Seeing isn’t quite believing

What a vexed issue photo-retouching is. Magazines and advertisers do it to present audiences with a fantasy and audiences lap up that fantasy and are quite prepared to reject reality if a brand puts that before them instead.

You could blame the magazines and the brands that contrive the pictures, or you could blame the consumers and the readers for generating the demand, or you could criticise the models for validating it all with their participation. It’s a vicious circle in which probably none are without fault.

It’s easy to overstate the problem though. Gratuitous retouching and extreme enhancement is not condoned in the modern news media. If detected, editors take stern action because their journalistic credibility depends on it.

But in the world of entertainment it’s rife.

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CNN replaces its staff with its customers

What’s the point of a blog if you can’t throw around some semi-informed, partially qualified opinions from time to time? Let’s call it blogger’s prerogative. Here goes.

I notice CNN offloaded about a dozen photo staff this week. The powers that be put it down to the increasing quality of reader submitted pictures through iReport and the like. Well, I can’t say I believe them. It’s just far more likely to be a decision made on the basis of the cost of reader submitted content than the quality of it. But hey, it’s a press release and they’re saying what the market wants to hear I suppose.

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Mainstream is not a dirty word

You hear people lamenting the supposed dumbing down of photography as a consequence of the digital era. Technology has increased its accessibility in a manner no other visual art has ever before seen, which is another way of saying they made it easier so more people are doing it.

It may well be easier to shoot a picture, but it hasn’t been made any simpler to produce a good one. Flickr proves that.

In Australia there are now more mobile telephones than there are people, and the latest boast cameras that outperform in many measures the hardware we paid tens of thousands for only a decade ago.

So what was once a mainly spectator sport has suddenly seen everyone invited onto the field for a kick. Photography, it seems, is more mainstream than ever.

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Art – a commodity

You’ve got to wonder whether art is still about the experience or if it’s now officially a commodity.

In the wake of the art investor movement we’re at a point where in some circles a photograph’s merit is based first and foremost on its predicted future yield. And the unintended consequence of massive price inflation is that it reduces our ability to decide for ourselves whether or not we actually like what we see.

Bluffed by the zeros, people think that if it’s so expensive it must be good, even if they can’t personally explain why. And to disagree would be to fly in the face of the experts.

In the case of Andreas Gursky’s recent record breaker, the $4.3 million Rhine II, the greatest single quality it could possibly boast of in my opinion is its price tag. It’s otherwise an unnoteworthy landscape with a transformative post production treatment and not much more.

But investors and their hangers-on will grasp at straws to find meaning to justify the obscenity. Christies called it “a dramatic and profound reflection on human existence and our relationship to nature on the cusp of the 21st century.” Gursky said it demonstrates the meaning of life. Seriously.

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Photographer to the President

With US President Barack Obama visiting Australia it brings to mind just how differently the Americans approach political photography.

I’ve written before on the anachronistic rules that determine what Australian media photographers can and can’t do in the Parliament. Hardly open, transparent or free I think you’ll agree.

It affects TV too. During George W. Bush’s 2003 visit an American network filmed his address to the Joint Sitting of Parliament themselves, an act that was in flagrant defiance of the rules (they’re meant to take the official feed, you see). Well it’s a good thing they did, because it’s their vision we now rely on each time Bob Brown’s fairly famous interjection from that day gets revisited on Australian TV.

The Americans really do approach this stuff differently.

The White House has appointed official photographers to document the terms of each president since Johnson and that doesn’t just mean grip and grins. While we do have a government photographic service in Australia, by way of its differing role and more restricted access, the two are chalk and cheese.

The “Photographer to the President” is commissioned by him directly and is considered a senior staff appointment. Some have apparently had better access to their subject than his cabinet. That they let Pete Souza into the Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden kill-capture mission last May should tell you all you need to know.

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Working for free

Working for free. It’s a subject with no shortage of blog entries, magazine articles and pub conversations in its honour.

And if you’ve taken part in any of them you’ll know that the consensus is clear: for the sake of the industry, for the sake of your fellow photographer, for the sake of yourself, they say, don’t do it.

Well I have to disagree.

Now you’re not about to read an argument in support of old gems like “do this one for free and there’ll be well paid assignments to follow,” or “it’ll be good for your portfolio”. Not for a minute.

But there are times when remuneration, if not monetary, is remuneration still.

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Observer vs. participant

Sometimes it takes the fresh perspective of an outsider to have you reconsider something you haven’t thought about in years.

A Q&A panel for students at the Art Gallery of New South Wales that I sat on recently raised a couple of good examples.

To paraphrase one of them: when would it be right for a photographer to put down their camera in order to assist in the emergency or disaster that they’re shooting? And when might it not be?

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Credit where credit’s due

I am not a rusted-on proponent of any particular manufacturer or brand. I do tend to have high expectations of my tools and I‘m pretty willing to put the boot in where appropriate and to change sides where necessary. In this I’d say photographers are mostly alike.

But you can easily run the risk of being quick to condemn when things go wrong, and slow to give credit where credit’s due. And so what follows is a bit of both.

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