Snaps from 1966

The connections in recent work have been many and roll in continually, every day a new surprise.

Interactivism, the hack day for people wanting to work with Ideas for getting Elders more involved with the internet, meshes of course with my work with individual Elders on their life streams, and with work I’ve been doing on individual personal photography archives. And so what a joy it was to see these arrive in my inbox the yesterday. The sender now has a blog herself, of course, and full instructions for uploading these to her Facebook pages. Clearly I need to re-visit those with her.

At yesterday’s The Versatile Image: Photography in the Era of Web 2.0 conference, there was lots of talk comparing this kind of verancular photograph with today’s digital versions made with point-and-shoot cameras or phones. Cindy Sherman’s was work cited by someone as the precursor to this digital stuff we see all over Facebook and Flickr, but it was hard to discern whether that was a scathing about Sherman or the digital stuff, or both. Certainly these pictures would fit well within the Sherman aesthetic.

Much is being made at the conference about the death of the photograph as object, as a piece of art on a sheet of paper. My, it’s a strange old world. Two things:

- manufacturers of those rapid black & white and colour printing machines that were being taken out of college and Uni photography departments and sold for scrap 4, 5 years ago are reporting never better new sales. I’ll dig out a reference at some point.

- Harman, Fuji and the proliferation of Chinese and eastern European film manufacturers would not still be in production were there no demand. The new and thriving Impossible Project, too. Yes there have been losses, but there’s been losses across all manufacturing industries. Whether the move to digital will ever and finally replace fine art prints handmade in a darkroom, personally many of us very much doubt. They are different objects.

In any case, it’s too soon to call death of the photograph, but please, go ahead, be my guest. The more of you who stop making proper photographs, the more precious, the more desirable an object they will become among those of us who continue to make and appreciate them.

And finally *

Word of The Day yesterday: ANXIETY. Apparently there are too many ‘images’ in the world, and that makes some people, many people anxious, although by the end of the day there was also a rush to dis-associate from that anxiety too.

Contrast that with the big words LIMINAL and METONYMIC  most spoken at the last two of the DCAP conferences, and ACTION, DOCUMENT and SUBLIME at the last three NPS events. I’ll put links in to these later, must go.

* ah well maybe not finally. A bit more from the conference, back there today for Day 2. Will edit stuff in to this post.

Related posts: