can find it here: "Better the Data You Know..."

Also, Sarah Cook and Ben Highmore have both written excellent essays, Highmore's dealing with the (subject) matter of everyday life and Cook's detailing some of the discussions and themes which originally galvanised the show.

Making Publics

2005-06-27T14:51:00.000-07:00

[I've been writing almost as much about publics as I have about photography, for reasons that I hope to make clear in present and future writings.] This is a public sculpture that nicely tests and voices some key ideas about how publics work (and, no doubt, fail to work).

Thanks to Jean for the link.

Some Generalisations, Part 1

2005-06-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

Here is the moment you've all been waiting for. Maybe. What is it? Generalisations! Isn't that what everyone _really_ wants from a sociological study?*

Possibly this will be useful to a few people, maybe most of all to (myself and) the people I've interviewed, many of whom have asked me for a list like this. Because I'm writing this primarily with you all in mind, probably I should use "you" instead of the more impersonal "they" in the list below, but that doesn't seem quite right either. Please forgive, if you can, how impersonal and social scientific it sounds.

So, here it is: a long, largely un-substantiated, highly generalised list of characteristics or behaviours that the people I've interviewed (you all) have in common. They're not all going to sound revelatory; in fact, by their very nature as commonalities, they should be familar to most people. Then again, my impression from talking to people is that they are not at all sure how "typical" they are, or where their practices converge and diverge from others' practices. I guess that's the first commonality in my list. So, I present them in all their underwhelming glory.

I've interviewed about 80 people in all, over 2.5 years, with about 95% living in the UK and far more than half living in London. Pretty nearly equal numbers of men and women. Approx. 55/80 people upload their photos primarily to blogs (although many have more than one site); approx. 25/80 people upload their photos primarily to flickr.com. These 80 people are the grammatical subject of all the following clauses. Important note: I really have no idea how generalisable the following are to the population outside the 80 people I've met. Others will be better judges of that than I am. Ok, here goes, in no very significant order.

Imagine that each of the following begins with: "Out of 80 people, some relatively large number..."

-migrate over time from being interested in what photography can show to being interested in photography as an activity in and of itself

-feel as though they steadily become better (more skilled) photographers through the period of taking photos and uploading them to the internet

-start to carry their camera(s) with them all the time, wherever they go

-take a lot more photos as a (direct or indirect) consequence of posting photographs to the internet

-tend to bristle or quail at the word “photographer,” at the suggestion that this is a name that might apply to them

-shy away from portrait photography and shots of strangers

-occasionally or frequently go on journeys or walks with the sole or primary purpose of taking photographs

-begin to change their photographic practices significantly when they get their first digital camera (more photos, more interest in showing those photos, more interest in photography as such)

-like to go on long walks

-are more interested in “urban grit” than pastoral landscapes; are more interested in "gritty" landscapes than bucolic ones

-prefer to shoot alone

-have most of their conversations about photography through the internet (in comment fields and discussion forums); that is, tend not to have very many offline friends (friends who they mostly see offline or who they got to know offline) with whom they talk about photography

-have done most of their learning about photography online, by looking at other people’s photos and participating in discussions—rather than learning through offline courses. This is far more of a self-taught than an institutional form of education, but it’s not really quite either one

-see most of the photographs they encounter (other people’s photos) on the internet—not in galleries or books

-say they are selective about the photos they put online (in other words, apply some standards; but this comment is about the fact of selectiveness and not the types of standards people apply; these are more variable)

-say that their blog or website or photographs are mostly done for themselves (for their own pleasure and not an audience’s pleasure)

-(nevertheless) are conscious of having an audience comprised of some known people (friends, family) and some strangers (a group which varies in size according to one’s imaginative tendencies and the amount of comments one gets from strangers)

-have comment fields enabled and actively read them

-feel obliged to respond to most of the comments they receive

-eventually become inured to the compliments they receive for their photos

-have more than one personal website

-are skeptical about making photography into a paid activity. Two reasons: 1. because most fear that being paid or trying to get paid will fundamentally change how they feel about photography if not about the photographs themselves (most like how they feel about it as an unpaid activity) and 2. because most know that the market for photographers is stingy and closed

-(nevertheless) have ideas about how to make money with their photographs

-say that taking photographs helps them to see the world differently

[this is just a start; more to come]

*The status of generalisations is something that's in question in this project. Why? Because it's generally good practice to question the process of generalising, but more importantly, because I think the topic of my research, itself, puts that process into question (i.e. in a sense, what I've been studying is the relationship of the single photographer to the mass of photographers, the single photograph to the mass of photographs--that is an issue of generalisation, or more specifically, trying to thwart the tendencies of generalisation).

Ochlocracy in action

2005-06-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

"Remixing the blogosphere"

2005-06-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

Remixing the Blogosphere, The Guardian, 09.06.05

All in all, a surprisingly wide-ranging and copyleft-friendly article. But I'm still going to quibble.

The article's narrative backbone is that "online independent media hubs" represent an advance over blogs. Specifically, the writer (Danny Bradbury), influenced by Clemencia Rodriguez (associate professor in the Department of Communications at Oklahoma University), thinks that hubs are more communal, more collective, more collaborative and therefore create a better kind of public. Rodriguez says that: "Blogs suffer from their individualistic nature...'Ninety per cent of them will never find their audience, because information and communication has to do with being part of a collective.'"

It's hard to believe that notions of community, collabortion, and collectivity still need to be subtended by an enabling notion of centrality. Aren't people watching how blogs work? How Flickr works?

I don't have a problem with the hubs they discuss, many of which seem pretty interesting (and some of which are less centralised and centralising than others), but I think if we use the emergence of media hubs as evidence that blogs and flickr sites and all manner of "individualistic" media are a primitive and already-superannuated form of public action, we are going to lose an opportunity to see how these sites of individualistic activity foster (although not causally or cumulatively) pluralistic activity. To me, this is one of the most significant and exciting aspects of blogs and their various individualistic media siblings; the article obscures this aspect in its praise for centralised hubs as the natural evolution of blogs and all independent media.

No Longer Greek to Me

2005-06-04T16:04:00.000-07:00

ochlocracy

Anti-Determinist* before it was cool to be anti-determinist

2005-06-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

"The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful. Their instrumentality is understood exclusively in this anthropocentric sense. But the instrumentality of tools and implements is much more closely related to the object it is designed to produce, and their sheer 'human value' is restricted to the use the animal laborans** makes of them. In other words, homo faber***, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not—at least, not primarily—to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things." —Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 151.

I like Arendt's re-direction here. To evaluate technologies on the basis of their ability to make human life better obscures the question of "better for whom." Her focus on "world-making" (in addition to being close to Warner's definition of publics as "world-making") admits of a broader, better set of conversations. We could say, then, that Arendt's concept of technology is more public (in Habermas' sense of a public discussion which opens to debate the very bases of discussion, the presuppositions, the biases, etc.—in contrast, for instance, to PR (or a techno-determinist account of technology) which stages a semblance of debate while obscuring the assumptions upon which that debate rests). Although I think her distinction between animal laborans and homo faber now seems at best a bit arbitary and at worst completely misleading.

*Determinist, or, Techno-determinist: a techno-centric view of the world, as embodied, for instance, in the U.S.'s infamous Star Wars initiative, a missle defense system designed to keep America safe from nuclear attack. The techno-determinist aspect of this initiative is to think that all one has to do is build this massively expensive machine and as a simple result, all Americans will be safe. But, of course, there are a set of very political and very complex reasons why America might think it needs a missle defense system in the first place (which are completely unaddressed, even elided, by the idea of the saviour machine) as well as a set of very political and very complex consequenes of building such a machine, the least of which would be that Americans are safe.

**animal laborans: the animal who labors; this is Arendt's way of talking about the part of us which has to labor to serve our most basic needs (i.e. eating and reproduction). This is an important term for her because, in the history of discussions about publics, it has often been argued that in order to be properly public (political, communal, engaged, etc.) one has to have distance from one's baser needs and the labor required to serve them. But Arendt is, at best, ambivalent about the concept because she recognises, at the most fundamental level, that we cannot ignore the body, and that (therefore) one cannot simply remove the need to labor (Marx, for instance, famously argued that the Revolution would bring about the end of the need to labor).

***homo faber: Arendt's term of that part of humans which works (as opposed to labors) to build tools which create the world, i.e. the things, the cities, the culture that is the world.

The Eye of the Dead Man* (19th c. Photography, Copyright and the Law)

2005-05-31T03:51:00.000-07:00

"Prior to the 1890s, [American] courts generally held that the photographic subject was protected from the unauthorized reproduction and sale of their portraits, a ruling that put an odd spin on questions of ownership, copyright, and commodification.[21] The ability to restrain the unauthorized reproduction of one's image was not founded upon the right to 'privacy' (a distinctly American legal concept that would not come into use until the end of the century), but, as this 1884 quotation from the Chicago Legal Times demonstrates, upon the principle of vested ownership in one's image. 'So, if a likeness, once lawfully taken, were, without permission, to be multiplied for gain... it might be considered whether there was not a violation of a sort of natural copyright, possessed by every person of his or her own features, for which the courts would be bound to furnish redress.' In the eyes of the court, the use value of the photograph resided not in the object itself but in the quality of the image captured upon the photographic plate: the photographic subject's 'right to control the market of her own beauty could not have been denied her by any court.'" -Thomas Thurston, "Hearsay of the Sun"

This whole article is really very good, and not least for its attempts to, as Thurston says, "help to establish standards in incorporating primary texts into critical essays, foster collaboration among scholars from different disciplines, and perhaps lead to the development of more ambitious legal-historical hypertexts."

Thurston describes the article as a consideration of "the legal reception of photography as a type of evidence in the appellate cases, legal treatises, and legal journals of the last half of the nineteenth century." I think it is also an excellent case study for a history of the reception of new technologies (which is an aspect of the PhD I'll be starting in October at The University of Chicago, with equal interests in the role of critics in the reception of new technologies, in technology+art, and in the operation and creation of publics).

Thank you Thomas Thurston for the incredibly well researched and fascinating and useful paper. And thank you Anne Galloway for the reference.

*in one of the cases that Thurston describes, a photograph is analogised to the eye of a dead man, because like the eye of a dead man [by which the lawyer means, a murdered man], a photograph permanently fixes the last thing it sees. By comparison—and this is the pointy end of the legal stick being brandished here—the eye of the live man registers only fleeting impressions, unfixed, impermanent, fallible and therefore far less useful (evidentiary) in a court of law than photographs...or the eyes of dead men. As Thurston carefully describes, photographs were not immediately and enthusiastically admitted into courts of law as evidence.

The Kinds of Publics Blogs Aren't

2005-05-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

Here's an excellent conversation about blogging, which of course, I want to read as a conversation about the kind of public space blogs are, or are becoming:

1. NY Times: "Blogging, as in Slogging" (I won't apologise for the NYTimes' closed subscription model, but I will point you to Tom, with whom you can vent your spleen).

2. Suw Charman, "Stuck in the old paradigm in so many ways"

3. Melissa Gregg, "Soundbites"

and finally...

4. The Observer, "Journalists must stop being in denial: bloggers are here to stay". Thanks to Russell for pointing this last article out to me.

[You'll find some of my comments in the comment thread to Suw's post.]

Opportunity to Rhapsodize

2005-05-27T00:27:00.000-07:00

mc gregg says to follow the meme and forget my focus on photography and answer the following questions, and so I do.

[Total volume of music on my computer]
34.36 GB (5679 songs, 21.4 days music)

[The last CDs I bought]
Electrelane, Axes (Too Pure)
The Rey Krayola, Singles (Drag City)

[Song playing right now]
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helikopter Steichquartett (Helicopter String Quartet)
[I really didn't want this album to be playing when I got to this question. I tried to avoid it, creating new criteria for what "right now" might mean. I worried about its modernism, its academicism, its radically un-hip associations, its potentially astronomical levels of pretension. But, dammit, THAT'S what was playing, and it is an interesting piece of music (maybe merely interesting, as Michael Fried is fond of saying). I'll stand by that, and trust that listing it will just sound like honesty, knowing however that it will not...knowing that, if I'm really honest with myself, I'm caught.]

[Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me]
Gastr del Sol, Camoufleur, "Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder:" possibly the best song ever written. I mean it.

Henry Flynt, Back Porch Hillbilly Blues Volume 1, "Blue Sky, Highway and Thyme:" my absolute favourite song that goes nowhere fast and takes 15 minutes getting there. It transfixed me in a coffee shop, where I heard it for the first time.

David Grubbs, The Coxcomb, "The Coxcomb:" the most spectacular and gorgeously controlled train wreck I've ever witnessed. David Grubbs and his French "saloon band" play Grubbs' adaption of a Stephan Crane short story "The Blue Hotel." It's about the strangest short story you'll ever want to read, rendered not a whit less strange or less wonderful in the song. I love to see music be so voracious.

Luc Ferrari, Interrupteur-Tautologos 3, "Tautologos 3 (For Eleven Instrumentalists And Magnetic Tape, 1970):" I'm very not-qualified to talk about this piece. I think it has all the chops and grandeur and precision of (good) academic music and all the drama of a rock song. I got to see Ferrari perform recently and in one slightly glib 15 minute composition he made it abudantly clear what skills, assurance and insight can come from a long life of passionate dedication to one's work (not that there aren't many other viable ways of doing good work—actually, Ferrari sort of re-lit my fire for this more traditional way)

Palace, Arise Therefore, "Arise, Therefore:" the piano!

[Five songs you’ve been listening to a lot recently, from several genres (genres given are from CDDB database)]
Matmos, The Civil War, "Reconstruction" (genre: "electronica/dance" meets Renaissance music, I kid you not): I think this album is incredibly brave.

Shellac, Terraform, "Copper" (genre: NA): one of the funniest songs I've ever heard.

The Sea and Cake, The Fawn, "The Argument" (genre: "alternative and punk"): the intro section of live + programmed drumming (by John McEntire), and the way that intro moves into the song proper. One of the most engaging openings I know.

The Necks, Aether, "Aether" (genre: "jazz"): I just saw them play here in London so they're much on my mind. This is a *very* patient band.

Kevin Drumm, Sheer Hellish Miasma, "Turning Point" (genre: "data"): Data?! Indeed. Be still my beating heart. The album title is neither joke nor irony. That's what it sounds like.

UP NEXT: maybe Katrina will talk about her favourite music to listen to on the bus?

How to Write a History in One Sentence

2005-05-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

"After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, "It felt like a movie" seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through: "It felt like a dream."

-Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, p. 22

Am-"Pro-Am"

2005-05-26T13:23:00.000-07:00

For me, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) is a far better, far more interesting, far more useful account of the phenomenon that The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts are Changing our Economy and Society (Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller) wants to describe. It's just such a mess, that article. E.g. so, what's a pro-am then? At it's most gaseously expansive, their account seems to include anyone with a hobby, and yet in the main, they don't think it includes many women or working class folks.

Who is this paper useful for? Ah...exactly.

Here's my brutishly reductive reason why Raymond's work is so much better: Raymond is writing in the spirit and within the immanent economies of so-called "pro-am" activities while Leadbeater and Miller are writing in the spirit of pragmatic capitalism—that is, they want to "sell" the idea of pro-ams. Which, as far as I can tell, is a rhetorical style and an audience-address strategy anathema to "pro-am" activities (although Leadbeater and Miller don't characterise pro-am activities with nearly enough clarity or focus to know what might be anathema to them. In fact, one way of stating my problem with their paper is to say that nothing seems especially anathema to pro-am activities as they describe them. But doesn't something need to be, in order for the phenomenon they describe to have any critical-historical bite?).

Does the Shoe Fit?

2005-05-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

This has gone around a bit (and been discussed, notably by Jean), but I especially wanted to direct the people who have helped me with my project to this: The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts are Changing our Economy and Society by Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller.

I'm just reading it now. It's leaving me very cold. But I'm curious about how the people it's trying to describe react to it.

Pew!

2005-05-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

Here is the Pew Internet and American Life Project's report called "Buzz, Blogs and Beyond" [only click the link if you want to download the pdf].

What a strange report. The authors want to empirically test claims they say are being made, loudly and often, for the significant influence of blogs on Politics and Big Media in America. Their set-up trots out all the chesnuts about how popular blogs are (number of users in the US, number of readers, etc.), and although they nowhere evince out and out suspicion, their impulse to *test* these claims seems to me reactionary from the outset. But let's leave that aside for now.

Their metric and their method, it turns out, is right there in the title: it's all about "buzz." It will come as no surprise then that the study was led by Dr. Michael Cornfield in collaboration with a company called Buzzmetrics. Put tersely, "buzz" is "a lot of simultaneous talk" (p. 2). But the most we get about it is the still pretty terse: "Buzz is the sound heard in public when a lot of people are talking about the same thing at the same time" (p. 3). Then they go on to briefly list some of things "buzz" can do: affect sales, alter behaviour and perceptions, embolden or embarrass, and "move issues up, down and across institutional agendas."

With "buzz" as their metric AND the primary phenomenon being measured, their study has some circularity problems. If "buzz" is defined at all, it's defined tautologically: "buzz is the sound heard when...". Yes, but, how do people hear it, how does it get amplified or distorted or disrupted? What are its mechanisms, its modes of circulation? But, ok, let's leave that aside too.

What do they find?

1. "Blogger power is circumstantial: dependent on the sorts of information available, and contingent on the behavior of other public voices."
2. "Political bloggers were buzz followers as much as buzz makers."
3. "Bloggers may have been positioned in the fall of 2004 [when they conducted their study] as a guide for the mainstream media to the rest of the internet."
4. "The key contribution by the bloggers in the "Rathergate" scandal consisted of providing forums accessible to all internet users in which facsimilies of the memos could be examined and discussed."

Subsequently, the tone of the paper is measured, but it's as if they're having to try...very...hard to stay neutral. When they cede some measure of influence to blogs, they do it begrudgingly. You can whiff it in those findings from the "executive summary" above. And I'm not the only one who has noted it. So we get this article, whose key "take-away" from the Pew study is telegraphed in the title: "Blogs May Not Be as Influential as Some Think".

Aside from the questions we might want to ask about this need to measure, test and confirm/deny the vaunted "influence" of blogs (which I've written about in "A Welcome for Blogs", forthcoming 2006, Continuum), I have two basic reactions:

1. The concept of "buzz" seems to belie (to bury rather than represent) almost everything interesting about the way that blogs operate.

2. The study admits of a very narrow scope for "influence:" to be influential on their terms a blog or set of blogs must be seen to (measurably, quantifiably) set the agenda for popular discussion. That is: lead discussion, be originary, avoid being derivative. This seems to me to impose a hegemonic model of influence (in which there can only be leaders and followers) on a form of public discourse which, in some quarters, is doing a lot to challenge that very model. So, while we hear a kind of tactful schadenfreude in the finding that "Political bloggers were buzz followers as much as buzz makers," if the study were more attentive to the characteristic rhetorics of blogging, it might recognise in that finding not only a unique form of influence (to "follow" is to relay), but also the ways that bloggers are part of a larger process of changing how we might define, recognise and assess influence, in the first place.

What's the Question

2005-05-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

The question I'm asking myself a lot lately is: how are photographs public (or, how do photographs uniquely form and circulate within publics, or, is there anything unique about the way photographs operate within publics or are they just one cultural text among many, including tv, books, comics, films, newspapers, speeches, etc.)?

I'm reading a lot of Habermas and Arendt. I'm not sure that's helping.

Warner gives these characteristics of publics:

-things (text or speech or performance or etc.) must *circulate* within a public (circulation is probably the key feature in Warner's terms; also, incidentally or not, one of the key features of internet-based photography)

-they must circulate among strangers within a public

-public things, to be public, cannot exist solely within preexisting frameworks (e.g. political parties, identity groups)

-as members of publics, we have to understand ourselves as both individually addressed _and_ part of the anonymous public whole (cf. sermons and lyric poems are meant to be apprehended privately, even if this voice is only a fiction perpetuated by the text; the goal and defining characteristic of public discourse is circulation)

-membership in a public is based on activity not on classificatory schemas (what we do, not who we are)

-public discourse is contemporaneous and oriented towards the future (by addressing contemporary events, it opens up possibilities for change)

-no single text (radio show, puppet theatre, photograph) constitutes a public; a public must put texts in relation to other texts; there must be a history and an implied future

-publics must be aware of themselves as publics

I think the more interesting and more specific question for my project is probably: how has the relationship between publics and photographs changed? How has the way that a photograph addresses a public changed? How have new practices of photography (e.g. blogs, flickr) changed the nature of publics—the publics of photographs themselves, but also, perhaps, publics more broadly.

Let me just give one example of what I mean. Think about the circulation of photographs before photographs started to appear online in significant numbers. Consider a paper photograph. When I am holding a paper photograph, I might be looking at the only printed copy of that photograph in the world. Or, maybe it's been printed and re-printed and given as a gift and hung on a wall and.... The point is, under normal conditions, I just won't know. So, where is the public for any given photograph, under these conditions? One of the important characteristics of publics is that they must be aware of themselves as public, i.e. as a collection of strangers, among whom certain texts circulate, referencing contemporary events, etc.—otherwise, there is very little potential for them to act. [For now, I'm bracketing a conversation about photographs which circulate as art, in galleries and collector's homes and etc.] Can we talk about a public for paper photographs in the same way we can talk about a public for digital, internet-based photographs? Of course, even the lowliest snapshot taken 60 years ago circulated within families and among a families' set of close friends. But this is public in neither Warner's, Arendt's nor Habermas' senses. Bourdieu's sociology of photography (a study conducted in the 50's and 60's) considered the circulation of photography as class and class difference, but this is different than the circulation of photographs. Bourdieu et al do not discuss at all the circulation of photographs—as if there was no such circulation at the time, or as if it wasn't important, if there was.

In contrast: when I look at a photograph on flickr, I know that there are potentially as many reproductions of that photograph as there are users of flickr. There is massive circulation (not just through users, but through groups and tags as well). There is what Warner calls "stranger relationality" (more than most people know what to do with). There is contemporaneity and an eye towards future uses (future viewings, new tags, new groups, etc.).

The idea here is not to check off Warner's list in order to identify what does and does not qualify as public on his terms. The idea is to notice (if only by one set of criteria, although I find Warner's a powerful set) quite specifically how photography is changing, and what kinds of changes, in turn, photography is effecting.

To gesture at a few more examples, it also strikes me that online photography significantly alters a photograph's mode of address (who it addresses and how—something Barthes writes a lot about); the temporality of a photography (how it exists in time: how it calls up the past, how it evokes or implies death, etc.—something else Barthes' writes about, but also Benjamin); and a photograph's relationships to other photographs (this one seems obvious, but is an important point vis a vis publics).

Meaghan Morris II

2005-05-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

[warning to those who come here only for the scintillating commentary on contemporary photography: there will be no edifying photographic payoff on this post. In that sense, it's a bit off-topic for this blog. I think Meaghan Morris' work warrants it.]

A little bit more about this, because it's worth it. Meaghan Morris is the Chair Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. In 2000 (I think I'm remembering that date correctly), she left Australia to take up that post, having been long interested in issues of race, nationalism, and globalisation, and seeing in the move an opportunity to explore what it might mean to do cultural studies (how it might usefully annoy or test the concept of culture) in Asia, in an only-just-post-colonial country, in a linguistically mixed environment, outside of the Anglophile world where cultural studies is so thoroughly (self-)centred. She talked at some length about the politics of publishing and translation, and how these conspire to excuse Anglophile readers from reading non-Anglophile literatures. So, she gives an example, rarely do we (Anglophiles...this is the word she used) engage contemporaneously with, say, Chinese scholars who publish in Chinese. Language and geography seem to stand in the way, if not something like Culture itself (the marketing team for an American publisher might say: "what market is there in the US for contemporary work on China?"). And when we do get or make the chance to so engage, it is often necessarily in translation (Morris expressed her frustration with intellectuals who assume their audiences will be literate in more than one language; for a majority of the world, she says, literacy in a single language is often a significant accomplishment). And in translation tends to mean, although need not mean: several years if not decades later, with all due excuses made in the new introduction for all the ways in which the piece (typically a book, not a stand-alone journal article) fails to address its new local readerships. In this context, Morris then spoke about a journal called Traces, which she has edited and written for, and which appears in simultaneous four-part translation (Korean, Chinese, Japanese and English), every single issue. No mean feat, that. Think about the logistics. So the talk was about what it means to do cultural studies in linguistically mixed environments, with a strong implication being that the world is just such an environment, and yet (in cultural studies and elsewhere) is rarely conceived of and written for as such. Morris' strongest and clearest call to action was for "intellectuals" (she made a point of specifying intellectuals) to actively take up the task of engaging with scholars across the world, not just in the Anglophile world.

[Also: Nervous speakers of the world, take heart. Early in her talk, Morris was relying heavily on her glass of water and finally explained: "This always happens to me, in every single talk I've ever given for my entire life...just at this point in the talk. I must breath now." At which point, she did: just stood there, sipping and breathing. All very endearing.]

Meaghan Morris Lecture: One Fine Welcome

2005-05-19T04:19:00.000-07:00

Meaghan Morris Lecture: Fine Welcome, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Cowfish in the City

2005-05-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks to cowfish for a long afternoon chat in a cafe that I knew, but didn't know I knew. I had been taken there once, when I had first moved to London (Sept. 2001), but my guide and friend and host had followed such a circuitous route that I've never again been able to find that spot, even though I remembered the inside of the cafe well, and even though I've come to know my way around that area (the City) well. It was nice to have present connected geographically to past. Cowfish helped me connect some other things as well...more on that subsequently.

Do we want norms or do we want Knapster?

2005-05-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

I met with Knapster today at the Tate. Tate at the Knapster. Knapster at the Tate. Anyway. Knapster runs a flickr group called "Public Space and its Discontents", so we each had a lot to say about public space, or (in the language I've adopted from Michael Warner via Arendt via Habermas) about publics.

This is how Knapster and his co-admin James_C describe their group:

"This group is interested in how people use, abuse and subvert 'public' spaces. Now that we lead sedentary indoor lives, public spaces are often neglected or strictly controlled and regulated. We are interested in how public spaces can be used for 'unexpected' purposes other than their design...."

Part of what I understand Knapster and James_C to be saying here is that people's experiences of outdoor public space are often either punitive or normative. Punitive in the form of laws and social prohibitions (de jure and de facto prohibitions). Normative in the form of injunctions that tend to standardise and restrict behaviour. There are a few things we can still do in public without fear of any sort of reprisal: we can shop, we can drive, we can read...if we make sure to read only in a place where idleness justifies the reading as passing time rather than, say, "loitering with intent." To say it this way may be to exaggerate the case, but it is probably not wrong.

The internet—well, let's be more conservative and specific—flickr is, of course, also sometimes normative (e.g. the etiquette of adding contacts) and punitive (e.g. flame wars in some groups), but I think that is not people's primary experience of whatever kind of public flickr is, or is becoming. Knapster and others describe the surprise one feels at getting one's first comment. The encouragement, sure, but also the sense of sudden and intimate connection (a funny sort of intimacy, sure, but I'd still want to call it intimate) with someone you not only didn't know, but didn't know you could ever know. But I'm thinking here less about "social networks" or "communities" (although probably much could be said about these kinds of entities). I'm thinking more about how an action in public (e.g. posting a photo to one's flickr home page, making a comment on someone else's photo, joining a flickr group) ramifies in all sorts of unexpected outcomes, which themselves then generate new behaviours and new activities and new uses for photography and etc. and etc. This is how I'm coming to understand the concept "public" in relation to online photography. It could be encapsulated in the question: How do publics act on us?

Rapt by Train Set in Karlsruhe

2005-05-10T02:25:00.000-07:00

Rapt by Train Set in Train Station, Karlsruhe, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

INCITE + friends

Public Sociology

2005-05-05T14:51:00.000-07:00

This an experiment and a collaboration and a kind of outcome of the research I've been doing.

Public Sociology

This week, I've been working with George Grinsted at the RCA. Who is excellent, by the way. What we've done is rough and the product of 3 days working together. But we both think it interestingly tests what it might start to look like if, say, Sociology, started to work with its own data in the way that flickr-ites work with their photographs and bloggers work with their lives and thoughts and audioscrobbler users work with their music interests, and etc. That is, by making their work more and more usefully public.

What Kat said...

2005-05-03T14:20:00.000-07:00

What

Kat

said

Nearly Last Pretty Long List of People to Thank

2005-05-01T03:45:00.000-07:00

Khalid and his fascinating group Muslim Cultures
emma b
Who is Looking
_tris_

(and for the interview that almost was: antgirl)

I have a few more interviews to do, but I'm fast approaching 50, the proposed goal. Which is a lot.

Last week was the Privacy Workshop.

Today my essay for Day to Day Data is due (if the link is broken, give it a day or so; the site is moving home).

Next week is the RCA Interaction Design/INCITE collaboration, where I'm happily paired with George.

Then, I'll have five months to try to make some sense of it all—and post here more.

The Rain's Small Hands*

2005-04-22T01:05:00.000-07:00

To you, the brave and recently interviewed: I think your photos, together, are something they are not individually, although this is not what you like best about them and probably should not be. Thanks to:

Jan1ce
Homemade
Squirmelia
froupster
ANNA:poet
Detachable
bitpuddle
Katcha

If I say that it is humbling to speak to so many people, in such depth, in so short a time, what I mean is this: I always feel how far my questions come from encompassing You (they don't even complete a lap). Even so, the conversations are rich and engaging and fully-fledged, born along by your generosity, and this is another compliment to the complex and artful lives you've all built. Thank you. I hope that my work measures up to yours.

*cummings image of the rain's small hands is the image of humility I'm trying to describe.

Praise for a writer not lacking in praise

2005-04-17T13:41:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture is the best thing I've read in a long time (the kind of book that makes me want to move to Palo Alto and apprentice myself to him, or pledge fealty). But I mention it here becaues I think it is deeply relevant to any discussion of blogs, photography, photo-sharing, "day to day data", and etc. Btw, it's free for download at the link above.

Blogs: the déclassé version of...everything

2005-04-13T01:04:00.000-07:00

I think this [Raiders of the Lost ArtBase] is an interesting project, maybe most of all because you can hear the insinuation that a curatorial project which appropriates blogs is thrilling because it is déclassé ("Unflattering as the analogy may be to many curators of fine art..." ).

Pub on the Park

2005-04-12T04:39:00.000-07:00

Thanks to katenadine for being the subject of my first field recording, here. One thing we talked about, and which has come up with a number of other photographers and/or bloggers and/or flickr members, and which I think is one of the more interesting effects of our newly photo-fast culture, is this: the way that membership in flickr, or fotolog or etc. acts upon a person to influence the kinds of photos one takes, and maybe more interestingly, the way one looks out for photos—finds or seeks out or senses them. This is probably obvious. Memes and aesthetic standards and all that. What's interesting about it to me is the pace and the nimble sociality of these influences. Nimble what? Here:

Pace: I think concepts like trends, memes or styles each have their own sense of time. Aren't they each predicated on certain periods of activity, response, dissemination, stasis? Don't they each travel at their own pace? Maybe a meme is quicker to transmit and more quickly forgotten than a style; maybe a trend is slower than a meme but faster than a style. It doesn't really matter. What's important is this sense of timing and how it works. I think the timing inherent in trends and etc. is not a spectrum which extends infinitely in both directions, from glacial or epochal on one end to atomic on the other. At some point, doesn't the scale break and don't we get a new phenomena, a new concept? It's clear that ideas travel quickly around flickr, but I'm loathe to call them memes or trends or styles because I think they work differently than those concepts. I think ideas in flickr (for instance) travel through groups and tags and comments in a way that forces us to re-think how people influence other people, how membership in online photographic communities works on its members. It doesn't feel to me that there are the familiar periods of popularity and idea-fatigue; the movement feels a little smoother to me than that; the evaluative stakes seem a little lower. Ideas certainly move, but there don't seem to be all of the sharp edges that we're used to; the moments where distinctions between one idea, between one practice and another are sharply asserted. But I stand to be corrected on this.

Nimble Sociality: Bourdieu was amazed (or claimed to be amazed) that popular photography was governed by any standards at all. Without institutionalisation in the form of training, schooling, etc. (which was less prevalent in the 1950's when B was doing his work), he expected it to be ruled by an anarchy of styles (that is, not ruled at all). His work on photography takes off from that moment of (rhetorical) surprise to explain how, in fact, photographic practices are quite rigidly governed, why, and what the effects of this governance are on photographic practices. I don't have much of anything to say about social class (a concept on which Bourdieu relies heavily, as you might imagine if you've read any of this other work), but B also relies on a categorisation of photograhic styles or modes: ritual photographs (e.g. holiday shots, ceremonial shots), professional photographs (e.g. journalism) and art photographs. At this point, I think that social class (I don't have a good contemporary definition for this, and I'm not sure that I need one, so I'm just referring pretty blandly to income and the effects of income) is probably not so diverse on sites like flickr (although, it could well be more diverse than I know). But certainly the movements between ritual, professional and art photography are very nimble. The influences or lines of communication run up and down, nimbly, and I think _distinction_ is not the only way in which those zones of practice interrelate.

A Roster to Thank

2005-04-07T01:02:00.000-07:00

Thanks to...

nedrichards
catfunt
johanna
769 imaging
dubmill
Louise Oldfield

...for each spending a few hours with me this week (and last). From kitsch to authorship to "social software" to the crisis of contemporary photography to cronyism in local public funding to the uses for mediocrity: conversations about photography range far and wide. Thank you all.

My Early Raining

2005-04-05T02:35:00.000-07:00

My review of The Internet in Everyday Life (Wellman and Haythornthwaite).

"The photographer who shows his works is acting improperly"

2005-03-31T02:46:00.000-08:00

Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, 1965, p. 71:

"The realization of the artistic intention is particularly difficult in photography, probably because, fundamentally, it is only with difficulty that photographic practice can escape the functions to which it owes its existence....

Almost always assuming social functions, conscious or unconscious, and intimately involved in family life, its values and rhythms, its reasons and its raison d'etre are borrowed from elsewhere. The traditional norms of the practice are imposed with greater force the more strongly the practice itself is imposed. So, all else being equal, subjects who do not take photographs much more often have an aesthetic attitude towards photography....

The photographer who shows his works is acting improperly, while the painter is not, because, not being a universal subject, the photographing subject cannot address the universality of viewers. If my feelings toward the child that I am photographing or towards the photograph of the child are not the same as those which I have towards the portrait of a child (either because it is my child or because it is my photograph), I cannot demand that anyone else look at this photograph as they would look at a portrait of a child, and I cannot forbid them, if they happen to look at it in this way, to find it devoid of interest."

Does flickr, then, offer the spectacle of a huge number of people engaging in what StefZ, speaking from the perspective of the viewer, yesterday called “voyeurism” and what Bourdieu, speaking from the perspective of the photographer, calls an “improper” act? In one sense, clearly it does not. For most people using Flickr, the point, precisely (or put mostly crassly), is to show one's works, photographic, cultural, artistic and etc. But what about for people who don't use Flickr? For people who aren't beguiled by the internet and its cultures? This isn't a point about the digital divide; rather, it's to suggest that Bourdieu's seemingly anachronistic point is more than just anachronistic. I think it shows how, within a setting like flickr, new practices of photography can obtain (in other words, photography can start to delaminate from some of its traditional "social functions") even while, outside of that setting, the kinds of social practices that Bourdieu sees as so pervasive and dominant (photography's traditional ties to family, to holidays, to the pose, etc.) still function as the lens through which contemporary practices are viewed, interpreted and criticised. Thus, I think a lot of people are confused by flickr's photographs of food, stick figures in peril, and transparent screens, as I think Bourdieu might have been.

Interesting to ask: what had to happen to get from Bourdieu's photographic milieu to our own? What technologies had to be invented? What practices fostered? With his ur-framework of social class, the thing I think that Bourdieu was unable to conceive was the idea that cultures which are distinct but mutually constitutive (which have to distinguish themselves from one another precisely because they are mutually constitutive) might nevertheless invite differentiated, or tailored modes of interpretation. Even though flickr's users have obvious relationships—photographically, culturally, historically—with flickr's non-users (because that's all there is in the world right now: users and non-users of flickr), I think they call for different responses. Bourdieu's intelligence, his ability to see distinct cultures (classes) within the same analytic framework, was also his blindspot (or, would be in the present day).

Thanks to StefZ for sparking this line of thought.

My Three New Friends

2005-03-31T02:40:00.000-08:00

My Two New Friends, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Thanks to StefZ for such a good chat yesterday afternoon. And thanks especially for making fun of my inability to match your face to pictures I'd seen of it. You make my point for me: photography is complicated.

Can't you find someone more comely to play the role of me?

2005-03-25T00:18:00.000-08:00

"How DVD [sic] puts family memories on small screens", The Observer, News section, 20 March 2005

The Observer (UK, the Sunday version of The Guardian) describes how a new service has grown up in London: a company that will take a family's collection of home videos, "lovingly shot videos of birthday parties and beach holidays," and turn them into a "slick piece of film complete with musical soundtrack." What I love is this: "One hour's worth of home video footage will typically produce five minutes of material for the finished montage, with scenes like a beach holiday more likely to make the cut than a school play." Filmic production values, meet family values. An interesting thing that I've been discussing with Jeremy lately has been how bloggers choose what to write about, and what those choices then represent (if representation is the right framework at all) in the context of the life lived and the life re-experienced through the blog. Now, people can leave it to the experts—they know what makes a good memory. Cinema does! (And hasn't this actually been the case for much of this century? See, for instance, Victor Burgin's new book, The Remembered Film, about how film inhabits, and operates within memory). And yes, the service is very expensive. Hollywood is the obvious model here.

The article attributes the legibility of this service to three things: 1. families who are tired of "information overload," not least in their own homes, of their own families; 2. a "national [English] obsession with genealogy and recording life experience for posterity (exemplified in the article by the BBC television series "Who Do You Think You Are?"); and 3. the "vacuum created by the geographical spread of modern families." Upon making the latter point, the article pivots on the thematic axis of technology (as a redress to the aforementioned vacuum) and ends by describing Nokia's new Lifeblog software which "organises photos, videos, text messages and multi-media messages into chronological diary form. Part or all of the diary can be transmitted to the internet in 45 seconds allowing, for example, parents to follow their children's holiday on the other side of the world in close to real time."

In my interviews with bloggers, the themes of memory, recording, and in a certain sense, posterity come up all the time, although these certainly do not explain blogs, if by "explain" we mean: take the measure of what blogs are or what they do. But journalists tend, when trying to explain blogs, to repeat one of three themes: 1. narcissism (as a contemporary social disease, with blogs as *the* symptom or the cause or both), 2. journalism (depending on the attitude and profession of the commentator, blogs are either the "new journalism" or never, never, not on your life will they ever be that), or 3. democracy (e.g. Howard Dean's campaign in the U.S.—blogs as a boon to democracy, a spectacular mode of popular representation). These, at least, are the themes I've noticed again and again. Genealogy is a new one to me, in the sociology of blogs as written by journalists. Have people noticed other explanatory rubrics circulating within popular commentaries on blogs?

Book to Get

2005-03-22T08:36:00.000-08:00

Living with His Camera-CL
by Gallop, Jane, Sutcliffe, Jane
Duke University Press, 2003

"This book is a book of almost filial devotion -- a sympathetic reading of classic books in the field of photographic theory. It is especially interesting on two of my favorites in the field, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, and Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middlebrow Art. Gallop critiques these and others from the point of view of the day to day experience of being the photographic subject of her photographer husband, Dick Blau, whose excellent family photographs illustrate the text. The photographed subject does not often have a voice in theory. Gallop's contribution helps fill that gap."

-Reviewed by Margaret Olin here.

Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network

2005-03-17T04:16:00.000-08:00

"Always a Dull Moment" by John Galvin. I know it's 2 years not-new this month, this news, but doesn't it still fascinate? Doesn't it still take the cake?

The article describes Vatsim, the Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network. A 45,000 member-strong network of air traffic controllers, spread all over the world. They have official training. Some have uniforms. They land planes. Tediously. In real-plane-landing-time. We've all, most of us, been on planes. We know how long they take to land, to take off. Vatsim members have day jobs which in most cases have nothing to with air traffic control. The planes they land are not real planes. They don't exist the way real, metal passenger planes do. Except that everything Vatsim does confounds every attempt to talk about it in terms of real/virtual, professional/amateur. There's hardly a virtual aspect to it. They're utterly fascinating.

This is Harv Stein, the Principal founder of Vatsim, speaking with John Galvin: '"We banned emergencies," says Stein, when I ask if it ever gets more interesting than this. "It was ridiculous. O'Hare was having four emergencies a night, and they don't get four a month in the real world. They'd call the tower and say, 'Emergency! Engines out.' I know what people are doing: Maybe they need to go eat dinner, so they call in an emergency so they don't have to wait in a holding pattern to land."'

Uh...I...wow. That just makes me want to throw my hands in the air the way some good rock shows do (i.e. like I just don't care). Doesn't it you? Well, maybe I'm the kook.

But I really believe that we don't have the conceptual firepower to talk about what these people do. Galvin's article is very good (how could it miss?), but ultimately calls Vatsim a game. "Game" is pretty expansive territory, and changing fast. Maybe it could work, with some elaboration. Better than "amateur," although the article relies on that notion a bit as well.

And so, while it's been said before (even by me, and I think 2 year-old news is still news), sometimes along comes a case that asserts not just the rightness of a particular thought, but its righteousness. "Amateur" or "hobbyist" or "nutter" don't quite capture it for me. Do they for you? Dont' they seem so impoverished in this context? Likewise: "amateur" doesn't help me think about photobloggers or flickr either. The extreme case gives us insight into the ones that *appear* less extreme, more quotidian.

"Personal Photography"?

2005-03-14T07:57:00.000-08:00

As a way to try to define my interests in this research, I've often used the phrase "personal photography." What does this mean? It has an evocative power for me, but doesn't bear up well under other forms of scrutiny, as was pointed out to me, perspicuously, by chromasia.

I think this is mostly what I mean: I’m interested in photographs which get put on the web and which are anchored to personal sites like blogs and flickr accounts—however linked, promiscuously used, and widely disseminated they become as a result of their presence on those kinds of sites. These are often photographs which are presented in the spirit of “sharing" (as long as we mostly disregard the flabbier connotations of that word, instead apprehending a number of different intentions for and outcomes of that sharing: feedback, creative re-use, historical record-making, autobiography, geographic documentation, collaboration, etc.). Which leads me to the framing for the project that so far feels most comfortable: new uses for photography.

Re-enactment

2005-03-14T00:06:00.000-08:00

Re-enactment seems to be a newly popular cultural trope, but then maybe it's always been around and I'm only noticing it because over the last 2 years I've been involved in a few re-enactment projects in the art world (e.g. pan right to find "Is Someone Coming to Get Me?"). In the art world, Jeremy Deller has re-enacted the 1984 miner strikes. Rod Dickinson has re-enacted the Milgram Obedience to Authority Experiments. Ben Coode-Adams and I, in collaboration, have re-enacted the 1996 disaster on Mount Everest, an event popularised by Jon Krakauer's bestselling book _Into Thin Air_ (see link above).

Outside the art world, of course (but, in light of the projects above, how far outside?), historical re-enactment groups have existed for a long time. In the UK, for instance, there are Tudor Societies (artists Pope and Guthrie have been working on a project with the Tudor re-enactors; and Jeremy Deller worked with historical re-enactment societies to re-enact the miner strikes). In the U.S., Civil War re-enactment societies are the most popular object of mockery. But re-enactors the world over, I think, are equally mocked. And why? Because they're nerds? Because they spend so much time in another century, appearing to eschew the more *present* pleasures and pains of this one? Because they spend so much time passionately participating (full stop) in something (full stop) that most people can't understand (full stop) or that isn't popular? Not enough critical or ironic distance? I'm not sure any of these answers are particularly helpful, but the penultimate one, about passionate participation, gets closest for me. And doesn't this start to sound like a form of mockery often directed at bloggers and WWW participants generally?

So then what do we say about SkyNews' recent Michael Jackson trial re-enactments? Bizarre, right? But compelling I'll bet (I hope to get to see some of it this week, thanks to a kind friend with access to Sky.

Outside of a similarly vectored derision, I think there are some other compelling reasons to think about blogs as re-enactments. The way they consider time. A similarly ambivalent relationship to audience. The way they re-make events by re-playing them. And the related hazards of fidelity, accuracy and a "narrowing of narrative opportunities". Of course, we can identify differences, but I don't think these invalidate the usefulness of the comparison. They may, in fact, enhance it.

I think we can make a similar argument that photoblogs, even photographs themselves, are re-enactments—or share tactics (uses and effects) with re-enactment projects, although the case here seems trickier. Not less welcoming, but more in need of qualification and careful thinking.

How Does a Photograph Show Respect?

2005-03-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

Bellocq, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

In his essay "Falkland Road" Eliot Weinberger compares Mary Ellen Mark's Falkland Road to E.J. Bellocq's Photographs from Storyville. Both are books of photography. Both contain images taken in brothels, Mark's in Bombay (1978), Bellocq's in New Orleans (1912).

Here is Weinberger on Mark's images:

"Falkland Road is a piece of the world that few of us could stand for more than a few minutes. Yet packaged as _Falkland Road_ it is an object with some popular appeal, though it is neither pornography nor reformist exposé. Its attaction, as far as I can tell, is its double dream: First, the dream of travel and its unchanging equation of exotic and erotic: sex, as we all know, is always more available, and wilder, someplace else. Second, the dream of the photograph: to see everything in the world—at a safe distance. These dreams are so powerful that they obscure the dreary evidence of the photographs themselves. Who can resist these images of 'real' people fucking in some strange corner of the earth? It is like watching firemen battle a blaze around the corner, knowing that one's own house is safe."

And Weinberger on Bellocq's images:

"Bellocq, a hydrocephalic dwarf, befriended—and never hired—the prostitutes; his photographs, a dialogue between outcasts, remain among the most loving portraits of women. Although nothing is known of these women—and little of Bellocq himself—no cpations are necessary: Storyville lives in a way that Falkland Road, despite Mark's claim of love and frienship for these 'special women,' never does. And Bellocq, of course, woudl never have used the phrase 'special women.'"

And finally, Susan Sontag on Bellocq's images:

"How far we are, in Bellocq's company, from the staged sadomasochistic hijinks of the bound women offering themselves up to the male gaze (or worse) in the disturbingly acclaimed photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki or the cooler, more stylish, unvaryingly intelligent lewdness of the images devised by Helmut Newton. The only pictures that do seem salacious—or convey something of the meanness and abjection of a prostitute's life—are those (eleven in this selection) on which the faces have been scratched out. (In one, the vandal—could it have been Bellocq himself?—missed the face.) These pictures are actually painful to look at, at least for this viewer. But then I am a woman and, unlike many men who look at these pictures, find nothing romantic about prostitution. That part of the subject I do take pleasure in is the beauty and forthright presence of many of the women, photographed in homely circumstances that affirm both sensuality and domestic case, and the tangibleness of their vanished world. How touching, good natured, and respectful these pictures are."

The Deranging Influence of Blogs

2005-03-07T02:32:00.000-08:00

The Deranging Influence of Blogs, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Probably worth pointing again to this:

The Extremities of Nicholson Baker
By LEON WIESELTIER
Published: August 8, 2004, Sunday
New York Times Review of Books

CHECKPOINT
By Nicholson Baker.
115 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $15.95.

[excerpted from Wieseltier's review]
"The novel consists in the transcript of a conversation in a room in a hotel in Washington in May of this year. Jay has summoned Ben to his room to explain what he is about to do ''for the good of humankind.'' We infer from what is said that Jay is a deeply unhappy man. His wife has left him, his girlfriend has left him, he has lost his job as a high-school teacher, he works as a day laborer and has declared personal bankruptcy, he spends his days reading blogs. (About the deranging influence of blogs Baker makes a sterling point.)"

And read Rick Moody's fine retort, in the form of a letter to the editor, here. [That is, unfortunately, purchase the means to read Moody's response there. But the Believer is well worth the effort and expense, I can attest.]

Spark Jumps the Gap

2005-03-07T01:01:00.000-08:00

I think this is an important post by Jeremy.

That's most of what I wanted to say, except this amplification: in a post which seems to be primarily about the photographer's and the blogger's experience of her own material, notice the points at which a spark jumps the gap, to something else, to someone else. Look at Jeremy's ideas about "blank time" for instance, in which time is something precious, and can therefore be stolen, re-claimed, lost, possessed, protected, but never absolutely. Which points to something paradoxical and interesting about Jeremy's idea that blog posts (photographs, text, comic strips, etc.) are a way for the photographer/blogger to repossess time as their own--because the mechanism for this is to post those reclaimed moments to the web, to reclaim them precisely *by* posting them to the web. This is perhaps not the most intuitive way to protect one's experiences, to lay a kind of personal claim to them. And certainly this does not jibe with the accounts which grumpily malign blogs as narcissistic (e.g. see the New York Times Review of Books review of Nicholson Baker's book Checkpoint, here), where the connection between blogger and reader is a such an impoverished one: cliche, un-lively, mean. Quite unlike what Jeremy and other bloggers describe, where the circuit is so much wilder and multi-vocal and oddly productive.

Outside the Inside of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

2005-03-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

Outside Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

curiously incongruous
[+]
Tom RS
[organised via]
london.photobloggers.org
[=]
conversation which veered recklessly between high-flying technical geekery, philosophic self-investigation and complex aesthetic inquiry. In a dark sub-sub basement. At a pub with "cheese" in the name [the photographers in question are not pictured above].

John Berger, "Understanding a Photograph"

2005-03-02T15:44:00.000-08:00

In his essay "Understanding a Photograph"in Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things, 1972), Berger's polemics lead him to make some lopsided observations about photography. In order to drive the wedge between Art and Photography (two confusingly ambiguous categoricals that just can't seem to keep out of each other's way)—between Art which for Berger is defined by its inevitable tendency to become property, and photography which does not (yet) share this tendency (remember, he's writing in 1972)—Berger emphasises photography's automatism (its technicity) and its lack of composition. It is easy to register meaningful objections here: of course photographs are composed, of course they are more than a machine's product (for more on this point of view, track down Joel Snyder's and Neil Walsh Allen's essay "Photography, Vision, Represention”). But Berger's intention is to recuperate or rescue photography from the fate he has seen befall High Art: it's commodification. Which leads him to claim, via a comparative mode of analysis, that a photograph uniquely bears witness to a choice being made. And so photographs are characterised by time more than by form: it is not composition which makes a photograph a photograph (which makes it something we can differentiate from, say, a painting), but time, the extraction of a single moment from a related chain of moments. The photograph sits always within that chain of moments (witness the poignancy of photographs of the dead, of buildings no longer standing), yet, at the same time, indexes a process of extraction (witness the strange fascination and the complementary boredom of photos we find in some photoblogs, from people we don't know, whose lives we know not at all). A choice is also a record of all that was not chosen. Likewise, the photograph.

This philanthropic impulse—the attempt to rescue photographs from bad analyses—finds its historical shadow in Walter Benjamin's attempt to rescue art from aura and tradition, to rescue art for politics, to save it from rarefaction. In this, Benjamin sees himself as the assistant of processes of mechanical reproduction, which had already significantly begun this epochal political work. And so Berger posits, finally, that a photograph may be judged effective when the moment it records contains a quantum of truth which is generally applicable, which is as revealing about what is absent from the photograph as with what is present. It's easy to believe that Berger is talking here about any kind of photography, from snapshots to photographs which are regarded and traded as Art, although he never specifies. And I think his emphasis on choice is important for the way it retains a connection to the moment of making, if not quite to the maker (the quality of this connection seems to me to be one of the definining characteristics of photographs as compared to other kinds of images). But in an environment where so many photographic images can be found at any time, from so many locations, and so many image-makers, all collected online, it seems no longer relevant, germane, or even possible to rescue photographs from commodification through bold acts of definition (photographs are this, they are not that). Too late for that, and in any case, commodification's [not perils but] processes, while significant, have been far more promiscuous and multiple than either Berger or Benjamin could have predicted. If an effect of (what Berger might call) the commodification of the snapshot photo (on sites like flickr and snapfish and etc.) has been to foster their new spectacular publicity, then commodification is too poor a framework. Effects have outstripped causes, and we would be justified in breaking the causal chains that tie our answers to our framing questions.

Stand Up Straight!

2005-02-24T13:46:00.000-08:00

Thanks to onionbagblog for the chat, and the bluntly honest reminders that not all photobloggers are photobloggers and that not all photographs are about photography.

"The Adventure of a Photographer"

2005-02-23T00:11:00.000-08:00

In Italo Calvino's short story "The Adventure of a Photographer," Antonino Paraggi is surrounded by friends who "go out on Sundays with a leather case over their shoulder. And they photograph one another." Antonino is a "non-photographer." But he is a philosopher by nature whose philosophising leads him to think about photography. He considers many theories to explain why photography is so popular, and to explain his lack of interest in it, but avoids the "more evident process" taking place: that all of his friends (the photographers) are getting married while he is not.

On weekend outings with friends, Antonino is often asked to take his friend's pictures—why not, his hands are free. He does not have a camera of his own, and he has no family. He continues to think about the condition of photography and his thinking leads him on, logically, to a series of actions. He objects to snapshots, calling them hypocritical: if you really want to capture your life, you need to take at least one photograph per minute, from waking until sleeping, every day. "The line between the reality that we photograph because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow." To avoid this hypocrisy, one must return to posed studio portraits, c. the 19th century. Antonino does this. He disappears under the black hood of an old camera to take portraits of his friends. To avoid a further hypocrisy, one must not only return to artificial, ritualised poses, one must aim for complete superficiality. He does this, posing a friend with a tennis racket in a series of ridiculous postures. He seeks a portrait outside of time and space. She must wear an evening dress, dark against her light skin. No, he must highlight the face, letting the rest melt away. He lowers the dress over her shoulders. The dress falls away of its own. She wears nothing underneath. He begins, finally, to take photos. This is what he wants. "I've got you now." He packs up the camera and walks away. Bice cries.

He falls in love with his model Bice. From that point, he photographs nothing but her, everywhere, in every pose. But what he most wants is to photograph Bice unawares, a Bice "whose presence presupposed the absence of him and everyone else." This was his passion, one that was not un-like jealousy. Bice soon leaves him.

In his depression, Antonino begins a diary, photographic of course. Then, in a moment of realisation, he begins to tear up all of his photographs, the one with Bice and the ones without. He will throw them all away. But not before he takes one more photograph, of his pile of torn photographs. He arranges them just so.

And this, he realises, is the answer he's sought all along: only to photograph photographs. (Calvino, 1955)

Another Spree

2005-02-19T09:40:00.000-08:00

Thanks to eyematter for our late night typing spree. Yet another photoblogger whose work continues long after work ends.

With you as with so many others: photoblogs don't just offer hundreds of thousands of photos to the watching world, they are creating a new generation of photographers, with their own photographic interests, their own styles, their own practices, and their own audiences and ways of looking.

If You Want

2005-02-19T09:11:00.000-08:00

Looking at Flickr, on Feb. 19th, 2005, you can see if you want to:

-20,017 photos of cats (15 minutes ago, you could see 19,954)
-13,919 photos of babies
-32,881 photos of what people think of when they think of "family"
-27,135 photos of Japan
-51,327 photos taken from cameraphones
-20,479 photos taken for moblogs
-25,981 self-portraits
-25,073 photos of weddings
-199 photos of Hackney, the neighbourhood I live in
-14,120 photos of grafitti
-7 photos depicting something homosexual
-0 photos depicting something avowedly, consciously heterosexual
-43 photos depicting something queer
-0 photos of Oprah Winfrey
-7355 photos of the colour white
-19,361 photos of nature
-618 photos of the notion of "public" or which are public
-121 photos of the notion of "private" or which are private
-313 photos of "bad"
-356 photos of "good"
-3 photos of "indifference"
-35,272 photos of parties
-385 photos of funerals
and
-43 photos of Satan, including this one.

One Hour Photo

2005-02-16T01:27:00.000-08:00

As if invoked (I'm not sure it would have arrived here by more conscious means) by my recent post, a video comes home about violation. 2003's One Hour Photo. Sort of a movie with training wheels.

Robin Williams (Psi) is a SavMart photo lab technician. He has been for 20 years. He's middle aged, balding, but in case we don't immediately recognise how unattractive he is, he wears big square metal frame glasses which he's forever pushing up onto his nose with the middle finger push, and he carries a retro airline bag—which only makes the filmmakers appear anachronistic, because didn't they notice that those are cool now? Robin Williams is unattractive and so therefore (the film implies...no, nothing implied...the film states, bluntly and often) he is without family. This is the film's central point and principle thesis about photography, as stated in an early wistful voice over by Robin Williams. The first line spoken along the film's timeline (after a Sunset Blvd-esque opening sequence where we see Robin Williams post-denouement, arrested and of course, mug-shotted) is: "Family pictures depict smiling faces." But Robin Williams has no family. He does, however, work in a photo lab and there he processes the family pictures for a lot of families. This is the opportunity the film seizes on for its horror effects: his access to other people's photos. A press quote on the video box says: "He knows your secrets." And one family in particular, the very attractive Yorkins (we know they're attractive because Mrs. Yorkin changes her hair stylishly in every scene, until the trouble starts, and Mr. Yorkin is stylishly "neglectful" as some sort of successful designer...he uses Macs), Robin Williams grows to like very much. He thinks of himself as Uncle Yorkin. He envies them, but other than occassional drop-ins at the photo lab where he works, his only access to them is through their photos. Photos are the vehicle for his envy. When the Yorkins ask for their photos in duplicate, Robin Williams prints them in triplicate, keeping a copy for himself. Creepy. In Robin Williams' house is this franky kind of gorgeous curtain of photos, spanning a very large wall, all photos of the Yorkins, taken by the Yorkins, attractively lit with flood lamps. Creepy. But Mr. Yorkin cheats on Mrs. Yorkin. Neglectful and a philanderer. Robin Williams discovers his philandering by cross referencing another customer's photos. Photos hold our secrets. Be careful what you photograph.

Robin Williams bathetically snaps. Does lots of cinematically crazy man things (scratching Mr. Yorkin's face out of all the photographs in his giant Yorkin curtain of photographs), exacts vengeance upon Mr. Yorkin and his lover, and ends up in jail, interrogated, where we learn that the particular form of psychosis-inducing abuse he suffered as a child was to be forced to photograph the "sick, degrading" things his parents did to him. Creepy. But with justification now. Defend the family.

Photos depict good families, but in the film they do more, they almost are the guarantee that a family is good—we know they are good because the evidence is there in the photos. Photos are intimate, they are the family itself, and so they can be violated, or the family can be violated through photos. But there is another theme that the movies works: photos sometimes get reality muddled up. Mid-way through the picture, Robin Williams fantasises himself into a Yorkin family photo and we subsequently are shown Robin Williams walking in their front door, exploring their house, putting on their clothes, watching football on their television. The scene is filmed as if he's broken into their home, the physical equivalent of snooping around their photos, a logical corollary, but when the Yorkins come home and find him on the couch, the tense moment is broken when they all embrace him as "Uncle Psi." He smiles and the fantasy ends with a cut to Robin Williams in his car, creepily staring into the Yorkin home from the street. This suggests (declaims) a possible instability between photographs and reality which sets us up for the film's climax. The film shows us Robin Williams exacting his insane (but is it?) vengeance on the husband and father who doesn't know how good he's got it, but we learn later that Robin Williams either didn't *load* his camera with film before photographing Philanderer and Lover in degrading poses, or, he never visited their trysting place at all. The photographs the film shows us from that encounter are innocuous (although still possibly insane) photographs of the inside of a (presumably Williams') hotel room.

To get this film made, the producers exploited two things: 1. the star power of Robin Williams and 2. the intimacy and vulnerability of family photographs, their genre potential for horror. But to make the exploitation work, the film has to invent a main character who works in a photo lab. And so maybe the film makes us aware of a small vulnerability in the privacy of our family lives (because don't we all have families like the Yorkins? Or don't we all want to?), potentialised by photographs, but activated by a betrayal of the family (Robin Williams might never have attached the Yorkins if Mr. Yorkin hadn't betrayed his family). Now, assuming that Hollywood has noticed photoblogs, flickrs and the like, they wouldn't need to make their antagonist a photo lab technician. He could be any old creep with an internet connection.

One thing we could say here would be that not only have people not noticed this form of vulnerability, they have extravagantly flaunted it in putting so many personal photographs online. But I don't think that photographs are any less vulnerable or intimate than the film posits, and I don't think that the public space of the internet, for whatever its differences, is less open to violations than any other kind of space. Maybe then (and there are other possibilities here) the internet creates conditions under which family life (or any kind of life) does not need, first and foremost, to be defended.

Step up, Step up

2005-02-15T12:27:00.000-08:00

An essay on photoblogging. How rare.

Violations

2005-02-15T10:20:00.000-08:00

Thanks to [temporarily anonymous] for giving me an Instant Messaging lesson: you were a model of grace, distraction, eloquence, and endurance. You teach me that distraction is only distraction when I adhere too dogmatically to goals, protocols and intentions. In defter hands, distraction is a more expansive mode of conversing.

Thanks also to erinpower for the IM chat. You've got me thinking about the episodes which reveal that privacy works differently online—is something different, is sustained, protected and violated differently. Not that this will be a surprise to some people, but its one thing to theorise it, another to have specific cases to think about. I like the idea that photographs, which many would say 'contain' some of their most intimate, precious moments, are also somehow more immune than text to attacks on privacy and personhood. One can be honest in photographs in a way that one cannot in text. Some forms of honesty require an absence of censorship, or an absence of the need to censor. Photographs allow one to be honest, in this special sense, i.e. without editing or censoring. You can tell all in a photography, so long as the right person is looking. Photos are a different kind of code than written posts, they establish different kinds of relationships with their viewers—the form of relationship varies strongly according to how familiar a viewer is with the life of the blogger-photographer. Photographs are a kind of knowledge which hook up with other forms of knowledge.

But think, too, about a situation where blog text is appropriated without attribution and compare it to one where a photograph is appropriated. Both might be felt as a kind of theft, but if they are also experienced as personal violations, they are different sorts of violations, aren't they? Imagine a photograph of a kiss...you and a friend are kissing. Someone you don't know steals the photo from your photoblog and posts it on their own site. When we imagine the worst from this scenario, what do we imagine? What kind of site steals our photos, what do our photographs sit amongst in the worst case scenario? What text accompanies them? And then, what about our writing? What is the nightmare scenario there, and are they the same types of nightmare? I think they're probably not. Can we say that photographs connect to personhood, to selfhood, differently than does text? Maybe they spin out from the maker differently, one a web, the other a secreted shell. A skin we shed, an egg we incubate and hatch, a nest we build, plummage that we sometimes spread wide.

Photography as Celebrity

2005-02-12T07:15:00.000-08:00

Aside from Amelie and Memento, can anyone think of any recent films in which photographs appear in a central or interesting role?

Thanks.

A History of Supplements

2005-02-08T05:43:00.000-08:00

As everyone writing about photography eventually does (and as I did in a recent post), McQuire tries to reckon with photography's liaisons with reality, the real, with life outside of the camera (whatever is left of it). In doing so, and far more than most authors, he notices the way that photographs, precisely because of the promise that they can perfectly, mimetically represent reality, vitiate that very effort. In other words, however compelling their link to a that-has-been (Barthes, Camera Lucida), photographs also inevitably point to themselves as versions, fakes, and therefore imperfect-as-representations (no more or less fallible than painting). So McQuire comes to talk about Marey and Muybridge and ultimately film in terms of photographic seriality (one after another), where he thinks about seriality as an attempt to recuperate photographic technology's ability to represent reality (if one photo alone can't quite get us there, then certainly 24 per second can). No mere game, this. There was a lot at stake in the effort. Biology, physics, criminology, and medicine were four fields which had put a lot of faith in the capacity for photographic technology to solve their most vexing problems, to advance them into the new century and newly perfect forms of knowledge.

This helps me think about the various ways in which photographs have been (McQuire loves this word, so, in homage) entrained in systems of meaning—placed in contexts that are meant to, or have the effect of supplementing what and how photographs mean. Captions are a strategy of long standing. Newspapers. Serial forms (time-lapse, cinema). Eventually, art galleries. Books. Etc. Etc. And now blogs.

Not that anyone thought it would be possible or desireable to think about online photography without giving some serious thought to what blogs do to the experience of viewing photographs. But to see blogs as part of a history of supplements (systems of meaning) is a more specific task.

Delectation

2005-02-08T05:26:00.000-08:00

Two quotes, for present delectation and future recall:

Duchamp: “You know exactly what I think about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.”

Foucault sometimes referred to his mode of critique as “voluntary inservitude” or “reflective indocility.”

"-kris"

Making the Scene

2005-02-08T04:06:00.000-08:00

I'm still happily chewing on Scott McQuire's Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera.

McQuire describes the scene of photography's popular emergence (~1888 with Eastman Kodak's first mass produced camera) as one which coincides (and colludes) with a privileging, across many fields (art, science, medicine), of a relatively new opposition: between reality and mimesis. In other words, prior to this period, and prior to the participation of photography (reality v. image of reality) and psychology (the mind v. our assessments of it) and science (the world v. our measurements of it) and etc., it might have been harder or less instinctual (less natural) to see the world as structuralist semiotics soon came to analyse it, viz. as a matrix of overlapping representations, each point in space a perspective, each experience measured in degrees of mediacy. Heidegger analyses this as the "conquest of the modern world for perspective" and perspectival forms of knowing. Jonathan Crary disputes the dates of this phenomenon, and thus photography's role in it. But whatever the date, McQuire insists on the importance of these continuities (not progressions) to the near-immediate popular uptake of camera technologies in the late 19th century. Cameras seemed to offer the ability to do something which was anyway very much in the popular consciousness: to make versions of the world.

Most histories of photography peddle the idea that photography arrived in these continuities as a kind of acme: the perfection of representation (and it is in this spirit that photography gets pitted victoriously against painting). McQuire argues that, on the contrary, photography (and other camera technologies) were the beginning of the end for the idea that representations were perfectable, i.e. that anything was precisely knowable. It is photography's almost-but-not-quite relationship to reality (a quality that most writers on photography describe as uncanny, including, prominently, Barthes and Sontag) that ultimately scuppers attempts to claim that meaning is fixable, knowable or perfectable at all. In being so close but yet so far, the very attempt to arrive becomes questionable. Maybe it's not possible after all.

And so, I wonder if this helps to understand something I've been hearing from photobloggers: their sense that photographs are not framed shards of reality but are instead products of an idiosyncratic and personal way of seeing. This project is founded on the idea that photographs are irreducibly personal, the product of a singular vision (and some say that better photographs are better precisely because the singularity of this vision shines forth clearly). Not that the idea of photography as itself perspectival, as one representation among many, is a new one. But photography's mechanistic qualities have never quite receded from view—it has always seemed especially cozy with reality, despite various attempts to recuperate it as art or artifice. But some of the descriptions I've heard of photography, weirdly and interestingly, are very close to mid-century descriptions of abstract expressionist painting (i.e. an expression of self through gesture and transferred emotion; but what is the mechanism of transfer for the self in or through photography? How does it arrive in the photo?).

I'm not saying that McQuire's history explains this (transformation or continuity or phenomenon or...). But he sets it up as noticeable, as a distinguishing contemporary feature of photography, and especially of online photography. Which in turn makes it possible to ask: what strains of contemporary thought (ways of knowing, shared desires, shared fears, shared delusions) is photography resonating with (constructively or destructively) that this new expressionist definition could come to exist, and to make sense? Why does it make sense to say this, at just this moment in time?

Persistent Vision

2005-02-04T08:17:00.000-08:00

Thank you Persistent Vision for distracting me from my project with talk about punk rock, an excellent sandwich from the world's smallest deli, and a most picturesque bench for sitting.

But also for the insight that toy camers are a "shortcut" to a certain photographic aesthetic. That's very nice. It points out the palpable link between technology (optics, but also the ways we differently invest in technology, e.g. as high-tech or low-tech, consumerist and less consumerist, etc.) and the ways we've learned to value photographs. It's something that escapes the notice of Bourdieu and Sontag and other past writers on photography—which was probably not oversight on their part, but the lack of an opportunity to consider so many photographic technologies operating at once (as we see when we look at photoblogs). Meaning: the lack of an opportunity to witness so many discrete technologies (digital, film, Lomo, SLR, camera, etc.), but also the lack of an opportunity to see so many photographs.

St. Dunstan in the East, interior

2005-02-04T08:15:00.000-08:00

St. Dunstan in the East, interior, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

St. Dunstan in the East

2005-02-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

St. Dunstan in the East, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Site of the most picturesque interview I've ever done or am likely to do.

1964, 2005: Photography's Lives

2005-02-03T13:40:00.000-08:00

I hear Gerhard Richter is unfashionable these days.

Here's Richter writing about his Photo Pictures (a name he used for his paintings made from found snapshot photography).

“For a time I worked as a photographic laboratory assistant: the masses of photographs that passed through the bath of developer every day may well have caused a lasting trauma.”

With photoblogs, Fickrs, and etc., we can all have this experience. Given that his Photo Pictures formed such a productive stage in his career, I think we can assume that by "trauma," Richter means a formative event. The kind that haunts and motivates us.

So, but, why create paintings from photographs? Aren't the photos self-sufficient? “Perhaps because I’m sorry for the photograph, because it has such a miserable existence even though it is such a perfect picture, I would like to make it valid, make it visible.” He writes here in 1964-5.

I wonder if he means, a miserable life cooped up in photo albums, rarely seen, badly archived, eventually thrown out or put into even deeper storage, and always secretly reviled when shown to hapless friends and family. Well, no longer. I think, had Richter's Photo Pictures never happened, the tactic of creating paintings from snapshot photos would, today, be very differently resonant. A fact which, if true, says a lot about the changed social life of photographs.

Both quotes from Richter, G. “Notes, 1964-1965” in Daily Practice 33, pp. 35-36.

Sneaky Library Fist Pump

2005-02-03T13:33:00.000-08:00

“The fact that camera technologies have been an integral part of the process of industrialisation has been as much neglected in social theory as the camera’s dependence on a whole network of industrial practices and production techniques has been excluded from art history. This concatenation of absences skews our perceptions of history, and limits our ability to respond to change in the present.” (McQuire, Scott (1998) Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera. London: Sage Publications, p. 4)

You just know that after writing that sentence he swivelled in his chair to see if anyone had noticed what he had just done. Six years later, I noticed. Nice work. Well said and well worth saying.

Stop Thinking That!

2005-02-02T05:10:00.000-08:00

In talking with Chromasia just now, he said something which struck me as really important, and not just because it had never occurred to me before, but a little bit because it dislodges a bit of my thinking that had gotten stuck.

He emphasised how his photoblog is just that, a photoblog, and important to him as such. My problem was this: because his (and many other photobloggers') photographs are so accomplished, and because in his comment box conversations, he seems to put so much emphasis on photography as such, on the technical and aesthetic aspects of a shot, I had been starting to think about *that* kind of photoblog as more of a gallery or portfolio than a blog. Which is wrong. Plain wrong, but also categorically confused. Simple classifications are just not going to work; I seem to have to learn that 10 times a day.

The thing he said which really struck me was that, even or especially on a technically/aesthetically focused site,
"there's a journey of sorts that's told by the photographs themselves (which includes changes of style, focus, equipment, and so on)...". By which he refers to a narrative spun out over time, a kind of continuity in the photoblog (over and above the bare fact that photographs go there) which is akin to that found in the archetypical or historical form of blogging, where, in many cases, it's the personality or some abiding interest of the blogger, related through text, which provides the continuity. And in photoblogs, Chromasia points out, it might be the same thing, but the photographs themselves carry and form the narrative.

Thanks to Chromasia for all of his help.

Gerhard Richter on What Pictures Really Want*

2005-01-30T14:35:00.000-08:00

In the 1960's, Gerhard Richter began a series of paintings copied from photographic snapshots (to see a few, do a search in the previous link for "ordinary life" images). Richter liked snapshots as sources because, as he says "there was no style, no composition, no judgment." I think we get more use out of Richter's sentiment if we take him to be saying that personal snapshots lacked—were free from—the modes of style, composition and judgment that painters, like himself, who had been trained in strict painterly tradition, learned to (couldn't help but) recognise and deploy. Snapshots were free from that which he felt hindered his painting, free from painterly devices and institutionalised modes of viewing.

Of course, Richter's ideas about what snapshot photography lacks are condescending, as if to say artists are the only people for whom visual concepts like style and composition are legible or relevant. His comments seem especially silly now, in light of the compositional, stylistic and formal awareness to be found in the photoblog world. For instance, check out the comment-box discussions on chromasia (with whom I'll be IM-ing tomorrow).

But Richter's paintings can happily exist apart from Richter's expressed interest in them. Let's let them.

To create his images, Richter mechanically traces a photograph which is itself a tracing from nature (William Henry Fox Talbot called photography the "the pencil of nature.") Of course, technology intervenes no less in Richter's process than it does in a snapshot photo, just as intention, artistry, and artifice intervene no less in snapshot photography than in Richter's images. No less, but differently. More to the point, in the viewing of images, we ascribe different roles to different actors in the process in order to make those images legible. Some of the familiar actors are: context (gallery, photo album or web?), image-maker ("artist" or anonymous snap-shooter?), iconography (composed or askew or compositionally askew, in focus or out, high resolution or low?), technology (Hasselblad, disposable camera or digital camera?). In order to make snapshot photography legible as such, we tend to privilege image content as sentiment and/or memory, and in doing so, ignore cues like authorship, photographic process and viewing context (these are tendencies, not rules). In Richter's images, probably we privilege something like the exact converse: authorship, process and context over some unrefracted sentiment that we might find resident in the photographic image had it not been re-rendered by Richter. Which is to say, whatever content we find meaningful in the photographic image itself (wherever that is), we take to be refracted through dominant cues like authorship, process and context, a product of them. This is how Richter's images become legible as Gerhard Richter images.

(Not to draw a categorical distinction between blog photography and any other kind of photography, but rather, to start to distinguish some practices for reading images...) A lot of blog photography draws attention to the image maker (e.g. it sits on a blog which is identified with the image-maker) without quite ceding to the maker absolute control over the image and its effects (e.g. it's quite possible on Flickr, for instance, to view images not according to who made them, but according to catergorising meta-tags). They draw a lot of attention to context without thereby generating contexts which are as homogenisable as gallery spaces (e.g. hard not to be aware that one is looking at a photoblog at the same time one is aware of looking at particular photographs, but equally hard, I'd say, to generalise successfully about blogs as contexts for viewing photography). And they persistently highlight process (how the photograph was arrived at, where it was taken, in what event, over how many beers, etc.) without suturing that process to any notion of authorship (as we might in looking at Richter's images, i.e. we say: that is Richter's unique process, that is how he gets those results).

In drawing attention to the institutionalised aspects of painting (explicitly, but also via the images themselves) Richter seems to encourage exactly these sorts of delineations in our practices of looking. Blog photography might do the same thing, might encourage carefully specified looking, if our instincts for which images deserve the respect of such looking weren't so inveterately tied to the art-image.

* WJT Mitchell "What Do Pictures Really Want?" October 77 (Summer, 1996).

How to Do Things with Words

2005-01-30T06:51:00.000-08:00

Philosopher J.L. Austin distinguishes two types of speech act: constative and performative. Constative speech acts describe a situation and can therefore be evaluated for their accuracy, how well they describe the world (Austin probably would have said: constative speech can be true or false). By contrast, performative speech (itself) produces an action (e.g. "I sentence you to life in prison"). Austin further delineates two forms of performative speech: illocutionary and perlocutionary. In illocutionary speech, the utterance itself is the action (e.g. the classical example, "I pronounce you man and wife"). In perlocutionary speech, the utterance is not the action, but produces the action as one of its effects (e.g. "Don't move!"). In light of later work in semiotics and cultural theory, constative and performative speech acts appear not nearly so distinct (e.g. does an influential critic's "description" of a photograph merely describe the work, or does it effect a certain way of seeing). But I think we can say that Austin's typology is still evocative: even if not politically useful, it does speak, at the very least, to the intention behind certain speech acts as well, therefore, to the ways in which certain speech acts are dissembled and disseminated.

Blogs, I think, as public speech acts, are more performative than they seem; and I think they operate in both illocutionary and perlocutionary modes. In fact, this is a pretty good summary of the work I was trying to do in my first paper on photoblogs, "What Does the Photoblog Want?"

This is further in the future than I've yet been

2005-01-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Deceptive Media for a great chat and my first opportunity to expore the Docklands. The Docklands is a strange barnacle on London's south east side. This is a peering photo of the Millenium Dome, once so full of promise, now merely photogenic.

This is Further in the Future, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Speaker's Corner Speakerless

2005-01-27T04:26:00.000-08:00

At 16:00 yesterday, on my way to Oxford, I passed Speaker's Corner, in London. It was empty, speakerless. I can notice it was speakerless because it is a place marked for public speech. We also know that a streeet corner like Oxford Circus, only .5 miles away, isn't marked for public speech because people who speak there, like the Sinner or Winner man, are called kooks. Some of the people who speak in Speaker's Corner are kooky, but we recognise their right to speak aloud in public, in that space. Which is to say, we recognise that even if their form of speech is outlandish to us, they (like us) have acknowledged a basic rule: only to speak publicly in the designated areas.

Didier Eribon, in part 2 of his book Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, examines how a form of coded "gay speech" (p. 7), from the 19th c. forward, has helped to constitute a community and a politics through a form of "public expression." Here, too, there are rules for what one can say in public, and consequences for errant speech-acts, for speech-acts of all kinds. Far more violent and intensively imposed rules.

The internet is a form of public. Speaking there, on a blog, through words or photographs, is a kind of public speech act (the trick is to know what kind--but I don't know yet). And there have been consequences, many and various: formations of communities and sub-communities and splinter communities, cults of celebrity, cries from the outside and from the inside of narcissism, complaints that the internet has been flooded by puerile, (or worse) amateur noise. Etcetera.

So I think we can see blogs alongside Speaker's Corner, and other locations for public speech (all places are—but the consequences for speaking vary). Not that they are the same, or even analogous, but I think they are governed by similar strictures. Offline, the rules of public space are not homogenous or entirely predictable, and they are not simply migrated wholesale onto the internet, but if the internet is a public which alters or perverts the rules of publics elsewhere (and how can it not?), then still, it is working from the basis of those elsewheres, and so sustains a relationship to them.

-kris

Speaker's Corner Speakerless, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Angel and Greyhound

2005-01-27T03:15:00.000-08:00

Angel and Greyhound, St. Clement's, Oxford, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Oxford, home of the Triple J: J, J, and J

Thanks for teaching me about the etiquette of death and blogging. Among many, many other things. The Triple J know a lot more than I do about photoblogging and photo-everythinging.

-kris

2005-01-26T03:03:00.000-08:00

Interesting comment here about "photo-a-day" projects, which Dick's Daily also mentioned.

And very interesting thread here about how blogging, at an individual level, changes through time.

-kris

List or Spectrum?

2005-01-26T02:19:00.000-08:00

art photography, abstract photography, compositional photography, stock photography, semi-professional photography, professional photography, documentary photography, journalistic photography, amateur photography, blog photography, slice of life photography, snapshot photography, holiday photography, personal photography, urban street photography...

-kris

Photography's Erotic Flaws

2005-01-26T02:05:00.000-08:00

Lovely thing about interviews: they don't let you hold onto either assumptions or conclusions for long. Yesterday morning, I wondered aloud and in print about whether the experience of viewing photographs online fosters a kind of double vision: on the content of the photo (seeing through the photo) and, at the same time, on the photograph itself (sight at the photo's surface). When along came yesterday afternoon's interviews with pixeldiva and Dick's Daily, during which pixeldiva described one of the pleasures of blog photography as the opportunity to glimpse the personality beneath the posts (despite their formal qualities, their grammar, their compositional qualities), and Dick's Daily distinguished blog photography from other forms of photography (not absolutely distinguished, but provisionally) by its friendliness to accident, to informality, to what, in the context of "proper" photography, can look like a mistake or simply a "bad" photo. Bad light. Bad focus. Graininess. Somehow, these qualities suit blog photography, or blog photography welcomes them. And to pixeldiva's point, maybe personality shows through (is nicely refracted by) these endearing flaws, or maybe personality travels within them.

-kris

Look, that nice building is hiding behind that ugly one!

2005-01-26T01:06:00.000-08:00

Look, that nice building is hiding behind that ugly one!, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Then, in the afternoon, I met with pixeldiva in the ugly building behind the nice building, which is much less ugly inside. Thanks to pixeldiva for courageously allowing me to pepper her with questions for 2 hours, which *I* did.

Near Green Lanes

2005-01-26T01:00:00.000-08:00

Near Green Lanes, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Met with Dick's Daily here, in sight of the televised cricket and an old man having a slap up lunch. Thanks to Dick's Daily.

-kris

Photography's Old and New Sites

2005-01-25T03:26:00.000-08:00

Many people, including two recent email interviews I've done with Daily Images and Donut's Daily Daguerreotype, talk about the internet being the main place where they intensively or intentionally view other people's photographs. Of course, they, like everyone else, see photographs all the time. But in order to see photographs as photographs (this is one way to articulate the distinction here), the web is their primary site. Some mention laziness or convenience as the reason for this. Others say that they find photographs on photoblogs to be more interesting. Here's how one person said it: "I think it's because online portfolios are more personal, more unique. People have the freedom to show whatever they want, whereas galleries tend to show work that is perhaps bound to certain rules. They tend to be good technically, but boring."

There's a lot to comment on and take issue with here. For right now, I'm trying to hold my attention on this in relation to the historical arc of photography:

-from a late 19th/early 20th c. popular recreation, but one where the taking of photographs was far more visible, publicly, than photographs themselves;

-to a medium inching towards the achievement of art status alongside its popular status, and therefore, gaining a new set of sites (galleries, books), a new critical language, a new nexus of comparisons (inevitably, to painting, but also to documentary, to film, etc.);

-to a (now) newly popular medium, digital, comparatively cheap, embedded in a new set of behaviours and rituals (than, say, the ones Bourdieu looked at in late 20th c. France), but which also sits along side other categories, old and new: journalistic photography, art photography, stock photography.

And so, here is evidence of some sliding between categories and modes of viewing: for a lot of people I've talked to, their experience of viewing photography as a medium (seeing photography as such, alongside its content, its iconography and etc.) is an online experience , whereas this was formerly a mode of looking most often fostered (I'm guessing) by art photography, photography in galleries, in books, etc., where the site itself tends to point to the photographicity of photography (not that it's not possible to have the experience of photography as such in, say, the morning newspaper, but I don't think this is the common practice, the ordinary language of photography). Does the internet, as we experience it visually, focus our attention on medium more generally: the textuality of text, the aurality of sound? Is this one of its effects? It's too large a question, however interesting. But within the public life of photography, more specifically, I can start to see where this attention to medium, paired with the familiar experiences of looking for content and tone (photos of people, photos of a birthday party, photos of the family trip to Mexico), is starting to change how photography functions.

-kris

Toast into Bread

2005-01-22T05:12:00.000-08:00

When it's a choice, why do we look at all? What are the kinds of attractions that keep us looking? Over time, sensation changes: often fades. Is looking sensation? Does it change with time, and, how does it?

Yesterday, Nicely Toasted likened the experience of reading blogs to the experience of looking down into the ground floor windows of row houses. A deeply pleasurable, engrossing act, slightly perverse, but mortal, short-lived. After a peroid of looking into ground floor flats—the tv-blue windows, the desultory signs of life—the flats start to look the same and the pleasure of looking fades. This kind of looking, or these objects of looking (other people's homes, blogs), seem to rely on the presence of an outside to that looking: looking at a person's blog (or maybe all blogs) is fun when one can still crisply remember what it was like *not* to have that kind of access. Looking into someone's home is fun in contrast to the more public, less sensational, less imtimate sights offered by streets. This kind of looking relies on a contrast, or an oscillation between intimacy and its opposite. Maybe the unexpected view into someone's home is an unexpected intimacy, and exciting for that reason. But also, necessarily, short-lived.

Is it the same with porn? (my suggestion, not Nicely Toasted's)

I don't take this to mean that blogs are a flash in the pan, or a fading sensation. Not at all. Rather, I'm thinking that at the start of a project, about a phenomenon which is relatively new, it's hard to have a sense of how that phenomenon sits in time. Thanks to Nicely Toasted for providing some insight.

-kris

Snug

2005-01-22T05:08:00.000-08:00

Snug, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

It was. This is where I met with Toast, yesterday in Oxford.

-kris

Poppy Thinking

2005-01-20T02:12:00.000-08:00

More on my conversation with www.prettypoppies.com:

We talked about the internet as a new medium for photography, a place where one can see thousands of people's personal photographs on any given day. I'm curious about what this does to the internet as a public or pseudo-public space. Indeed, what this would do to any public space (your local mall paper-posted with thousands of enlarged photographs from people's family albums?). As Sontag is constantly saying (allow me that present tense, please), along with Flusser and, in his own way, Don Slater, our experience of day-to-day life is an experience of photography. But it's never quite been an experience of people's personal photography. "Personal photography?" Leaving aside for the moment issues of aesthetics and iconography, of medium and institutional networks (all common forms of distinction), personal photographs are different than journalism or art photography or most other types of photography for the simple fact that they are personal, and to me, that means that they mostly don't get seen or shown outside a close circle of intimates. They have their own networks of circulation—not private exactly, but intimate, close, sometimes affective, less like commodities and more like rumours. And this form or level of distinction is exactly one thing I think the presence of personal photography online might be changing, which is to say, invalidating. [Displacement, or a mix-up of circulation networks, is one way to account for the appeal of Dave's found photographs, as well as for the melancholy of Barthes' writing on photography.]

So, we talked about the experience of seeing personal photography online and prettypoppies.com described a feeling of overcrowding (to be fair, she had many reactions to all the photography out there; I'm just picking out one). I think it's fair to say that (here, at least) hers is a photographer's point of view, and her reaction is aimed at people who post photographs in photography communities. Many, many people are posting their photos to photography communities these days (e.g. livejournal's), and if anything, I understate the case to say that the standards of quality (and quality is one thing that prettypoppies.com was talking about) one finds there are extremely diverse. Which can make the internet a difficult place to browse; sticky; possibly boring or unappealing; even annoying. Full of distractions and what one thinks one doesn't want. Many art forms are confronting this situation. So many writers; so many photographers; so many web designers and illustrators. It's like the mob has come to every medium. On one side, people herald the "democratization" of art and cultural production; on the other, people decry the loss of standards (and as a result, the internet gets painted as a space for "amateur" production, in contrast to galleries and books, the spaces of rarified, legit cultural production). But both responses assume that all forms of cultural production *want* the same thing: audience, recognition, upward mobility. I'm not sure they do. And I think that if we assume that they do, we help to create a cultural economy of scarce resources, where everything out there seems to clamber for the same forms of recognition, and nothing seems adequate—not our attention spans nor our capacities for appreciation. Suddenly, it is consumption and not production that appears to be in short supply and ill-equipped. Interesting. But it also makes me think that "production" and "consumption" aren't going to help us think about this moment (a point that Jean has been pressing for months).

-kris

Poppies the First

2005-01-20T01:51:00.000-08:00

Very good Instant Messaging interview with www.prettypoppies.com yesterday afternoon. It was a follow-up interview actually, about 15 months after I first spoke to her about her photographs and her livejournal blog. Things change fast in the blog world, as they do in the world world. She's moved to a new country. She has two new websites for her photography (including www.prettypoppies.com and one due out in short order) and continues to be active on her original livejournal. And she's taking more photographs than ever. These changes seem like diversifications to me. A spreading out into new forms, but related to more keenly felt interests and more clearly specified goals. "Goals" is the wrong word, because in blogs, I've found, goals are less ends than they are means to ends (which are often unknown or unspecified at the outset). The blog itself (for instance) appears to be an end, an outcome, but seems to function far more actively as the means to many and various ends. Further evidence: her photoblog, and all of the activities that constitute it (photography, photographic rambles, the photographs themselves, conversations about photographs staged in comment boxes all over the web...) has been, at least in part, generative of these changes.

-kris

Towards a Philosophy of Photography

2005-01-18T11:57:00.000-08:00

Not my philosophy, but Vilem Flusser's (1920-1991). Steven Shaviro writes about it here.

One thing to say for him: Flusser takes photography very seriously. For him, two major events divide history: the first was the invention of writing (supplanting images); the second was the invention of photography (supplanting or beginning the process of supplanting writing). If you're writing a grant application to work on photography, and you need a citation which inflates the significance of your study, Flusser is your man. The stakes of photography are human freedom, in the largest possible sense.

That said, for Flusser, photography is important as a philosophical object mainly for the way it prototypes all similar apparatus, all means of "technical image" making. A result being that Flusser is unconcerned with images themselves, with photographic iconography, with any particular image-makers. He does, however, cleave photographs into two qualitative ur-categories: 1. photographs which produce no new information, which are redundant and endlessly reproduced—snapshots are his primary example here, although he also recognises documentary and journalistic photography as of this type; 2. photographs which attempt to produce new information, which try to exceed a camera's program, the technical codes which dictate what an image can be and do—here, he cites something he calls "experimental photography" but gives no better sense of what practices this might reference. Snapshots, Flusser asserts at least twice, are not of interest to his study (although he talks about them persistently). Informational photographs, on the other hand, are of interest because in their attempts to exceed the apparatus' program, they strive to free human intention from "automaticity." He reserves the valorised term "photographer" for those who practice experimental photography. The rest of us are "idolaters."

Obviously, hasty summary does Flusser few favours. I'm finding it impossible to avoid a tone of mockery here, when that's not at all my aim or what, ultimately, I think Flusser deserves. It's an 80-page book, terse, neologistic, and entirely without citation. After the first half of the book, I was ready to write him off as someone who believed many things that I could or would not: that technology can and does ruthlessly determine human action, that the bulk of cultural production is nugatory and the majority of cultural producers are deeply self-deluded, and that the "matter of the world" is separable from the symbolic registers of the world (e.g. photography) such that one can dominate the other in particular historical moments. I wasn't sure I could have any sort of productive dialogue with Flusser's work. But the second half...well, it's not that it gets suddenly more nuanced and interesting; rather, his accretive prose style arrives someplace unexpected.

Flusser's is a doggedly, programmatically pessimistic view of photography. But his philosophy of photography, as he outlines it, is a liberational project. What a strange vision. It seems very worth a reckoning, if only for its complications and the resistances I want, instinctually, to erect against it. [in other words, I'm giving up on this post. I had bigger plans for it, but there are always more posts, and it was offending me, sitting there all misshapen and gangly in my draft folder.]

-kris

More on Curiously Incongruous

2005-01-17T13:28:00.000-08:00

Curiously Incongruous' awareness of photography's art world has me turning my attentions that way as well. Here's Sontag again—she draws out one thread of the comparison that I'm after:

"Photography is the only major art in which professional training and years of experience do not confer an insuperable advantage over the untrained and inexperienced—this for many reasons, among them the large role that chance (or luck) plays in the taking of pictures, and the bias toward the spontaneous, the rough, the imperfect." (p. 28, Regarding the Pain of Others).

However true this might be in principle, Sontag's point here better suits her case at hand than the de facto rules of the field at large. She is talking about the now famous post-9/11 photography show in New York called Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs. In that show, amateur photographs hang next to commercially and artistically professional photographers' images—the various forces of professionalisation are indeed not insuperable in this specific case. But professionalisation does more subtle work that simply admit or bar the door. It colours how we see; it sets standards and modes of reception for many more than just the so-called professional images. However obscure these standards.

Curiously Incongruous, however, is neither inexperienced nor untrained. On the contrary, he spends a very serious amount of time on his photography, as do many so-called amateur photographers. There are and will be spaces where art-world photographs (photos which arrive from that vector) meet their Others. "Here is New York" is one such space; the internet is another. We can expect all of the familiar reactionary responses: *that's* not real art, *this* is real art, etc. The unique event, the one we might learn something from, will be the practices fostered in the hothouse of this encounter. Practices of image-making and practices of image-viewing. Thanks to Curiously Incongruous for helping me to see the importance of this encounter.

-kris

Interview with Curiously Incongruous

2005-01-17T11:57:00.000-08:00

This is the pub where Curiously Incongruous and I met.

[that's not him in the back of the photo]

-kris

Interview with Curiously Incongruous, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Regarding the Pain of Others

2005-01-15T13:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, at the aforementioned workshop, Jackie Orr spoke about panic. This is a great and heteroclite topic for research. It connects so much: the ways in which panic is incited and governed (e.g. the recent simulations of bio-warfare attacks); the ways in which panic is experienced and governed (e.g. prescription drugs for controlling panic attacks); the ways panic is represented and otherwise enacted. It's the kind of topic that is suddenly everywhere, in everything, once one is given the right optic for it.

Orr describes how panic is, at once, the responsibility of individuals (panic attacks) and the outgrowth of collectives (mass panic). I think about how, in representations of panic, the movements of the camera teach us how we might conceptualise panic: it cuts from the source of mass panic (the invading ships) to the faces, close in, of individuals suddenly out of control. Panic happens, we learn, when individuals go crazy--a definition which opens the door for someone to then claim that the source of panic was imagined, and that the individual is therefore merely insane, themselves to blame for their *own* panic. (Orr is careful to admit of how panic might be experienced by individuals, not merely represented. I'm the one obsessed by representation, not Orr so much.)

This busy movement between the individual and the collective. We see it in studies of photography as well. An individual's photograph is given as irreducible. The artist's valuable print. The stranger's holiday snap, impassive outside the family. In both cases, meaning devolves onto the individual, if it does not emanate from the individual. I like how Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others gives us the collective life of photographs, how they act together (if not in concert), alongside a sensitivity to how images work individually, iconographically (in contrast to, say, P. Bourdieu or D. Slater). The dangers of generalisation notwithstanding, I think photographs have a collective life. In that collective life, there is busy movement between the individual image and the collective image-body. What effects this movement? When? To what ends? Can we say there is a collective life of personal photographs? Has there always been (though the photos have been locked away in albums)? Does this life (or the collectivity) change in the context of the internet?

-kris

Fourier Transform

2005-01-13T03:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in Oxford (as mentioned on the Weekly INCITE) I talked to www.fouriertransform.com/365/. Who also, btw, runs a beautiful record label.

[In the future, I'll try to post a photograph of the place where the interview took place, but I don't yet have permanent access to a camera. Next time. For now, imagine a building shaped like Freud's face, with mouth as door. The cafe was called Freud's.]

One thing that we (S and I) talked about at length is the extent to which his photographs, which he describes as "Photographs of different places around the world," are photographs *of* those places. He emphasises that they are not "willingly perverse," but that nevertheless, they are not exactly photos which are recognisable *as* a particular place, or which conversely make a place recognisable through the medium of the photo. They are photos of small things, that which might otherwise go unnoticed. Take a look. The perversity, witting or un-, of representation here interestingly raises the issue of representation resident in all blogged photos (as possibly but not necessarily distinct from all online personal photography).

The simple impulse is to say that bloggers' photos are photos which (somehow) represent the blogger (e.g. the blogger's experience of a place, if not the place itself). But. At the very least, this response seems uselessly vague. In other words, I think it's still a very open question. One which yesterday's interview helps to open and starts to answer, although it's still too early in the research for me to quite hear what S is saying in this respect. I think it matters what these personal photographs show--most blogging research ignores this. But it's probably not an issue of representation. I think that the answer (the theoretical framework of the answer) is going to need to simultaneously address not only image content (the traditional scope of representation), but all of the various activities of photography and blogging. Representation's purview is not normally so wide.

If in the world of art (e.g. art photography), the author is no longer popular as a source of meaning (e.g. an author's biography), I think blogger photos are going to call for a very differnt mode of analysis.

-kris

Other People's Photographs

2005-01-13T02:47:00.000-08:00

For the last few years, Dave has collected photographs that he finds discarded, in trashcans and wherehaveyou. He says that they stand in for tourist photos, which I think we can take to mean: originating in a specific place, in a sense "taken" in that place, from that place, and somehow (both more and less than photographs one takes oneself) OF that place. These photographs are evidentiary in a way that personal photography has always wanted to be. That is, evidentiary in the precise way that people have ever wished they were (would that journalists' photos could finally tell the truth). They are literally the matter of their place of origin. The very stuff. Dave carries them away from that place like we carry away our own photos. Dave posts them on the internet like we post our own photos. Could we dream a situation where, looking through our own holiday snaps, the scene of a beach recently visited shows a person we don't recognise, someone who has slipped into our photo? And a conjoined scene wherein we look at Dave's trashcan photos and think that maybe we see someone we know, the likeness of our mother's aunt, a cousin? Then, what would be the difference?

-kris

Croc!

2004-10-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

Multimedia message, originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Isn't this the finest stuffed croc you've ever seen? It moved in recently. Or is it an alligator? -k

London This Week

2004-10-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

me freezing, originally uploaded by Damen and Walton.

It got cold.