You've all got my brain buzzing with further musings and questions.

* What's always been somewhat suspect -- or, as Mike and find it, kinda neat -- about photography is that everyone has taken some terrific photos. Keep snapping for years and eventually, buried on your hard drive, will be a handful of really nifty pix. In what other artforms does this -- and can this -- happen?

* One way that art-photography has tried to elevate itself has been via gorgeous printing, heightened craft elements, etc. I'm a fan of gorgeous, handmade photography work myself. But historically, this kind of emphasis is in part a reaction to the suspect nature of photography. Press a button -- what's hard about that? The machine seems to do most of the "work." And a given negative can be used to make zillions of prints. The uniqueness that's often associated with "real art" doesn't seem to be there. So art photographers did their best to introduce elements of the handmade and the unique into photography.

* Is it posssible that photographic imagery made to be digitally reproduced will come into its own? Superfab though the gorgeous hand-printed photographic work of art can be, why shouldn't photography work just as well on computer screens? I'm the world's worst photographer. But I can't help noticing that I print out almost none of my digital photos. I'm perfectly happy keeping and using them as digital files -- looking at 'em on screen, emailing 'em to friends, occasionally even posting one or two on the blog. Now imagine I were someone with talent.

* And the digital thing compound the puzzle in an interesting way, because it kind of erases the identity of "the original." At least in traditional photography, there was usually a complicated camera, and a negative, and a skilled craftsperson crafting a print. But a digital photo is really just a digital file. Click on "duplicate" and how can you tell the two files apart? Every onscreen incarnation of a digital photo file is its own unique event, I suppose you could say. But a "unique event" is somehow a little different than a "unique thing."

* As culture goes digital, a number of things seem to be happening. One is that culture seems to become less a matter of "creative people" and the rest of us so much as "everyone pitching in." The old model of the individual genius imposing his vision has started to dissolve. (Incidentally, I see good sides and bad sides to this development. But it's the inescapability of the development, and not its desirability or non-desirability, that interests me here.) Another thing that's happening is that the relationship between text and visuals is changing. Visual are less likely to be subordinate to print; it's more likely to be vice-versa these days. Text explains and plays second fiddle to the flow of the visuals. So how is our experience of photography changing? There's certainly a lot of high-class pro photography around, for one thing. But I find the existence of things like moblogs and Lomo sites even more interesting. Many people seem quite happy to have fun, please themselves, pitch in, and swap experiences. If that becomes the standard way to interact with photography, what becomes of such Greats as Lee Friedlander? Once he could command attention by virtue of being The Artist. These days, and in the future, what will he strike people as? Really good? Pompous and stuffy? Or will he just be ignored as people get on with the fun of creating their own version of Culture?

* Culture also seems to be getting more participatory generally. Make your own DJ mix. Throw your own website online. Send a video clip to a relative. We're rolling our own, and able to roll our own, in ways we haven't been able to do before. And as we do so, the topography of culture seems to be changing dramatically. What will be remebered as the significant works of art from this era? Who knows, of course. But is it likely to be a Great Novel? Isn't a Great Novel something like a Great Photograph, of the Lee Friedlander sort, likely to be dissolved in the digital solvent. Maybe the solvent means that nothing will remain of present day culture. Maybe some historian will see the development of the "blog" form as far more important than anything any individual novelist did. Yet blogs are highly participatory -- with their links and especially with commenters, they're more like discussions than they are like lectures or performances ....

There's probably a lot more that's interesting that could be teased out here too. Fun as ever comparing notes.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on January 17, 2005 11:34 PM