One of my photographs is included in Pictory’s “showcase” on San Francisco. Please take a look.
If you follow the tumlbemalog I do with Karl, you’ll know that I was fairly critical of Pictory’s first offering. Either Karl or I, or both, will probably post some sort of follow-up on 1/125, at some point, but right now I’m pretty slammed with work and other stuff, so it might take a couple of days.
In the same way, I wonder if photography and art isn’t degraded by the internet, if looking at pictures on the internet isn’t remarkably similar to watching 2 minutes of All About Eveon youtube and checking out the number of stars on IMDB and imagining it’s the same as watching the movie.
Colin Pantall’s blog: Endless wittering about photography
I would accept this as a valid concern, were it not for the fact that this is almost exactly how the vast majority of museum-goers look at photographs, too. They glance at them briefly, they read the little placard next to them, they may or may not make some brief technical or aesthetic observation to the person they dragged along with them, and then they move on tot he next one, and dispatch with equal speed and dispassion.
The only difference between this experience and the experience one gets on flickr is that (a) the image is often larger, (b) you don’t usually drag your spouse or friend with you to the internet, and (c) the offhand remarks on the internet are often persistent and can be perused by all who come after.
Of course, you don’t have to behave this way when you go to a museum or gallery, and some people do not. However, those people are the exception.
The photographs included in this review remind me in principle on the old Buddhist practice of meditating on dead bodies…This passage describes the effect well:
Richard’s photographs contain empty structures, and these structures appear to be mere shells. What is left standing has the the paint peeling off and the doors remain open as there is no real reason to close them anymore. The wood floor boards have become so rotten that they are collapsing under their own weight. The wall paper is yellowing, if there at all. Sometimes even the wall boards are gone, revealing the stucture’s skeletal timbers, like flesh that has come off the bone. There are decaying carpets and stair cases leading to nowhere.