“What would happen if the printed book had just been invented in a high-tech world in which people had never done their reading from anything but computer screens? The unquestionable advantages of the computer would not be threatened by this new product but the people, who so love to compare apples with pears, would be quite bowled over by this ultra-modern invention: after years spent chained to the screen they would suddenly have something they could open like a window or a door – a machine you can physically enter! For the first time knowledge would be combined with a sense of touch and gravity – this new invention allows you to experience the most incredible sensations, reading becomes a physical experience. And after experiencing knowledge only as a bundle of connections, as a system of interacting networks, suddenly here is individuality: every book is an independent personality, which cannot be taken apart or added to at will. And how relaxing these new reading appliances are, their operating systems never needs updating – the only thing that changes over the course of time is the message that they contain, which is always open to new interpretations.”
—By Juan Villoro, in an article in last month’s adn CULTURA (an Argentinian culture magazine) about the “future of books.”
[kindly pointed about by reader David Christensen, and translated via SignandSight.com].
The Premise: A Crowd Sourced Blog Posting About Photography Book Publishing
Andy Adams, the creative juice behind the online magazine Flak Photo recently contacted me about a “crowd-sourced” blog posting relating to photobooks, in conjunction with Resolve, the Livebooks blog. Was I game in posting something on my own blog? Sure. I’m always game for a discussion about photobooks.
Miki Johnson, an editor and contributor to Resolve kick started the discussion with a smattering of provocative questions: “What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?”
Language and Books
What these questions assume is a common understanding and definition about how the term “book” is being used and in my opinion, so many of the discussions around photography books are sloppy because of a lack of precise language. Language and books are intimately connected—clay, stone, leather, vellum, wood, and paper all share the distinction of being used to carry words and symbols and ideograms which refer back to a spoken vocabulary, to a spoken language.
The desire and ability to create written languages is uniquely human and whole civilizations have been built around and because of them. (cf. Steven Pinker’s books, particularly The Language Instinct). The very notion of a “written language” implies a material upon which the language is written or recorded, and a brief survey reveals all sorts of variations on a theme—tablets, stellae, scrolls, screens, accordion-folded papers, bags of inscribed bones, hinged wood panels, and of course sheets of paper bound with thread all dot the history of humankind’s desire to record and convey the written word. It was Gutenberg’s invention of movable type that moved humanity into a new era, one of ever-increasing facility with reproducing the written word.
So, shoot forward to the 21st century and we have all sorts of ways that written language is conveyed to us, beyond vellum, stone tablets and sheets of paper bound with thread—the primary advancement is that we have now added electronic media, both audio and visual. But as to the act and the effect of reading the Psalms, a sheet of vellum with calligraphy from the 12th century is essentially no different than a Kindle. They are physical objects upon which one can read the written word.
The Future of Books
Over on eyecurious, Marc Feustel, who maintains the blog from Paris, adds his two-cents to this crowd-sourced blog posting and points out that the current discussion among publishers is “that the e-book revolution is primarily going to affect non-illustrated books.” This is how he approaches the questions: “Firstly, there is the question of technology. This debate should be placed into the larger context of the debate on the future of books, period.”
I would beg to clarify this, though. Publishers are not really debating the future of “books,” if by books we mean the future of “recorded human language.” They are debating the future of the sales of printed books in the quantities they are used to. Think for a moment about this same discussion, which we’ve witnessed over the past decade, in relation to the music industry. It would be meaningless to say, “The music industry is debating the future of music.” People aren’t listening to less music nor are less people listening to music. Our global population is growing at unprecedented rates and I guarantee you they are listening to music and looking for entertainment. What publishers—big publishers—are fretting about and debating is how the digital medium has affected their sales of written language on sheets of paper bound between two covers and sold as books. Make sense?
Before we go on, I’d still like to emphasize that the future of “books” is secure. And by that I mean that the future of human language written on sheets of paper bound between two covers will exist with us for millenia into the future. I’m betting on history. With a printed book, there is no need for electricity to access it—a lap and a pool of sunlight or a single candle are all that’s required. The fleeting nature of access to electricity and utilities that huge portions of the world’s population has to deal with will necessitate printed books for centuries still, if not perpetually into the future. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In my mind, there simply is no replacement for a physical object. Think about the Torah, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Hidden Words, the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Bhagavad Gita—all of these sacred works, which have shaped societies and will continue to shape societies, are books that are used daily by 100s of millions of people. Having to rely on electricity (which we’ve only had societally for less than 200 years) seems particularly ridiculous.
Photography and Books
Photography has also existed for less than 200 years. But when it comes to the reproduction of images, the discussion revolves around the same concerns as with the written word. It’s just as easy to carve an image as it is to carve a letter (which, after all is an “image” itself, a symbol that indicates a sound which, when combined with other sounds creates a word, which in turn is a symbol for an idea or an object that exists in the world).
An “image” of a man on a tablet-sized sheet of vellum, drawn by a 10th century monk and an image of a man seen through a browser window on a tiny white “tablet” computer made by a 21st century photographer, are both more or less the same, when seen from a certain vantagepoint.
So, is a pdf a “book”? Or is a pdf a book in potentia? It is definitely a conveyor of both written language and images, whichever you like. And as an electronic artifact, it has it’s own pretense to existence. However, to me, a pdf or a website or an “ebook” are not books in the same way that a stone tablet or a scroll or a sheet of papyrus are also not examples of books. They are vehicles of recorded human language, true. But a pdf is a pdf. A website is a website. A stone tablet is a stone tablet. A set of pages with either written language or images on them (reproduced in any manner of methods), gathered and bound together in some fashion = a book. It is a thing I hold in my hands. It is material and concrete.
Back to the Questions
“What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?”
Out of the 5 questions posed by the instigators of this crowd-sourced blog posting, the first and the last, if taken from a creative standpoint, are impossible to answer. “What will new music composed for the piano sound like in 10 years?” Who knows.
But when it comes to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th questions, they all revolve around electronic technology. And I am suggesting that this is simply another query about the materiality, about the physical vehicles that will be used for disseminating language or images. Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? Yes, sure. They already are. Will they also be printed? Some will, no doubt, and some won’t. Will some of the larger traditional publishing houses incorporate more and more ebooks into their inventory? Yes. Will some small, new companies deal *only* in electronic media? Of course. Will some photographers choose to release their images only through an electronic platform, and will that platform be open-source or proprietary? Sure, probably some will, and probably some won’t. Are there still guys (and girls) that use letterpress out in their garages in Brooklyn? Yes. Are there some photographers who only shoot digitally? Yes, of course. Will technologies continue to change and advance and will humans adapt to those changes? Yes.
As I think more about these questions, it may be more useful to ask, “What will book publishing look like in 10 years?” Again, I come back to the music industry as an example. The word that pops to mind is “fracture”. 50 years ago—even just 20 years ago—there were really only a handful of large music conglomerates that controlled most of what we, the consumers, were able to access. But it has fractured so much so that no matter where you live, I guarantee you there are at least a half dozen “record labels” in your town. In Santa Fe,too, there are at least half a dozen “publishers”—one or two person operations that curate small lists of books and publish them under a company name in very small quantities.
The photography world is now filled with scores, if not hundreds, of “photography book” publishers. Shane Lavalette, with his brilliant Lay Flat photography magazine, is a “publisher.” Companies like Hassla Books, Rathole Books, Errata Editions, Radius Books, Nazraeli Press, Twin Palms, J&L Books, Fraenkel Gallery are all “publishers” and they are *all* one or two or three person collectives; hardly “traditional” publishing and hardly the ones that are making a fuss about the “future” of books. It’s the bigger houses that are lamenting the future of the only thing they’ve known—large offices in Manhattan with just as large company rosters and overhead, putting out titles that used to appeal to 10s and 100s of thousands of customers, customers who are now a little more selective and might just buy a book from those kids from Brooklyn than from the big house in the City.
Photography book “production” and photography book “publishing” may also be a useful distinction to make. Any artist or photographer that makes a book, whether using a Xerox machine or using a platen press and a litho stone is producing a book. And if they made 10 of them and sold them, can they rightly be called a publisher? Generally, no. But small art book publishers often aren’t making too many more copies of something than that. 250, 500, 1000 copies of a book can hardly be called “mass production”. However, producing someone else’s words and images in book form in any quantity and then distributing and selling that to the general public is probably the best practical definition of “book publisher” that I can come up with.
Over on Conscientious—Jorg Colberg’s photography based blog—he laments that there are not more “experimental” books being produced. He implies that it’s the big ones—the big publishers—that are not willing to take a risk. By big, I would assume he means publishers like Abrams or Rizzoli or Chronicle. But when it comes to smaller presses, there is a ton of experimentation going on—experimentation in terms of artists published, experimentation in terms of sizes and formats and bindings and materials, and experimentation in terms of engagement with the (history of the) medium.
A Word About Print-on-Demand
For the past two years, I’ve been involved with the judging of the Photography.Book.Now contest sponsored by Blurb. Eileen Gittins, Blurb’s founder and CEO, needs to be commended for so passionately pursuing this new technology and for placing it in the hands of everyday and professional photographers alike.
Print-on-demand is a powerful new tool in the toolbox of photographers, but because it is so new, many photographers are still using it straight “out-of-the-box” so to speak. Not a single photographer that submitted to the contest took the print-on-demand book and altered it from the way it comes from Blurb, which, when dealing with a creative community, was surprising to say the least.
Here are some ideas for “experimentation” with print-on-demand: have the book block created using print-on-demand technology and then take that block and have it bound in a cloth of your choosing at a local bindery; produce a hard cover print-on-demand book and produce a letterpress dustjacket on paper of your choice; design the book for a different trim size, print it in the larger size from Blurb and then have it professionally trimmed to your designed size—you’ll be sidestepping the limits on possible trim sizes; print two slim volumes—one print-on-demand and one using some other method—and have a slipcase or box produced to house the set; use the paper or trim sizes intended for non-photo print-on-demand books and make a photography book. These are just a few general ideas, but I genuinely hope to see more creative innovation with the book form in this next set of contest submissions for 2010 (the contest will launch sometime in the early Spring of 2010, so stay tuned).
With all of the interest in photography books and the history of photography as seen through publishing, there can only be more and more innovation ahead, which is truly exciting. I’m looking forward to seeing the fruits of these discussions over the months ahead…
[Feel free to post comments. I'll keep 'em flowing through here...]
On Monday night, the 9th of November, I had the real privilege of participating in a conversation with Roger Ballen live at the SVA auditorium on 23rd street in Manhattan. Roger Ballen’s work has fascinated me for a long time, and I was thrilled to be able to engage him in dialogue before an audience in New York City. Hosted by SVA and introduced by Chair of the Photography Department, Stephen Frailey, the evening proved to be one of riveting photographs and thought-provoking dialogue. My own introductory notes are below, followed by a video of the evening as well as two passage—one from C.G. Jung and another from Robert Sobieszek’s essay for Shadow Chamber—that I used during the on-stage conversation.
Darius Himes, Introduction to Roger Ballen:
“From any objective viewpoint, Roger Ballen operates as a one-man school of photography. For more than two decades, he has developed a style of image-making that is firmly rooted in the documentary tradition of the great mid-century storytellers, but which has consistently taken the notion of a photographic “document” as a mere starting point for an ever-deepening exploration into the human subconscious.
Roger Ballen grew up in New York under the familial influence of the Magnum clique of photographers; his mother ran the New York office of the famous agency for many years when he was a child, and young Roger considered Henri, Bruce, and Elliott as so many uncles and tutors. He left the City behind—and the safety of that world—immediately after university, spending 5 years on the road, traveling to such far-flung places as Istanbul and Papua New Guinea. Eventually he settled in South Africa and found work according to his formal training, as a geologist. His travels to the back-country of that country, and in particular around Johannesburg, provided occasion for a continued sustained photographic exploration, which his first two published books of photographs bear out.
The common and underprivileged residents of rural South Africa have remained his “subjects” over the years. But where he began with a simple documentary approach, portraying them and their homes, he has wandered into an imaginative middle-ground that is informed by the world he inhabits, but which is at least equally conjured as it is found.
In many ways, Ballen is seduced by the infinitude of detail that a well-exposed, traditional gelatin-silver negative and print can offer up. His camera-mounted flash serves a double function of flooding a room with light, and thus providing more detail, while simultaneously pushing the shadows towards a deeper shade of black. This photographic approach—detail surrounded by inky blacks—serves the goal he cultivates, which is far more psychological, more Jungian in nature, than most photographers ever attempt. It has been his “goal as an artist … to create increasingly complex images with greater and greater clarity of form and intensity of vision,” where meaning can “be layered and reveal an aesthetic that is [as] ambiguous as it is mysterious.”
In his stunning introductory essay for Shadow Chamber, Ballen’s second most recent book, Robert Sobieszek stated this effect as follows: “Ballen senses that documentary is more fluid than fixed. His photography has glided easily from the clinical chart to the dramatic script over the years, and his art tests our very conception of the reporting photographer creating tableaux that speak to, and not just about, our human condition.”
Boarding House, Bllen’s most recent book, (out this Spring from Phaidon) continues this rich, penetrating vision. Mark-making, sculpture, theater and photography are all deftly woven together to create a cast of characters—animals as often as humans—that stand firmly before the camera, in real space and time, and yet somehow shimmer on the edge of immateriality, leaping out from a fantasy realm for a brief moment, only to recede into the unconscious the next. He has transformed a technical vocabulary and drafted a dark poem infused with all of the struggles and turmoil of our modern lives. As Sobieszek mused, “little more can be expected of art.”
“Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes.” para 261.
Archetypes were, and still are, living psychic forces that demand to be taken seriously, and they have a strange way of making sure of their effect. Always they were the bringers of protection and salvation, and their violation has as its consequence the ‘perils of the soul’ known to us from the psychology of primitives. Moreover, they are the unfailing causes of neurotic and even psychotic disorders, behaving exactly like neglected or maltreated physical organs or organic functional systems.
… For this reason the scientific intellect is always inclined to put on airs of enlightenment in the hope of banishing the spectre once and for all.”
C. G. Jung, The Archtetypes and the Collective Unconsicous (Para 266–267)
“‘Relentlessly meaningful, yet resistant to logic,’ the characters are actors without audiences, acting out their distress, reduced to the ‘forced extroversion of all interiority’. This is no longer documentary expression in the classic sense; Ballen now explores the truly unphotographable margins of the human condition in his work, where anything is possible and surfaces count for little or are in constant flux.”
“One of the most lasting lessons about photography left us by the French critic Roland Barthes is that while all photographs are ‘contingent’, none are, by themselves, ‘coded’. For any clarity of interpretation or reading, a gloss or caption is required, some sort of text that explains what is going on in the image. Picture editors, museum curators and educators depend on such glosses. Artists usually do not. Everything in Ballen’s recent photographs clearly happened in front of the camera, what we see took place as the shutter was released; because he does not deal with digital imaging, everything was absolutely present and contingent. To discern fact from fiction in this work may be simply impossible; to tell acting from real life may also be; to bother with such discernment may be not only futile but missing the point.” —Robert Sobieszek, Shadow Chamber
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”—Alan Kay
Last night, on a beautiful, balmy, breezy September eve in New York City at Tribeca Rooftop, Blurb.inc hosted the awards ceremony for the 2009 Photography.Book.Now contest. As lead judge not only did I MC the evening event, but I got to give a very deserving photographer by the name of Rafal Milach from Warsaw, Poland $$$TWENTY-FIVE-THOUSAND-U.S.-DOLLARS. Not only did it make him happy but it made me very, very happy.
In many ways, Blurb is inventing a part of the future, and their support of books and photography is phenomenal. So, one more “Thank You” to Eileen and the Blurb crew (Robin, Lori, Brenna, Mike and the rest of the team + Wendy and the NYC collaborators for putting on an amazing evening).
Below is the text of my prepared statement for the evening:
There has been a lot of news of DEATH, DYING and KILLING in recent times and I don’t just mean the dozens of wars and armed conflicts worldwide. When we listen to the media we hear that newspapers are dying and photography is dead. They say that digital killed analog, bloggers killed print-journalism and any number of magazines are listed on deathwatch websites.
If you believe it there is carnage and unprecedented global upheaval from which we’ll supposedly never recover.
Personally I think all of that is a load of bull.
I’d like to suggest that this “is what real revolutions are like,” to borrow the words of Clay Shirky, a brilliant social commentator. They involve slippery and exciting change that cannot be controlled by the usual methods.
I fully agree.
“The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”
And so it is with us assembled tonight. We are here not because one technology has killed another, or because some set of industries are in danger of dying, real as that may feel. We are here to celebrate newness, innovation and the glorious creativity of the human spirit. And yes, CHANGE. Whether we know it or not, we are living through revolutionary times.
When someone demands to know whether print-on-demand will kill publishing and whether newspapers and magazines will die “they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution.” As Shirky says: “They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be lied to.”
I cannot tell a lie.
But I can say that books are ancient vehicles for the dissemination of ideas and resonate with us as objects even today. Photography, by contrast, is no more developed than a toddler in the scope of human history. It is a gift of modernity and it is changing rapidly before our eyes … and all of that is as exciting as anything I can think of.
To be attached to old ways and outdated systems in this new day is foolhardy and naive, for who can any longer believe that technologies won’t change radically every six months or more. And who cares!? Change is inevitable. Has anyone mentioned we are living in the 21st century? I don’t know how all of these changes will affect the larger industries many of us work in; no one really does. But I do know that we are the future—we are the architects and the builders and there are more and more powerful tools at our disposal every time we blink our eyes.
So let me remind everyone to please take out your cell phones … and make sure they are on. Please Tweet, Blip, Facebook, Blog and Qik video anything and everything you want. We are witnessing changes the likes of which previous generations could never dream.
The Photography.Book.Now contest was not just another “photography” contest. This was a photography-book contest—and specifically, one that celebrates print-on-demand technology. Many thanks and shout-outs to all the photographers who submitted, attended the party and decided to participate in something fresh and exciting, without really knowing where we’re all headed.
[Posting this entry from 34,000 ft & the future. Here is the full text of Clay Shirky's talk on the state of newspaper publishing. Follow me on Twitter @dariushimes]
The winners of the Photography.Book.Now contest have just been announced (Reuters announcement here & PDN article here)!
Out of the winning titles selected by the great team of judges, of which I served as Lead Judge, Rafal Milach’s “Black Sea of Concrete” stood out as the best overall photobook. It stands as a wonderful embodiment of all of the criteria I asked the judges to consider: strong photography, important subject matter, vigorous edit and intelligent sequencing, combined with a thoughtful attention to those elements that are specifically book-centric, including type treatment, page-layout and cover design.
At the heart of the contest was the combination of photographs and books. The contest was not just about photographs, but about photographs in book form.
Overall, Milach’s book is one that I think people will want to return to repeatedly. He enlisted the assistance of a designer and an editor, and in doing so exhibited care and attention to the book, as a whole, acknowledging his own strengths and weaknesses in the process; it was truly teamwork that led to a better end-result. As lead judge, I’m extremely proud to have been able to award the Grand Prize to a relatively young photographer and book artist and I look forward to seeing more from him in the future.
The other winners include:
Kurt Tong, who won in the Editorial Category with People’s Park (below, top) Joshua Deaner, who won in the Fine Art category with I Sell Fish (below, bottom)
And Dennis Kleiman, who won in the Commercial category with Volume One
Read the story on PDN here (with more photos). Read the Blurb blog here. To join judges and winners at various meet-ups around the country (+London), click here.
About Photography.Book.Now
Photography.Book.Now is an international juried self-published book competition, and a celebration of the most creative, most innovative, and finest photography books – and the people behind them. Now in its second year, Photography.Book.Now offers photographers of all stripes the opportunity to showcase their work to a world-renowned panel of judges, and take a shot at a $25,000 grand prize. Submissions closed on July 16, 2009. For more information on prizes, sponsors, and upcoming social events, visit www.photographybooknow.com.
Back in the spring of this year, the good folks at Mus Mus (who prefer to remain anonymous) approached me about contributing to their new Mus-Mus project, @Paris. I gently declined due to an already overflowing plate, but they came back a month or so later and asked again, “just to make sure.” I think I again gently declined, but by the time they knocked on the door a third time, I had been thinking about what I would contribute to an online photo-project about Paris.
What I had been thinking about was the above photograph.
Since childhood, this photograph has been lodged in my memory banks. Truth be told, it’s my only connection to Paris. I’ve never been to the city, and while the romance and history of the city definitely has its hold on me, I’ve just never had occasion to get there.
But I’ve been there numerous times through the history of the life of Abdu’l-Baha and the talks he gave in that city almost exactly a century ago. I wrote back and said that if I were to contribute it would be about this photograph, and was that ok? The Mus-Mus folks were so enthusiastic and encouraging that I was glad I had decided to say Yes.
The essay is now written and the @Paris project is live and launched. And to be completely honest, of all the work I’ve been busy with this summer, this is my favorite thing. My piece is just one small touchstone of a much larger, thoughtful online “archive” of photographs by contemporary photographers, about Paris. The jurors were Stephen Shore, my good friend Denise Wolff, of Aperture, and curator/writer Ulrich Baer, who also contributed a wonderful, lengthier essay about Paris and photography. The archive is here. An excerpt from my essay is below:
In 1908, the Young Turks of the Committee of Union and Progress revolted against the despotic Sultan Abdu’l-Hamid. This brought to an end the centuries-old Ottoman Empire and paved the way for a semi-secular government based in the ancient city of Constantinople. With that singular, revolutionary act, all political and religious prisoners throughout the Empire were freed. Abdu’l-Baha Abbas, the man in a white turban pictured in the middle of this photograph, tasted freedom for the first time since childhood. He was 65 years old.
This photograph was made in Paris in the autumn of 1911. Abdu’l-Baha stayed in the city for nearly two months, near the Trocadero Gardens adjacent to the Avenue de Camoëns. After over 50 years of exile from his native Persia, and imprisonment for espousing the universal ideals of the teachings of his father, Baha’u’llah, he had left, by steamer ship, the prison-city of Akka where he had been under house arrest since the age of 24, and embarked on a journey to the West. First London, then Paris and eventually New York City hosted his visit as he sought to create new bridges between the peoples, cultures, religions and ideals of the East and West.
In this photograph, we see Abdu’l-Baha standing at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, with the Champ de Mars visible in the hazy background….
mus-mus is a collaborative photography space that yokes ideas and images together in an experimental and playful way that seems most appropriate for an internet based salon of an increasingly post-consumer world. In keeping with this ethic we prefer a mildly anonymous position and ‘authorlessness’. Keeping mouths shut about who we are, we hope you will better know the pictures, projects and ideas.
The semester has begun, and many of my friends and colleagues are back in their classrooms and lecture halls inspiring willing, ready students of higher education.
For me, this (lost) summer was a bit of a technological explosion: I updated this, my WordPress blog (actually, the team at Bad Feather updated it!); got permanently locked out of my FB page (Yes, that’s me. No, I can’t access it. Yes, FB has been notified and NO, they haven’t responded. Yes, my Twitter feed still goes to my status updates and makes it look like I’m actually on FB a lot…but I digress…). I also figured out how to best utilize Twitter (and TweetDeck) and love writing with it; I had fun with my Flip video; I geeked out on various Apps for my iPhone (and recorded an entire “live” album on my built-in Voice Memo App).
I also watched the people (and youth) of Iran challenge their government through the same “social media” networks that many use in frivolous ways on a daily basis, and I honored the imprisoned, innocent Baha’is in Iran who have spent over one year in jail for serving their country and promoting the oneness of humanity.
In addition to the frenetic-ness of the summer, I sat in awe and wonder as various absolutely amazing programs, utilities and apps were developed and released into our Internet-world. I was introduced to Tokbox, Qik, Shazam, and Blip.fm and began using them regularly.
With bluetooth capabilities in our cars, Pandora.com playing on our iPhones, Skype on the laptops and massive file sharing through any number of online services, I began to feel rather Jetsonian. I just need to find Rosie the Robot to complete the picture.
But then I came across this passage (online, of course) by Thoreau:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” —Thoreau, Walden
These two passages instantly resonated with me and my inner dialogue felt stimulated, nourished and challenged. I both agree and disagree with Thoreau and Benjamin. Many of the “inventions” I came across this summer are not much more than “pretty toys” and fall into the entertainment category. In fact, depending on how you use them, all of these tools could reside at the level of superficial entertainment.
But that is precisely the point. It depends on how you use them. For example: the people of Iran (primarily young adults) were able to publicize on a hitherto unprecedented international level what they saw as rigged election results by the Iranian government through utilizing Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Protests, beatings, police crackdowns and deaths were all placed directly in front of the eyes of the people of the world to see and bear witness to. No longer could a government simply drive over to the TV and radio stations and easily shut down the stream of information flowing to the outside world. Every single person with a cell phone or a PDA was a potential broadcaster in a worldwide sea of journalists. It was truly amazing to watch and follow (and I say that regardless of political positions).
That may beg the question, however: Why do we care what happens to people on the other side of the world? The answer (besides a much longer blog post) is that our world has shrunk to such a degree that we are all connected in ways that, as a human race, we have never been before.
Let me say that again: in the entire history of humanity, humans have never been thisin touch with each other—socially, politically, through commerce and the military, through ideas and religion and popular culture—ever before. New realities require new paradigms and new ways of existing. To many, it’s obvious that a new system of ordering society at the global and local levels to facilitate those social, political, commercial, popular culture connections is not only required but will inevitably be constructed. (And to be honest, to be alive at a time when the global body-politic of humanity is passing through such changes is about the most amazing, exciting thing I can even imagine, like witnessing a stormy teenager enter into a confident adulthood.)
Back to the point though. Benjamin’s wonderful observation, made nearly a century ago, is as much about the worth of the content published as it is about the ability to publish, held even more so now by any and all average citizens.
In the world of publishing (and photography book publishing specifically), there is a fascinating development going on in the form of print-on-demand books. As I state in my essay “Who Cares About Books” (published by LACMA in WordsWithoutPictures*), “An entirely new generation of curators, critics and photographers** see the book as a central form of expression in photography.” This appreciation of the book, coupled with the ease and accessibility of book production, thanks to companies like Blurb.com, has fueled a flood of new books, all printed out one at a time using technology that was unthinkable 15 years ago.
Anyway, the coolest tools of the age are all around us, and they only add to the great developments of the twentieth century. The ability to produce a book is only a few clicks away. The responsibility to produce worthwhile content, as Thoreau implies, is still there.
[For someone not at all related to photography but doing amazing book~literature~new media stuff, check out Barbara Hui. Her Litmap project, about Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage by W. G. Sebald will blow you away. Imagine Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's The Photobook: A History organized like this!]
* —join essayists and Charlotte Cotton in NYC September 17, 2009).
** —Markus Schaden (of Schaden.com, Europe’s best photobook store talks with Martin Parr about Parr’s newest book, Playas, published by Editorial RM)
To order the WordsWithoutPictures book (a print-on-demand title), click the image below. This is what will come in the mail (if you order two, that is):
Reading the Modern Photography Book: Changing Perceptions was an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art this past Spring. Somehow, tragically, I missed it! But the online slideshow is amazing.
