How the public - and industry - sees photographers

[amolitor]

Eh? I looked at prints once a year or three. I browse nostalgically through my digital photography keepers folders once a year or three.

You are atypical. Most people do not have "digital photograph keepers folders". Most people DID have a shoebox or similar collection of disorganized prints. The point is that the typical person's shoebox has been replaced with flickr/instagram/facebook, and the latter has properties that are quite different from a shoebox.

On a more general note, why the hell do people tend to respond to statements like 'The general populace X' with 'but I don't X, therefore you are wrong'?

 

[Gavjenks]

Eh? I looked at prints once a year or three. I browse nostalgically through my digital photography keepers folders once a year or three.

You are atypical. Most people do not have "digital photograph keepers folders". Most people DID have a shoebox or similar collection of disorganized prints. The point is that the typical person's shoebox has been replaced with flickr/instagram/facebook, and the latter has properties that are quite different from a shoebox.

On a more general note, why the hell do people tend to respond to statements like 'The general populace X' with 'but I don't X, therefore you are wrong'?

I am still not buying it.

Even if you do use flickr for storage instead of a folder + flickr, so what? Semantics. Nothing's stopping you from going back and flipping through your old flickr albums, any more than a shoebox. In either case, you have to specifically say to yourself "oh hey, I'm gonna go look at old photographs" and then do it. Most often motivated by looking for a particular photo, or a girlfriend wanting to see pictures from your younger days, or something like that.

 

[Alex_B]

Eh? I looked at prints once a year or three. I browse nostalgically through my digital photography keepers folders once a year or three.

You are atypical. Most people do not have "digital photograph keepers folders". Most people DID have a shoebox or similar collection of disorganized prints. The point is that the typical person's shoebox has been replaced with flickr/instagram/facebook, and the latter has properties that are quite different from a shoebox.

On a more general note, why the hell do people tend to respond to statements like 'The general populace X' with 'but I don't X, therefore you are wrong'?

I do have shots on the wall ... small selections. I see them every day.

I have an online gallery for specially selected images ... I look through them once in a while.

I have my LR-database ... I go through parts of it from time to time ... chronologically .... looking even at the poor shots for nostalgic reasons

I look at most of my slides from time to time ... but usually at the electronic scans!

But I also look at my black and white negatives from time to time (unscanned)

So I basically look at things in retrospective a lot ... almost no time for new photography

 

[amolitor]

The point is that people don't, and they used to. The secondary point is that the current mechanisms favor new over old, while the shoebox does not. The tertiary point is that the shoebox and film limited the scope of the problem, a shoebox COULD hold all the prints, and this is no longer true. This in turn informs the first point - a few hundred prints can be flipped through, a few thousand is, well, an order of magnitude harder to.

You are welcome to not buy it, however, I don't mind a bit.

 

[cgipson1]

The point is that people don't, and they used to.

Sources?

 

[Gavjenks]

a few hundred prints can be flipped through, a few thousand is, well, an order of magnitude harder to.

This is irrelevant to the question of "do people look at old photos?"

Because fine, so with 10x as many images, perhaps people only have the time look at 1/10th of their old images... still would be just as many as before, though.

Why would this be changing the nature of photography at all for me to occasionally flip through 300 prints (when I COULD have flipped through 3,000) versus flipping through 300 prints (when all I have is 300 prints)?


Also, I organize things in themed folders, just like people on flickr would organize in themed albums. You would intelligently pick out albums or folders based on what you're looking for or which things meant the most to you. Do I ever go nostalgically look at my old photos I took for work publications? No. So it doesn't matter if there are 30,000 of them or not, I just don't open that folder (/album). Instead I go straight to the topics that mean the most to me, which were usually relationships, and the shots are fairly limited in number (when you're with your family, you want to actually hang out / play with them, not stand in the corner snapping photos all day and not interacting, so you won't probably have ten million of them per event/day).

Trip photos do usually have a higher volume, but I can still single out that trip via a folder or album, without having to slog through other stuff I don't care about. Maybe I don't look at all the photos from the trip since there are a lot of them, but I still get the nostalgia fix, and it still serves much the same purpose as a shoebox.

 

[amolitor]

a few hundred prints can be flipped through, a few thousand is, well, an order of magnitude harder to.

This is irrelevant to the question of "do people look at old photos?"

Because fine, so with 10x as many images, perhaps people only have the time look at 1/10th of their old images... still would be just as many as before, though.

Why would this be changing the nature of photography at all for me to occasionally flip through 300 prints (when I COULD have flipped through 3,000) versus flipping through 300 prints (when all I have is 300 prints)?

Um. How many times can I repeat that the major photo sharing/archiving sites strongly favor the recent over the older? Would you like me to repeat it several dozen more times, or should I just stop now? I'm gonna stop now. If you have any further questions on this point, I suggest you go re-read the remarks I have already made. The answer is quite likely to be fond among them.

 

[cgipson1]

I guess old paintings, old sculpture, etc.. are doomed to follow the same path as photography then! All those Picasso's and Rembrandt's just became worthless.. lol! Art is Art, right?

 

[Gavjenks]

I heard you the first time. But I never heard any explanation of:

1) Why that is different than a shoebox. The only way they "favor the new" is that the old ones scroll off the bottom. This is identical to a shoebox, where the old photos get hidden by the new print envelopes you jammed in front. In either case, if you want to see new things, you have to make a trivial conscious effort to scroll/flip further back... So what?

2) Why that stops ANYBODY from looking for old photos? Are you assuming people are so braindead that they can't handle the concept of scrolling down to find the album they want?

I get what you're saying. I don't get how it is relevant or different.

 

[Gavjenks]

I guess old paintings, old sculpture, etc.. are doomed to follow the same path as photography then! All those Picasso's and Rembrandt's just became worthless.. lol! Art is Art, right?

No, those are safe, because they're in a physical box together, called a museum.

It only becomes worthless if you organize them the same way, but on a monitor instead of a physical box.

Try to keep up.

 

[Gavjenks]

I decided to design a system for displaying photos that meets your desired requirements of not being organized by time (or any other dimension). Basically, what you do is you take all your photos, and set them each to a transparency value proportional to how many photos you have. Then you display all of them at once on top of each other, in order to make sure not to bias the viewer with newer photos, and in order to prevent them from having to perform the onerous (and frankly Un-American) task of scrolling down a page. Here is my portfolio displayed in this way:


This is gonna catch on, I think.

 

[cgipson1]

I decided to design a system for displaying photos that meets your desired requirements of not being organized by time (or any other dimension). Basically, what you do is you take all your photos, and set them each to a transparency value proportional to how many photos you have. Then you display all of them at once on top of each other, in order to make sure not to bias the viewer with newer photos, and in order to prevent them from having to perform the onerous (and frankly Un-American) task of scrolling down a page. Here is my portfolio displayed in this way:

View attachment 46820
This is gonna catch on, I think.

Keep in minds.. that some people are Mouse Challenged! It is not fun to make fun of them! :hail:

 

[Steve5D]

We used to carry empty film canisters to throw at other photographers that did this. One of the big things that I learned at an early age, before you move, look behind and see if anyone is there. Seems these days, courtesy is lost on the idiots.

And you want to complain about how the public views photographers?

I often agree with you on most things, but your "solution" above is both childish and stupid. Someone standing in your way could quickly become the least of your problems if you hit the wrong person...

 

[12sndsgood]

This conversation reminds me of the whole music on the internet, stealing music, how the internet is going to change the landscape of music, 10 years ago when we discussed this I was the type who said I will always buy cd's that I like having them in my hands. 10 years later I have all 300 cd's that i own stored on a SD card plugged into my car stereo and yet I find myself plugging my phone into the stereo instead and listening to pandora. it's probalby been 4 to 5 years since I last bought a cd.

Digital and how we share photos has changed dramatically and we are in a huge shift with photography, where it will lead who knows. good or bad it's going to change with us or without us. It's somewhat hard to argue that what we do is what the general public does because are love of photography makes us a lot diffrent then the average person.

 

[Ilovemycam]

When it comes to photography in the art circles, photography is the 'step child' of art. And within photography circles...the street / documentary tog is the step child of photography.

Sure, people admire street work, but it is of the 'ugly genre' of photography and they wont pay for it. We can see how an honest pix by Bresson may only bring in $20,000.

Yet have Cindy Sherman go to a thrift store, buy some used clothes, put on some exaggerated make up, make a funny face, take a self portrait and have the background p'shopped in and it goes for $4,000,000.

I just heard from one museum (a well respected, smaller size museum in NE) I sent them a 30 print $2500 portfolio on spec. ($2500 is in production costs, I am counting zero for art value.) The lady curator of photography sent me a nasty letter. To sum it up, "Pick it up...send us a check to ship your photos back...or we will destroy them."