an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Winter 2017/2018, ISSN 1552-5112
Photographers Need Not Apply: Photography Doesn’t Need You Anymore
1. A
New Life-form
Science fiction
writers have long been fascinated with the idea of artificial intelligence and
the dawn of sentient technology. In these scenarios humans fare badly. Once
computers become independent of their creators they soon realize that the
biggest threat to humanity is the human race itself and that the world would be
much better without homo-sapiens mucking things up. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to The
Terminator to The Matrix,
computers do their best to kill or subdue the offending bipedal hairless apes
who somehow hang on through unpredictability and cunning.
The good news is
that we aren't there yet. Apple, Inc.’s operating system personal assistant, Siri (commonly found on Apple iPhones,
for example) isn't going to kill you,
yet. The not so good news is that a venerated medium of visual representation
that has contributed more than its fair share to changing the world has become
free of its tether to learned practitioners and has become a self-perpetuating
organism.
That medium is
photography. It has evolved into an organic-digital hybrid life form no longer
dependent on photographers for its growth or existence. This is not to say that
photographs will no longer be taken. They will most likely be taken in ever
increasing numbers, outstripping the staggering volume we are currently
struggling under. The unpleasant truth photographers must contend with is that
they will no longer be part of the equation.
Humans with cameras
will continue to take photographs, but they will no more be photographers than
literate humans with pencil and paper can be called writers. Instead, the term
operator is more appropriate. Operators are people who take pictures in
accordance with the program of photography. They respond to aberrations in
daily routines by dutifully pointing a camera at them and posting them to
Facebook. They fulfil social rituals by recording appropriate responses in
socially sanctioned events and markers in one's passage through life. They also
record violations of the social code and make one's transgressions available
for public shaming.
Photographers, on
the other hand, do not follow social codes or programs when they make images.
They understand the communicative powers of the medium by arranging symbols and
signs in the frame, manipulating formal qualities for effect and have developed
a certain mastery of their equipment to be able to intentionally create
meaning.
Operators have
existed since Kodak introduced the point and shoot camera in 1888 with the
tagline, 'You press the button, we do the rest.'[1] However, operators were kept in check with lower
quality equipment, lack of know-how, and most importantly by not being given
access to distribution by gatekeepers that permitted the dissemination of the
work of an elite band of photographers through galleries and print
publications.
The biggest change
in photography wrought by the digital age has nothing to do with the camera
itself or the plasticity of image manipulation. It's the ease of distribution
and the loss of authority of the gatekeepers that are the really important
changes. An oft-quoted but uncited statistic states that more photographs are
taken today in just two minutes than were taken in the entire 19th century.[2] We have reached the proverbial army of monkeys
bashing away on typewriters, one of which will produce a Shakespeare sonnet
completely by chance. With billions of smartphone users blissfully tapping
away, that's going to be the visual equivalent of a sonnet every few minutes.
The lack of
expertise necessary to use these high quality and highly sophisticated
image-making and sharing devices creates the illusion of adequacy and a deluge
of images that are all essentially the same, recreating an earlier image that
the operator wishes to duplicate. Selfies, cute pets, and people acting
foolishly fill the dataverse in a self-perpetuating spiral. The lack of
thought, the lack of effort negates individuality and visual contributions that
can be attributed to a single person. We are faced with behavior of a lower
order; behavior that is essentially a response to stimuli, not very different
from reacting to something very hot or very cold. In this, the operator is
similar to a plant turning its leaves to face the sun or if/then statements in
lines of computer code.
The paradox of having
a smartphone is that it feels like empowerment. And in many ways it is; but it
simultaneously leads us into mindless time-wasting behavior that nullifies the
individual that we are led to believe we have become through its purchase. Part
of this blindness is due to the cult of the individual that is actively
promoted in advanced western countries, especially the United States. It
denigrates our strong conformist tendencies and tries to separate us from
animals such as sheep, ants and cows, which we look down on for their lack of
uniqueness. What many of us mistake for originality is actually a kind of
conformity in which we all express ourselves by choosing from a limited menu of
options.
The photographer,
with a deeper understanding of the camera and the power of the image to
manipulate viewers' understandings and interpretations of events, retains a
higher degree of independence and control over his or her tool. The operator,
on the other hand, with less understanding and greater reliance on preformatted
choices is more prone to be the manipulated side in the relationship. This has
profound implications when one considers how social media not only encourages
image creation but also influences it through a system of rewards in the form
of iconographic validations. Just how many images are created for the
satisfaction of a virtual pat on the back is unknown, but certainly it
compromises the operator's use of a camera and distribution media as tools of
empowerment.
As one flies into
almost any American city today the extent of the suburban sprawl of our car
culture is hard to miss. From the vantage point of several thousand feet the
curlicue layouts of housing developments begin to look like the trails of
parasites in tree bark. The identical homes surrounding their cul-de-sacs evoke
the panopticon prison design. The snarls of highway traffic resemble ants
streaming into their hill. Yet it is with promises of freedom and individuality
that cars and homes are sold to consumers; so it is with smartphones and social
media.
Operators may think
of themselves as individuals, but as they upload and share photos, 'like' their
friends' posts and unknowingly feed the databases of security agencies and data
miners they become part of a much larger entity. Like a soldier with a gun that
surrenders his or her individuality to become part of an army, operators
unknowingly through participation in social media become a single pixel in an
enormous cyborg camera; networked through social media into a giant inside-out
eyeball, a 7000 megapixel camera, seeing and recording everything on earth.
This sheath of
surveillance replaces the eye in the sky of the omniscient god concept. There
is no need for someone or thing to be actively watching us when we willingly
report on ourselves. Our technology has tapped into our latent narcissistic
desire for attention while we go about our business largely unaware. According
to Sigmund Freud we enjoy a healthy period of narcissism as infants, during
which, our every demand is met by all-powerful mothers and fathers, who dote
upon, nurture and protect us. While we grow out of this phase on our journey
towards independence we never forget it. Freud postulated that we even create
gods and goddesses to fill the emotional void left by infantile perceptions of
our parents.[3] Social
media easily steps in and assuages our narcissistic tendencies through round
the clock attention and affirmation of simple accomplishments such as reposting
someone else's cat video. Yet this stroking of our ego through 'likes' and
smiley faces comes at a price. Attention from so-called friends and family also
means surveillance by unknown entities with less than altruistic intents. This
is a new generation of surveillance that differentiates itself from Foucault's
panopticon model[4] in that it is not fear of a guard's gaze that
prevents bad behavior, but a mask of friends and family that encourages it.
Deeper penetration into the mindset of an individual allows for a more
profitable form of control through the offering of desirable commodities
tailored to each person's self-declared interests.
What will life
inside the eyeball be like? With everyone on earth transformed into a single
cyborg pixel of an enormous living camera, everyone must simultaneously become
a subject as well; either their own or someone else's. A 1:1 relationship of
camera to subject ensues bringing to life at last Borges' mythic map that was
the exact replica in size and detail of the territory it represented. Yet at
the same time it won't be so much a facsimile as a hyperbole. People don't like
to make pictures that are truly descriptive of themselves or others. An element
of flattery is usually at play, creating what Baudrillard would call a second
order simulation one that distorts or perverts reality.[5] However, another aspect of human behavior must be
considered: the habit of reconstituting images we have already seen in order to
meet expectations. Without photographers contributing new visual strategies to
the image stream, a feedback loop of operators will ensue recreating
distortions of distortions until the photographs will no longer have any
relation to the original image; a complete simulacrum. Susan Sontag once wrote
that, 'Today everything exists to end in a photograph.[6]' But in this scenario there will be no end, just
an inwardly spiralling vortex of image redundancy.
2. The
Photographers
It used to be that
we relied on photographers to record historical events: wars, fashion shows,
humanitarian crises, propaganda, natural disasters and transgressions of
justice. Mathew Brady, the great impresario of photographing the American Civil
War brought 3-D carnage to the stereoscopes in drawing rooms across the
country. Jacob Riis showed us how the other half lives in the slums of New
York, and Robert Capa got more than close enough on the beaches of Normandy in
World War 2. But with the spread of operators to every inch of the planet with
high enough quality equipment, a shift has been under way for several years
from professionals to the monkey with the typewriter approach to fulfill
diverse organizations’ and consumers' visual needs. In 2013 the Chicago Sun
Times suddenly layed off its entire staff of 28 full time photographers and started
training reporters in iPhone basics.[7] Vogue magazine recently advocated not hiring a
photographer at all for a contemporary wedding.
It
made sense back in the olden days, pre-Facebook albums and Instagram hashtags,
when the whole world didn't have phones with cameras on them. Having the actual
leather-bound album on your coffee table seemed like the only evidence that the
whole thing actually took place. If social media is not your thing, why not
scatter some disposable cameras around the party and let your drunken guests go
to town? You'll end up with hilarious and candid pictures without the pressure
of "likes."[8]
When was the last
great photograph taken by a photographer? Was it Nick Ut's terrifying photo of
running children burning from napalm in 1972? Steve McCurry's Afghan Girl from 1984 or Jeff Widener's Tank Man in Tiananmen Square in 1989?
There are no definitive shots of the September 11 attack on the World Trade
Center simply because there were just too many people with cameras there. The
defining image of the Iraq War has presented a dilemma for art historians. The
hooded Iraqi prisoner standing on a box with electrodes tied to his hands was
taken by one of his torturers. Does the picture taker's collusion in acts of
torture disqualify them as a photographer? Does that person not get their name
in bold in photo history textbooks? Is there no gallery show? If we label them
as an operator, a monkey who got lucky, we can duck the question. In 2015, many
of the most powerful images were taken of police brutality by people who just
happened to be there at the right moment. Some images were actually automatic
dash-cam video not involving a human operator at all. Yet they revealed
breakdowns and racial bias in the American criminal justice system that no
photographer had yet been able to capture. These unprofessional images have
given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and the #ifiwasgunneddown hashtag
on Twitter. Far beyond generating a stunning but well-composed image that can
win a Pulitzer Prize, they are transforming conversations on race relations and
reshaping law enforcement and the political landscape.
3. The Blob
Cells removed from the human body can be kept alive for decades in
special solutions and bred until they far exceed in mass the original life form
from which they came. The most famous example of this is the HeLa cell line
originally taken from a tumor growing in
a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951. Apart from the fact that these cells have
been used in ground breaking research from the polio vaccine to AIDS
treatments, it has been estimated that all together, all the cells grown from
the original sample over the last seven decades would far exceed the weight and
volume of the original Mrs. Lacks. In fact, they would be enough to cover the
earth twice over.
This
sounds like the stuff of science fiction and in fact it is not far from the
truth. Stories of mad scientists breeding cell tissue into ravenous monsters
can be traced back to 1922 when Alessandro Fabri wrote a terrifying tale about
cell tissue taken from a chicken being grown into a rooster large enough to
cross the Atlantic in a single stride threatening everything in its path.
Horror comics from the 1950's abound with similar tales of cell culture
research going awry; megalomaniacal eggheads throwing sweet young things into
oversized quivering pulsating pink mounds of Jello. Finally in 1958, Hollywood
entered the fray with its iconic movie, The
Blob, about a mass of alien cell tissue that grows and grows devouring
everything in its path.
Operators have
traditionally been like cultures of cells politely living in their Petri
dish-like environs such as photo albums, and slide carousels. But the digital
age with its connectivity of social media has allowed for the spreading and
uncontrolled growth of operator images. Even the term 'viral' acknowledges the
rapidity and randomness of its reach. It has overwhelmed the gatekeepers and
can cross oceans with the blink of an eye. Like the HeLa cells, photography no
longer needs its original source. It is in a nutrient-laden medium that
sustains its indefinite existence.
Is photography a
virus? Has it become a cancer? Perhaps what is more important to consider is
that like cells growing in culture and sent from lab to lab to be used in
diverse experiments, the product of billions of operators is being harvested,
gleaned and repurposed by editors, news agencies, artists and data-miners as if
it were raw material, free for the taking. Postmodern artist, Richard Prince,
who came into notoriety in the 1980's by photographing Marlboro advertisements,
is now printing screenshots of other people's Instagram posts and selling them
for upwards of $90,000 each.[9] We live in an age when the most influential
photographer alive is cultural celebrity Kim Kardashian, who is redefining the
very concept of shame itself. Instead of training photographers perhaps what we
need to be doing is nurturing a new generation of harvesters, curators and
photo archaeologists to dig up the work of previously unknown photographers
like that of Chicago nanny, Vivian Maier.
Taking
a picture today is no longer a privileged or anonymous act. What we are slow to
pick up on is that pictures are a kind of data; data about us that travels with
every image. The entire meaning of the portrait has changed invisibly in front
of us by sleight of hand. A portrait no longer is just a visual record of what
one looked like at a point in time. It is a complex data file. A portrait no
longer has to be just visual information, it can also be about search
histories, shopping habits, medical concerns, and secrets you would prefer to
keep to yourself. Data portraits look into our past and can reliably make
predictions about our future. They exist in 4 dimensions, yet we still can only
conceptualize them as being in just 2 or 3. Each posting or search then becomes
a self-portrait in the sense that it alerts interested parties of our
whereabouts, tastes, and activities. We have a perfect blending of narcissism
and surveillance. We live our lives craving the attention that we once had as
infants, without realizing that the gaze we are under is not the benevolent
purview of our mother. Our brains have not yet caught up with the latest
technological advancements in surveillance and still lag behind in the embrace
of the 20th century.
The
question on many peoples' minds must be what are photographers then to do? If
they aren't needed should they just hang up their DSLR's and fade away? No, in
fact, I have some good news. We are in the second phase of the digital
revolution. The first phase with its plasticity of image manipulation relieved
photography of the burden of telling the truth. The second phase relieves
photographers from all responsibility whatsoever. They are unnecessary,
irrelevant and useless. That potentially makes them artists. Since the days of
Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo Secession, the dream of being taken seriously as
artists has vexed photographers. Through contortions and backbends, draconian
parameters, mind-breaking French philosophy, wanna-be artist photographers have
striven to somehow separate themselves from being mistaken for
photojournalists, commercial sell-outs and worst of all, amateurs. But no
matter how they stretched for this Holy Grail, in the back of their minds
nagged the thought, 'I could still shoot a wedding.' At last, as the utility of
their craft drains away, photographers can now join the ranks of printmakers,
drawers, sculptors and yes, even painters; all practitioners of obsolescent
technology. The blessing of the digital age is that at last photographers can
be starving artists, too.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Winter
2017/2018, ISSN 1552-5112
Bibliography
Rebecca Skloot. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New
York: Broadway Books, 2011
Kodak, Research and Development, viewed
March 18, 2016,
https://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/researchDevelopment/whatWeDo/development/designUsability/history.shtml
Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer, viewed March 18, 2016, http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/04/all-the-photographs-from-the-19th-century.html
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, New York, London, W. W. Norton,
2005
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison, New York, Vintage
Books, 1995
Jean Beaudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, 1995
Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977
Kenneth Irby, John White on Sun-Times layoffs: 'It was as if they pushed a button and
deleted a whole culture,' Poynter, viewed March 18, 2016,
http://www.poynter.org/2013/john-white-on-sun-times-layoffs-it-was-as-if-they-pushed-a-button-and-deleted-a-whole-culture/215016/
Molly Guy, The Ten Wedding "Rules" to Break, Vogue, viewed March 18,
2016, http://www.vogue.com/13384689/wedding-rules-to-break/
Christopher Sprigman, Richard Prince, Instagram, and Authorship in a Digital World, Bloomberg.com,
viewed March 18, 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-17/richard-prince-instagram-and-authorship-in-a-digital-world
Notes