A deeper read on the image flood

seastack

This may be of interest to some here. It's a deeper read on the flood of images in an essay built around the Instagram work of Magnum's Pinkhassov (a favorite of mine who defies categories). He once famously shot an incredibly nuanced and deceptively simple essay from the solitary confines of his hotel room.

Dappled Things: Pinkhassov on Instagram

But the rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. So the problem is not that images are being altered—I remember the thrill I felt the first few times I saw Hipstamatic images, and I shot a few myself buoyed by that thrill—it’s that they’re all being altered in the same way: high contrasts, dewy focus, over-saturation, a skewing of the RGB curve in fairly predictable ways. Correspondingly, the range of subjects is also peculiarly narrow: pets, pretty girlfriends, sunsets, lunch. In other words, the photographic function, which should properly be the domain of the eye and the mind, is being outsourced to the camera and to an algorithm.

And another thoughtful essay in a similar vein ...

Shoot Hip or Die

Edit: An interesting aside. I found these essays because someone reposted them through Tumblr which, in itself, can be a wonderful tool to tame the image tsunami.

michswiss

I should probably go back and restart my tumblr account. Both excellent articles. I particularly liked the phrase from Matt Pierce:

“Never before have we so rampantly exercised the ability to capture the way the world really looks and then so gorgeously disfigured it.”

Thanks for posting.

seastack

If you restart your tumblr account, be sure to grab the feed of candadian photographer mpdrolet on there (Mark Peter Drolet, MPD). He's getting famous for his curation and it's many photos everyday. Street photographer Blake Andrews had a great interview with him on his blog "B."