Owning Up - Part 2

I just reread my post... a bit cryptic if you didn't know what I was thinking. I was reading an article about Shakespeare and came upon the quote I cited yesterday.  It got me to thinking about my work, my personal life, and the bigger world around me.

At one time, accountability was an expectation at my work.  We were encouraged to be accountable for our responsibilities.  If we succeeded, we were rewarded.  If we failed, we took ownership and worked to fix it, teach others what went wrong, and ensure it didn't happen again.  By taking accountability, we succeeded in being responsible employees.  Failure, while not being rewarded, was an avenue to enlightenment and growth.  With that philosophy, the company grew into a major success which led to its being acquired by a huge corporation last year. 

The new big company does not embrace accountability. No one will raise their hand and say, "That is mine, I am accountable for getting it done right."  Instead, everyone runs around with excuses.  Sadly, those of us from the old company are getting sucked into this system of finger pointing bureaucracy.

In my personal life, I see people who do the same thing.  They go around saying, "If only..."  So much of that is bullshit and I've done it too.  Parts of my backyard are still an overgrown mess, if only I had more time to...  That is BS.  I just need to do it.  I am too fat, if only I had more time to...  That is BS.  I can find time.

So many of us just pass the buck on why our lives suck.  I can legitimately blame a few things, but in the end, it is me.

In the big world, conservatives blame liberals, liberals blame conservatives.  All the groups I listed in yesterday's post point blame at others.  Yes, groups are oppressed, discriminated against, and held back.  Some of the finger pointing and blame is justified, but much is self-imposed limitations and crappy excuses for their own failures.

Dr. L,  I admired your post about nude art as a political statement.  You aren't just pointing fingers and saying, "no fair."  You are doing something about it. 

It is funny how finding a simple bit of art, literature, music, or other artistic creation can crystallize something that has bothered me for a while.  That line from King Lear did it for me and that is why I went off on this rant.

Gluttony of Visuals - Conference Presentations

Vintage Berkeley

On the Friday night of the conference, I listened to Robbert Flick talk about Looking at Then and Now. He talked about two themes of current photography and his art, the difference between photography in the 70's and now, and how he uses the ideas of time/temporal themes as well as geographical distance in his photo compilations. For today's post, I will expand on the first point.

There are over 10 billion (10,000,000,000!) images on the internet. The population of the world is around 6.8 billion. That is 1.4 photos for every person. I am probably responsible for a few hundred of them.

Flick mentioned this number to make a point. With the over saturation of images by anybody with a camera, the meaning of each image is diminished. It is like how Christmas carols lose their specialness since every year another performer has to give their special rendition to the songs. I sometimes think this is also true about pornography. The first time I saw it, I felt shocked, aroused, squeamish, and many other emotions. Now I don't really notice it because of the flood of it around me. Sometimes seeing images of people clothed feels like the rarity.

Prior to the internet, our only opportunities to view photos (other than the photos we took) was in magazines, books, and galleries. The only photos we touched were our own taken by us or a family member. Almost no one had a dark room so it was very rare to actually create, manipulate and edit the print into the desired final product. Those days are gone.

I can get a good digital camera for under $500 and be able to manage the images on a multi-use tool (the computer). I can use Photoshop Elements (about $100) to greatly manipulate and edit the image. After I get it to where I want it, I can publish it in my own book, prints, blog, Flickr, and multiple other venues instantly. It is very easy to be prolific with imagery. (The notable exception though is the art gallery. It is still a pain in the butt to get into those.)

It has always been stated that everyone has a great photo in them, but great photographers are able to create a body of excellence. With that said, some of these images in a master's body of work become iconic while others fade away. If I mention Pepper Number 30 by Edward Weston or Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, we can probably visualize them. Has this ability to create important single images been taken away by the gluttony of photos?

Sprout

With this gluttony of the visual stills (and home videos), our individual photos lose their individual power. Robert Frank took over 28,000 images for his series, The Americans. He chose 88 of those images for his final cut. In our current world, we would be tempted to post most or all of these images online and flood the market even more.

Maybe it is time to look at the single image as just a part of the grander single portfolio. With this view, we can have each image transfer a bit of conceptual richness to a greater whole of the series. Maybe we have been struggling too hard making each photo contain deep conceptual context to avoid didactic messages. If I create fifty didactic images of various aspects of a theme, together they can be taken and discussed as a whole, refined product. The message of the sum of the images is greater than the whole.

Maybe we are getting to a point where a single image is not enough. We need to incorporate subtlety in communication throughout the span of many works. This though could increase the gluttony of images around us instead of creating the rare gems.

A Big Conference

Down and Out at Mare

A few weeks ago I attended the Society of Photographic Educators (SPE) West conference in an idyllic conference center outside of Oakhurst, Ca, just miles from Yosemite National Park. This conference was very powerful to me for so many reasons. I think I found a bit of my soul there.

Part of the joys of having a community college nearby is that I can take classes for cheap ($26 per unit) and use great equipment. The downside is that almost all of the students are photographic hobbyists. I greatly encourage everybody to learn how to take better photos, but that is the end goal for the bulk of the students. For a few though, it is about art.

Richard and I are both students in that class. We are both college graduates with degrees in psychology. We both are trying to find our artistic voice and are toying with the idea of heading back to get Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) and teach. Fortunately, we were both invited by a former instructor to the conference.

The first night we had dinner and then started a series of presentations on various areas of art in photography. I soon found that the more conceptual the better.

I've been slowly digesting what I learned. A few key nuggets I gained were:

• It is invigorating for my soul to be with fellow artists to talk about photography and what makes it important.
• There are so many different theories about art and the world - feminist, post modern, environmental, queer, feminist-queer, and many other interesting areas.
• Some take themselves too seriously.
• Some are truly mentors, many are very supportive and want to help artists grow, and a rare few are willing to empty both barrels into a photographer and photo if they are offended.
• Artists are sexy as hell.
• It is easy to feel like a minor minnow when you look at others' art and compare it to your own naive attempts.

I want to thank David from Speaking Truth for sharing this blog post about the Post Workshop Re-entry. I am taking some of those lessons to heart.

Over the next few days I will share some of the key things I learned about art and myself.

Coffee and the Conference Pond