Notes From Nowhere

I think it was Magnum’s very own Donovan Wylie who ten years ago stated publicly that “Photojournalism is very dead.” From the context it was clear that he made his judgement both regarding subject matter and style. There have been many others who said the same thing – reaching back to the 1960ies, when photographers in Vietnam saw the same images they took earlier in the day flicker on television in the evening, their unprocessed film still in the camera. Fast forward to 2008, and the otherwise relentlessly encyclopedic “Conscientious”-blog complains that we we have seen grainy black and white pictures of suffering individuals before (here, discussed here).

Here’s a question: Perhaps it is not just photojournalism, but also all the well-cartographed “fine art” photography of today that is dead? If Wylie’s criteria hold, it probably is. “Conscientious,” for better or worse maybe the best summary of contemporary photography “as-it-is,” might be living proof of that. Fine art photography may be as ubiquitous as it is today *for the very reason* that it has moved on such well trodden paths for a number of years. When you look closer, as has been suggested in the excellent discussion over at Magnum, there’s much to admire in lots of fine art photography, as there is in lots of journalistic photography. But the deadness comes with the relentless repetition of narrowly guarded subject matter and style, I guess, and the sense of familiarity one feels even with some very recent work. It’s probably easy to get sucked into that – get yourself some MFA degree, buy a fake beard and a large format camera, then read blogs about it all… It’s like in the stock market, when the hockey moms start buying Google shares, and you know there is a problem…

Speaking of crashing markets: Mysteriously, there are now empty apartments in Manhattan, and last week I looked at one of them. The sight was so unfamiliar that I felt the urge to document it.

Last week I tested the new Canon G10. Until a wider array of small, high quality cameras will be available next year, I thought this one might be a good compromise. Well, the camera went right back to the store. In the great tradition of first rate Canon quality control, the upper left corner of the files was distinctly blurry, starting at mid zoom and getting worse towards the long end. This is a pity, because otherwise the camera seemed great. I’ve never seen a digicam that comes close in operation to a DSLR. This one kind of does – you have access to every important adjustment parameter without the need to scroll through menus. Build quality seemed first rate, apart from a somewhat fragile feeling lens.

I’ve gone through this with Canon (and others) before, and will wait for the second batch. Someone once explained to me that later batches of this kind of mass produced products usually get some tweaking – apparently it is very difficult to get the manufacturing process right from the start. But I have doubts. I’ve looked at some full resolution G10 files on flickr, and a number of images displayed similar issues (although not as bad as the ones from my sample). The high pixel count of the small sensor demands a very high precision lens, and the slightest sample variation will show – the files I saw all looked somewhat strained. I suspect that with these camera specs, and at this price point, you have to be kind of lucky (or very persistent) to get a good sample.

The artificial fish was the only photo I ever made in Berlin Dahlem, a couple of years ago – with a lowly film camera and some cross processed film. Back then quality control misery reared its head daily, in the lab, so I don’t look back. But more and more I wish one could make photographs without a camera at all.