I’ve written this piece which can be seen as the beginning of a reflection, on the subject of consumerist photography v’s in-depth photo projects made by the artist photographer as opposed to the purely commercial photographer. The assumption here is that the slow growing work is not used for consumption in the same way that the commercial piece is and this is a theme up for debate. What I’m writing here gained its inspiration from the curator, producer and editor Monica Allende who was given a short write up in conversation in the May 2017 addition of Bjp.
In it she says: “Choices bring options, but there is an overwhelming sense of possibilities and how can you concentrate and produce an in-depth body of work when you are constantly distracted by market driven trends” Allende M. (2017:14).
So one of the arguments in this section of writing is that the photographer can’t get on with long term projects ( I understand this as a photographer pursuing a private or commissioned project) in the face of growing high speed photo consumerism usually satisfied by the commercial photographer. According to Sontag (1977) this is not a new phenomena but one that she was writing about in the seventies before the advent of digital photography.
“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs as strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.”
So what Sontag is illustrating is rather complex. Her findings tell us that image consumption is equated with the notion of freedom. That freedom to consume equals freedom per-se. So the tyranny of choice has well and truly landed into the domain of photography and consumerist culture is both fuelled by images and demands them as part of the general material consumerist culture that we live in.
How then does this impact on the serious artist who wants to take his or her time to produce a well developed and researched body of work? First of all I think that the audience will be different as often the work of this kind is taken on a commission and shot with a pre-sale arranged with a buyer. But then there is the independent photographer who perhaps also relies upon his income from photography but wishes to dedicate more time to producing work with meaning and values or something that helps create change.
I agree with Sontag and with Allende to a great extent. The fast pace production of imagery and the way that is getting seen and consumed seem to change the way photography is being produced, up to a point. One of the questions that comes to my mind is: will there be people around in ten years that have the interest and concentration power to look at a set of images that I have shot over the course of years, to actually appreciate the work, imbibe its meaning and contemplate it well? Often one sees people in galleries floating past pictures only giving them a cursory glance. This is obviously to do with different factors, but I personally at times find myself perturbed at the way, speed and poor digestion people can have of photos and visual arts generally.
It seems that the trend to commodify photography goes back as far as the mid-ninteeth century when the photo studios of Paris were setting conventions to establish their businesses among the wealthy and thus impede the process of creativity inherent in the new technology, the camera. This was especially the case then in portrait photography (McCauley 1994).
Perhaps in the end we have to just follow our convictions and trust that there will always be someone somewhere that takes our work to heart. Perhaps there will always be photographers that make the work they feel moved to make, simply because the impulse comes from within an intuitive resonance with the world around them.
I hope that it will be possible to always see and benefit from the more serious and well thought through art work in the form of photography for many years to come.
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Bibliography:
- Allende M. (march ed. 2017:14) British Journal of photography
- Sontag S. (1977) On Photography, printed by:Penguin classics
- McCauley Elizabeth Anne (1994) Industrial madness:commercial photography in Paris 1848-1871, New Haven, CT and London: Yale university press
OCA log level 1 Photography 