networked photography

[Click here for italian version.]

I have always liked Craig Mod, since I read years ago his travelogue/review of the Panasonic GF1. He traveled to Himalaya, captured some great shot with this little camera, and wrote extensive and very well written thoughts about 'gear' -- linking tech talk to excellent photography and interesting, deep commentary about how it feels to use a camera to capture your emotions. So far, this has been the best review of a camera that I've ever read. And it has been that review that inspired me to abandon (although only temporarily) DSLRs and got myself that little micro 4/3 jewel that was the GF1¹.

However in recent times he has become something like a small internet celebrity and he is very active in discussing stuff like the future of publishing and all sort of nerdy-techie-creative endeavors that appeal to the smart kids of the interweb. He has reached that higher level where the most appropriate way of expressing himself is to pontificate.

He's recently written a piece on photography (on the New Yorker!) that has been reblogged by all technophiles and other internet hotshots like John Gruber:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/goodbye-cameras.html

Go and read the piece. It is a very good read, there's a bit of history of photographic equipment that people my age can easily relate to, but the conclusions he reaches do not resonate with me -- at all!

You tell me if the power of photography can really be reduced and diminished by the lack of diffusion on social networks; you tell me if photographs and photography are really improved somehow by the fact that you share them with other people.

Photography to me is such an individual pursuit that the fact that other people may or may not like what you make is largely irrelevant; what's particularly fascinating to me (bear with me for a second, 'cause I'm going on a tangent here) is that photography allows people that have no physical talents -- like the ability to draw and paint for example -- to express their creativity. Nothing to do with peer's appreciation.

However, this seems to be his main point, together with his belief that somehow photographs will evolve to incorporate other pieces of information like GPS coordinates and weather (?):

In the same way that the transition from film to digital is now taken for granted, the shift from cameras to networked devices with lenses should be obvious. While we’ve long obsessed over the size of the film and image sensors, today we mainly view photos on networked screens—often tiny ones, regardless of how the image was captured—and networked photography provides access to forms of data that go beyond pixels. This information, like location, weather, or even radiation levels, can transform an otherwise innocuous photo of an empty field near Fukushima into an entirely different object. If you begin considering emerging self-metrics that measure, for example, your routes through cities, fitness level, social status, and state of mind (think Foursquare, Nike+, Facebook, and Twitter), you realize that there is a compelling universe of information waiting to be pinned to the back of each image. Once you start thinking of a photograph in those holistic terms, the data quality of stand-alone cameras, no matter how vast their bounty of pixels, seems strangely impoverished. They no longer capture the whole picture. [...] Today, it turns out, it’s whatever can’t be networked that becomes less important.

So photographs without latitude and longitude or "radiation levels" will be meaningless? I agree that documentary photography could be affected by this; but when I say 'documentary photography' I certainly don't mean photos taken by war photographers but the sterile images that you take of your car after a crash to get the insurance money.

Then he talks about this hike:

One of the great joys of that walk was the ability to immediately share with family and friends the images as they were captured in the mountains [...] I saw more and shot more, and returned from the forest with a record of both the small details—light and texture and snippets of life—and the conversations that floated around them on my social networks.

Do you really go on a 6-days hike constantly texting and messaging and facebooking with other people instead of concentrating on the here and now? Are you really saying that in order to find satisfaction and pleasure you need to pull other people in the whatever you're doing?

Oh man I couldn't find a more depressing thought this grey monday morning. When I'm in the mountains for any of the things I like to do like hiking or cycling or simply making photographs I enjoy the moments, and more often than not, I take a pause and breathe in the fresh air and pause to look at the distant urban lights and just absorb all the smell and the sounds of the woods.

Sharing that moment with your "network" of people, how and why the fuck would you do that? With an iPhone photograph? And why exactly you want to do that, to generate meaningless exchanges of "cool", "beautiful shot", "wish I were here"?

I think that today, "thanks" to mobile computing, we have a serious problem of staying focused while we work, play, eat, talk:

• we walk and run with stupid white earphones plugged into earphones, so we are not aware of the small rabbit that just happened to zip past by us;
• we drive our cars constantly talking over the phone or texting or checking our facebook status, without being aware of the danger we put ourselves into -- or that damn biker that is fighting for survival in the traffic;
• we study while listening to music.

When we finally switch off all technology and go for a hike in the mountains, do we really need to take a stupid snapshot of some woods and broadcast to a bunch of random people? Why can't we stay with our thoughts, or even better, walk with no thoughts at all, just relax, take it all in, focus on the physical activity and let everything else fade out.

Finally, he also mentions editing (as in processing and modification of an image, not in the purest, photographically speaking, sense of selecting your best shot):

I’ve come to love using the smartphone as an editing surface; touch is perfect for photo manipulation. There’s a tactility that is lost when you edit with a mouse on a desktop computer. Perhaps touch feels natural because it’s a return to the chemical-filled days of manually poking and massaging liquid and paper to form an image I had seen in my head.

I would argue that if you prefer to manipulate your photos on a small screen you're not really that interested in the quality.

For other interesting reactions to this piece, go to the Online Photographer and read the comments to "Connectedness". The comments here are high quality stuff, written by people that do actually have something to say and not the brainless morons that post comments on youtube.