The writer picks out Alexx Henry who works in a strange space between photography and video.   I’ve heard it called motion graphics when I’ve worked in advertising in the past.

This is geared towards magazine features which will be available through the online version of an issue and focuses on the new(ish) tablet market which has been getting a great deal of attention with the release of Apple’s iPad.   The thought is that tablet computing will overtake the use of text readers such as the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader as they provide the functionality of a mobile device in the same physical format for around the same price.   People don’t seem to enjoy reading magazines on their desktop or laptop computers but may change their behavior for a reader like device.

So can we expect the kind of motion graphics depicted above jumping out at us from the corner of our eye as our neighbor on the train flips through an issue of Maxim (or based on the typical content of lad magazines, busting out… emphasis on bust) on the train?

Don’t count on it.

If you visit the blog article I linked above, the second article shows the making of one of these features.  Notice that there’s a crew of 5-10 professionals for an editorial shoot.   Chances are that’s a shoot that cost the magazine several hundred thousand dollars.   Something tells me they can’t afford to do more than one or two shoots year unless the publisher is willing to dump money from outside the magazine’s budget into it in order to establish a strong presence in what they believe will be an emerging media market.

Meanwhile in the rest of the industry, we have articles like this one from The Online Photographer which reveals that Time Magazine, a most august publication splashed out an entire $125 for its cover shot which it pulled from a microstock site.  Yes, the cover of a national magazine was done by pulling an image from the same service that people who do banner ads for websites use when they need some filler photos.   I’ve  read enough accounts of photographers complaining that magazines are unwilling to pay for content and expect them to provide it for rock bottom prices or else they’ll simply butter some schmuck up on flickr and get it for free.   As I’ve been approached by several editors who informed me that they do not pay for photography and tried to get some of my work for free I can personally vouch for this trend.

Massively expensive shoots with extensive post-production work goes against this trend and most likely will result in photo editors finding their entire budget blown on a single shoot and being left with filling the rest of the year with a zeroed out budget.

Lifestyle magazines may find it useful to lose money at first trying to produce these kinds of features but I suspect that they’ll need to start forming partnerships with advertisers in order to support the massive production budgets these kinds of shoots require.  Or they’ll need to start charging money. We’ll have to see how product placement and in-line ads sit with viewers who are used to the idea of anything coming through a digital device be free and annoying advertisements can be blocked.

Its an interesting concept, but I don’t see it catching on until something can be done to reduce the production costs… which may prove stubborn.

Rev. Billy demonstrates outside of AIG headquarters. April, 2009

This is a photograph of Rev. Billy Talen, a local activist, personality, and grassroots organizer who has earned global exile from the Starbucks company.   Here we see him with a megaphone protesting the government bailout of AIG across the street from AIG headquarters in NYC to a crowd of curious AIG employees out on their smoke break.  Other than the dozen or so fellow protesters and a few unemployed photographers such as myself this protest attracted no crowds and was only picked up by grassroots media groups such as IndyMedia which are largely ignored by the general public.

One would ask, why did he and a few other fellow travelers bother to come out on a chilly early spring day to stand outside of a building on Wall street and voice their opinion?

Why Bother?  And why did I bother taking his picture?

Why Bother? was to be the title of my Grandfather’s master’s thesis.  His thesis for his undergraduate work in chemistry, Who Cares? was well received and allowed him to start pursuing a master’s at UCLA before he was forced to drop out and start supporting his family.

At least that’s how he liked to tell the story.

He does pose two essential questions, Who Cares?  Why Bother?  Like most other guys who liked to think they were real smart I indulged in existentialism during my late teens and early 20′s.  This was mostly for the association with ultra-hip Left Bank lifestyle (something entirely lacking from the suburbs of Southern California), drinking enough coffee to kill a mastodon,  smoking hand rolled cigarettes, and sitting very close to girls who looked like they walked out of a Godard flick.  And why not?  There were tons of the books lying around the house I grew up in so I didn’t even have to spend any money to dig on Camus.  Just pull them off the bookshelf and dig in.

The literature I could get into but the actual philosophy texts put me to sleep within 45 seconds.  They were completely opaque.  In the days before wikipedia I could only rely upon the encyclopedia for guidance which I found similarly full of a flurry of words signifying nothing.  All I could comprehend was that it had something to do with the attempt to address the eternal question of Why Bother.  It was distinguished from previous streams of thought because they considered using God as an explanation to be cheating.

To a 20 year old with a typical lack of appreciation for subtlety seeking to establish their own identity at the end of the Reagan era this sort of barely understood nihilism was pretty cool.  Especially if you were attracted to girls who wore way too much eyeliner and had well thumbed copies of The Stranger poking out of their bags.

Over a decade and two relationships with cheerful farm girls who almost never wear eyeliner later I’ve found myself confronted with The Questions yet again.  This time around I have wikipedia and an entire universe of Nietzsche fan pages on geocities to help me dig it on a slightly more nuanced level.   I also discovered that The Questions were now being crowded by more mundane but also more strident little questions.  How do you intend to make money with this?  Where are you going with this?  Are you actually any good?  Is this an efficient use of your time? Is this art?  So this is what you’ve been doing with all that time you didn’t spend watching TV?  Proud of yourself yet?  Rather expensive isn’t it?  Shouldn’t you be saving the money? Why aren’t you trying to get a gallery show?  You’re at least using this to convince girls to take their clothes off I hope?

This of course had to do with the thousands of dollars and years of my life that I had devoted to photography.   This wasn’t my career.  It wasn’t even a way to make a little extra money.  It was a sinkhole that large amounts of cash, time, energy, and rodinal were poured into.  There was no end.  There was no goal.  There is no win to be had.  No victory.  No triumph.  Why?

Why Bother?  Who Cares?

As artists we’re left in a very quiet room by ourselves.  Usually this is a literal statement.  Art is often a solitary activity engaged in during the dead of the night.  Most of us won’t make any money.  We’re forced to rely on the dreaded Day Job to get by.  There is no practical justification for what we do.  Yet we keep at it.

I really don’t have an answer beyond stating that I wouldn’t like myself if I didn’t do it.

Why else would someone stare down a steel logo of a financial services company bolted to a 40 story building from across a narrow lane?

Rev. Billy outside AIG headquarters in NYC's financial district.

Hooters. Tits. Boobs. Jugs. Knockers. Garbanzos. Funbags.  That which brings all the boys to the yard.

Ain't she something fellas?

Saturday was the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island.  The Mermaid Parade means a lot of girls running around wearing not much more than body paint.  A lot of girls running around in bikinis or less means a lot of crowds and a lot of people with cameras.   The crowds are pretty thick so people rely on flickr and other photo aggregation sites to let them see what they missed.  As the above photograph had the greatest number of hits (by a factor of two over the next most popular photo, which also involved a girl in a swimsuit) it doesn’t take much imagination to determine what they feel they missed out on.  A glance at my most viewed photos on my flickr stream only confirms this.

I’m not proud of this nor am I dismayed.

Hit tracking is one of the tools that people can use to make decisions about the kind of content they’re trying to present to the public.  According to my hit tracking I should go out and take more color photographs of women in bikinis and burlesque performers.  A little investigation shows that I should go further and post photographs of women with no clothing on.  Preferably performing sexual acts.  An even deeper look would tell me that I can dispose with the need to take photos entirely and can simply repost pornography that I found elsewhere on the web.  This would maximize my hits and minimize my effort.  Yes, its a violation of copyright but who bothers with that these days.

Sex grabs eyeballs on the internet.  Its very difficult to get accurate statistics but I would not be surprised if the majority of the traffic on flickr is concentrated on their collection of amateur and pilfered commerical pornography.   Yet if you visit Flickr’s explore page which highlights its most “interesting” photos you’ll notice that there’s narry a nipple.   Instead you’re greeted with a variety of landscapes, portraits, macro shots, still lives, and the occasional travel or documentary photograph.

If flickr spends most of its processing time churning out blowjobs, why don’t they feature them?  Even behind a credit card based age verification system?  Why shouldn’t they cater to their adult users who obviously crave adult content.

Sex might get you a lot of views but it doesn’t sell.  The number of hits a piece of content might attract are also highly misleading as indicators of success.

Getting 1,000 hits on a saucy photograph of a well put together young lady may inflate my ego but it has never done anything for my career as a photographer.  Instead my collection of well tagged and carefully titled and described photographs of dancers and musicians have.  The number of hits on one of my shots of Vangeline Theater at the Howl Festival will never, ever come close to those of my most popular photo of a young lady in a seashell bikini that I took at my first Mermaid Parade but it has appeared in the NY Post, Time Out/NY, and was used by the Howl Festival to promote itself.  Based on sales and outside interest my most successful photographs are of local events and performers.

In terms of flickr’s revenue stream they’re well aware that the majority of the users who are primarily interested in pornography are not interested in becoming paid members.  They will gladly be subjected to ads in order to endlessly shift through content, delivering huge numbers of hits, consuming system resources, but generally not adding content of any value or otherwise meanfully contributing to the flickr community.   The people who do buy memberships are people who use flickr to share their work, help promote their creative endevors, and enhance the community by commening on other’s work, posting to groups, and pulling outside users into the website through search results and social networking.

In the end numbers mean very little unless you put them into context.  5000 views on a photograph is meaningless if it has never generated any interest in the rest of my work.  I’ve provided 4800 units of cheap thrill and perhaps 200 units of loving her outfit.  Similarly seeing someone with a million hits on their flickr account is equally meaningless.  Have those hits resulted in useful contacts?  Has it generated sales?  Does it enhance their networking efforts?  Do they even get a word of appreciation or just a rapidly spinning hit tracker that adds up to nothing?

…and my favorite photograph so far from the Mermaid Parade doesn’t involve any tits.

Looking for Sunshine, 2009 Mermaid Parade.

Its a month dripping with interesting things to do, happenings to attend, people to observe, and fine weather to enjoy.   My personal favorite events to photograph, the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island and the Queer Pride Parade in Manhattan usually fall on the same weekend resulting in complete collapse sunday night as my sunburned flesh gives in to fatigue.   This year they fall on consecutive weekends so at least I’m spared back to back days of street high energy street shooting.

While many older and perhaps more serious photographers scorn it, I enjoy flickr a great deal.  After an event I like to see what other people took away from it.  Even people who consider themselves snappers with point and shoot cameras can often surprise themselves.  Let’s not forget the legions of avid amateurs who have high performance machines tightly gripped in their right hands and a decent amount of proficiency at Photoshop or Lightroom to boot.  Thousands of cameras will converge on the same scene and all go home with gigabytes of dirt cheap memory cards filled to the brim.  Even without a camera nearly everyone has a phone with a built in camera which are surprisingly good for snapshots in bright sunlight.

And they’ll post every single pixel of it into their photostreams.

Cream has a way of rising to the top but when its got a lot of shit in the way it might take days, weeks, months, or years to do so.  I’m being overly judgmental but I think its important for people to realize that when they post things to a public people do want to look at them.  Photographs have many purposes one of which is information.

There’s a term from electronics called “signal to noise” which has crept into common usage.  Quite simply its the ratio of useful stuff to distraction.   When someone comes home from an event and uploads 500 photos to flickr using the bulk tool to label them all “Figment Festival” or whatever event they just went out to which features 400 pictures of people’s backs with no sense of place they’ve just made it very difficult for someone to find out what happened at the festival.   Multiply the 500 photos by the thousand people who brought their camera and you could easily have half a million photos of an event within 12 hours of its occurance.  Even if a thousand people only post 10 photos each that’s an astounding amount of information to sort through. If you’re a performer who wants to contact a photographer who has some photos of their performance, you’re suddenly looking at a Sisyphean task which only grows more onerous as more and more memory cards are unleashed.

This isn’t a matter of aesthetics its a matter of being a good member of a community.  Flickr is a community of users.  Its just not the people on your contact list, its the general public.  Perhaps its just a matter of my most liberal of liberal arts education putting exotic ideas in my head but being part of the community means doing good for that community.  How can you increase the utility of the community?  How can you enlighten, share, teach, communicate, show, and delight?

By not posting a bunch of shit that people have to sift through to find the nuggets of information they value.

I’m not asking for people to judge their photographs on artistic merits before posting.  That’s my personal hangup.  What I am asking is that they realize that they’re not alone.   A little thought and a little bit of typing can easily improve the utility of any community like flickr for the general public.  Simply tell us what it is and be honest.  No one asks for great art, but when they search for something they do want to be given an answer.  Ask yourself, does this photo tell me anything.  What does it say?  Label it as such.  When you ask for an apple, you want an apple, not an egg.  Be sure to extend the same thoughtfulness to others.

As I’m writing this there’s unrest in Iran.  The government has been attempting to shut out foreign journalists to control the flow of information.   Individuals using social networking sites have been able to get around the government blockage and have been telling their stories to the rest of the world.  These are just a bunch of students and young professionals who have the same facebook account you do.  Now they find themselves in the middle of a contested election that has started the largest series of protests since the ousting of the Shah.   Just normal people.  Who want to speak.  And want you to hear.

Photos are important parts of their stories.  Be a little thoughtful and make sure that each channel is clear so the signal can be heard.