Come to Rochester - Learn to Approach Photography in Thoroughly Conventionalized Ways

The University of Rochester and George Eastman House Announce Joint Master's Degree Program in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management

This is one of the headlines from the UR daily e-noticeboard this morning. The story is here. Despite the fact that I have been teaching a course on and writing about the politics of photography for half a dozen years, I have not been involved in any way. So much for interdisciplinary initiatives, I suppose. The real irony, however, is that while the  program (as described) may be in keeping with fundamental views in the humanities about photographs as objects which have meaning, it really is contributing to shaping the world in ways that conform to just that theoretical approach. My own views are that that is precisely the wrong way to think about photography. Rather than worrying incessantly about semantics of photographs, it would be more fruitful to focus on pragmatics, on the ways we (a deliberately ambiguous term) use photography and the purposes for which we do so. Recently, I invoked Rancière's essay "The Intolerable Image" which I think underscores pretty much just that point. And today in my class we read and discussed John Berger's 1978 essay "The Uses of Photography" which (I think) anticipates Rancière's argument in central ways.  Berger's essay is dedicated to Susan Sontag who, as much as anyone I suppose, is responsible for the view that thinking about photography (a technology for doing things) reduces to talking about photographs (objects and their characteristics). The new UR program is another step in making the world conform to Sontag's vision.

What's Wrong With Nuclear Power?

"The question ... is why such an inherently flawed design as the light-water reactor (LWR) is still, after all these years, the preferred technology?

Most of today’s reactors, whether they use boiling water or pressurised water, trace their ancestry back to the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine, launched in 1954. At the time, the LWR was just one of many reactor designs that existed either on paper or in the laboratory—using different fuels (uranium-233, uranium-235 or plutonium-239), different coolants (water, heavy water, carbon dioxide or liquid sodium) and different moderators (water, heavy water, beryllium or graphite).

The light-water reactor of the day, with its solid uranium-dioxide fuel and water for both moderator and coolant, was by no means the best. But Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of America’s nuclear navy, chose it because it could be implemented faster than any of the others, making it possible for Nautilus to be launched on time. The LWR also appealed to Rickover because it produced a lot of bomb-making plutonium as a by-product.

After that, the die was cast."

So we have a flawed technology because the decision-making process was dominated by military not energy generating considerations. (Source: This story at The Economist.)

Instagram Reflections

"I speak as a recovered digital photography addict. I more or less stopped taking photographs at all once I realised I was subscribing to a cheap self-deception about the originality, beauty and meaning of my tens of thousands of pictures. An enthusiasm has frozen into revulsion."

That is the animating impulse behind this essay by Jonathan Jones at The Guardian. I admit that I sometimes put photos or stolen images up here or on Facebook. But this is a blog partly about photography. And I rarely actually take photographs. So, I've avoided the pendulum swings Jones has experienced. But I also have not been tempted in the slightest by Instagram or similar photo-sharing sites. And that is the focus of the essay - prompted too by the report that the company planned to "monetize" (to take the euphemism de jour) the content subscribers have been uploading there. Jones, of course, is speaking from the perspective of amateurs. But here is the view from the ranks of professional photographers. Unsurprisingly, it differs; no doubt that is because different people will be using (and have used) this technology for different purposes. Just like photography more generally. It is not about the pile of pictures, online or in a shoebox in the closet. Photography is a technology for amplifying vision and imagination. Jones might find that notion therapeutic if he seeks to overcome his phobia.

Republicans, Public Goods, and Sheer Idiocy

The Los Angeles Times has run two interesting pieces lately. The first is this essay "So, who really did invent the Internet?" - which sketches the fact that not only did it take government funding and research - not just in the U.S. but in those dratted "European Style Social Democracies" - to 'invent' the Internet, but government officials to open it to private commercial development. The punchline:

So the bottom line is that the Internet as we know it was indeed born as a government project. . . . Private enterprise had no interest in something so visionary and complex, with questionable commercial opportunities. Indeed, the private corporation that then owned monopoly control over America's communications network, AT&T, fought tooth and nail against [its predecessor] the ARPANet. Luckily for us, a far-sighted government agency prevailed.

It's true that the Internet took off after it was privatized in 1995. But to be privatized, first you have to be government-owned. It's another testament to people often demeaned as "government bureaucrats" that they saw that the moment had come to set their child free.

No one beside libertarian ideologues and Republican politicians like Romney should find this observation troubling. But they surely should have the good sense not to embarrass themselves when Obama utters truisms about the social-political-economic infrastructure on which "job creators" and "entrepreneurs" build businesses.

The second interesting essay is this one, suggesting that Romney actually understands what I just said. He apparently finds it no insult whatsoever to elite athletes when he suggested that they had oodles of help accomplishing their great, if various, feats. Why then, does Mitt consider it an insult to entrepreneurs when Obama suggests that they do not build businesses whole cloth? Can't the Republicans come up with a candidate who is less dim than this? Come on! I am not even an Obama supporter. This, though, is ridiculous.

Update: And it gets ridiculous-er and ridiculous-er by the minute - look here.

Thoughts on Apple

“I actually think Apple does one of the best jobs of any companies in our industry, and maybe in any industry, of understanding the working conditions in our supply chain . . . I mean, you go to this place, and, it’s a factory, but, my gosh, I mean, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools, and I mean, for a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory.”~ Steve Jobs (2010)

Manufacturing #11. [Cafeteria at] Youngor Textiles,
Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, 2005.
Photograph © Edward Burtynsky.

Manufacturing #10AB. Cankun Factory, Xiamen City, 2005.
Photograph Edward Burtynsky.

I use an Apple MacBook Pro. It is a nice, but hardly flawless, machine. While using an Apple gives me something in common with Lisbeth Salander, it does not make me cool (that is really difficult to imagine) or especially insightful. In fact, her Apple laptop it is not what makes everyone's favorite, slightly wacked, avenging anti-heroine cool either.

I have written, mostly critically, about Apple and the impulse to canonize Steve Jobs here on several occasions since I became un-PC. ( I will say for the record that when, during the State of the Union Address earlier this week, our Hoper-In-Chief pointed out Jobs's widow, I wondered how she must've felt about being invited to the official ritual to serve as a prop.) But Apple has been in the news lately for its knowing complicity in highly exploitative environmental and labor policies. In particular you should read this extensive piece in The New York Times earlier in the week. Alternatively, Apple hipsters might download this segment from This American Life and listen to it on their iPods as a podcast.

What is the point? Surely not that Steve Jobs (or any of the other Apple execs) is a bad man. He may or may not have been a nice fellow or a jerk, honest or duplicitous, caring or oblivious, and so forth. Character issues are a sideshow. Surely not, also, that Apple is the only company knowingly complicit in environmental degradation or exploitation of workers in the developing world. The report in The Times makes it crystal clear that that hardly is the case. So too do Burtynsky's images of nice Chinese factories. (If you don't care for Burtynsky on all this, try Chris Jordan or Pietr Hugo.)

So, here are some points to take from the recent revelations about Apple.

First, a cool logo and image does not make a corporation less capitalist, less preoccupied with profit. Apple differs not at all from Wal-Mart in that respect.

Second, there is little room for moralism here. Using this or that product or brand does not make you guilty or culpable any more than abstaining from doing so absolves you of guilt or culpability.

Third, as the This American Life segment I link to above makes clear, lots and lots of things are "hand made"; that, for instance, probably includes your cell phone. When labor is very, very cheap "handmade" loses its romantic connotations.

Fourth, it is not just manufacturing that has been globalized. So too has environmentalism. And recycling of high tech gadgets (with its attendant health disasters - think carcinogens, heavy metals, etc.) is done by hand too. On this it is important to go back and read the earlier comment on moralism. Recycling your electronic toys as you engage in planned obsolescence does not make you a better person. It simply means that somewhere in China, or another developing country, people are taking your junk apart by hand.

Finally, all this news about Apple suggests that voluntary standards - whether for fair labor practices or environmental protection - are a joke. Companies will fabricate vacuous criteria that they will then work around. And they will turn a blind eye to the evasions. That is how capitalism works.

So, even if - as Jobs opined - the Cafeterias are nice, making iPhones-Pads-Pods by hand is a pretty crappy way to make a living. Apple ought to do better, but they won't. That is how capitalism works.

China Recycling #12. E-Waste Sorting, Zeguo,
Zhejiang Province, 2004.
Photograph © Edward Burtynsky.

Manufacturing #16. Bird Mobile, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, 2005.
Photograph © Edward Burtynsky.

Relentless Trajectory: Digital Versus Film

How much longer can photographic film hold on?

(AP) – 1 day ago

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — As photography continues its march toward digital dominance, a shrinking number of people are still devoted to shooting on film, the analog ancestor to today's technology.

In Rochester, Gary Thompson and his wife are the only two of 11 partners and resident artists at a private gallery who haven't switched to digital.

But that time may be near. He thinks he will eventually make the switch.

At the turn of the 21st century, American shutterbugs were buying close to a billion rolls of film annually. This year, the total could be a mere 20 million rolls.

Equally startling has been the plunge in film camera sales. Americans bought 19.7 million film cameras in 2000; that number might dip below 100,000 this year.

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The "right-to-dry movement" & the Next Big Public Policy Debate in the U.S.

We live in the country. And we hang laundry - with the exception, of course, of what my British ex-pat sweetheart Susan refers to as our "smalls" - out to dry as often as is possible. The clothesline runs from the back porch across the head of the driveway to the garage, a pulley on each end. Before we moved here I hung laundry out too on a line with pulleys that stretched from the garage to a big oak at the side of the house.*

In any case, I am pleased to know that apparently all this makes us movement activists. How you dry clothes has become a matter of politics. I wonder what Hannah Arendt would think of public debates over the laundry!
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* When she reads this my ex-wife probably will harrumph that that was her idea, but that is totally in character; it is beside the point too since I did at least half the laundry and put up the line as well. Life is too short for harrumphing though. And, much to my sons's chagrin, I'd rigged a clotheslines back and forth across the porch of the second story porch in the Rochester apartment I lived in prior to even meeting the ex; the boys were young then and surely thought clotheslines were not at all cool. Little did they know just how cutting edge their Dad was!

Not a Paul Klee

Winner 1996: Doxorubin in methanol and dimethylbenzenesulfonic
acid (80x), Polarized Light ~ © Lars BechNaarden, The Netherlands.

This hardly is my primary interest among the various uses of photography, but at Wired you can find this cool collection ~ "35 Years of the World's Best Microscopic Photography." The images are the winners, over the years, of Nikon’s annual Small World photomicrography competition. Note that you can link to the runners-up for each year too. The direct link to the Nikon page is here. The source of my interest? My son Douglas is a biology major and a budding photographer.

Mid-Life Crisis

No, I've not purchased a Harley Davidson. Worse. I confess. After years of thorough skepticism about Apple products, I've succumbed. I am so disgusted with my PC and its foibles and susceptibility to viruses that I ordered a Powerbook late last week. I am having a bit of a hard time coming to terms with this mid-life crisis in part because I really do feel much the way Charlie Brooker does ~ while I've grown to think Microsoft is a sterling example of the failings of private enterprise, my religious upbringing makes me leery of the cult-like enthusiasm of Mac users. Hopefully I'll be able to turn down the cool-aid when someone offers it around.

So Long, Kodachrome

Sharbat Gula, Afghan Girl, at Nasir Bagh refugee camp
near Peshawar, Pakistan, 1984. Photograph © Steve McCurry.

I rarely comment on technical aspects of photography, since I don't know much about them and there are lots of other places to read about such things. But this story also has local resonance in Rochester, where I live and work. Kodachrome is no more. You can find the story here and here and here among other places. As the story in The Guardian notes, one of the most famous pictures in contemporary photography - Steve McCurry's "Afghan Girl" (1985) - was made with Kodachrome. What is interesting about that photo, however, is less how it was made than the uses to which it subsequently has been put. In that regard I highly recommend the essay "Cover to Cover: The Life Cycle of an Image in Contemporary Visual Culture" by Holly Edwards. You can find it in the terrific book she co-edited - Beautiful Suffering ~ Photography & the Traffic in Pain. And, of course, our current path in Afghanistan may well provide McCurry's image with renewed relevance.

Free Radio

I have been intrigued for some time by the possibilities of "free radio" or "micropower" stations as an alternative to the pablum we confront on commercial stations and almost all non-profit or public radio. Today I discovered* an (admittedly, quite poorly written) article on the subject at Counterpunch and a couple of useful links [1] [2] and thought I'd pass them along. You might also have a look at Greg Ruggiero Microradio & Democracy: (Low) Power to the People (Open Media Project/7 Stories Press, 1999) which you can get access to here.
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*Thanks to Mark Woods.

Missed Opporunities Due to Web Dysfunction

Carrito © Betty Bastidas

At the on-line magazine nat creole I discovered a small photo-essay Sensualidad in Cuba by Betty Bastidas. The images reproduced by the magazine seem to me striking in the way they capture color and I thought I would check out more of the work at Bastidas's web page. Unfortunately, it was not terribly functional (I literally could not get it to respond) so all I can do is point you in that direction and wish you better luck than I had with it. The image I've lifted here reminds me of some work by Migel Rio Branco on which I have posted here before.

In any case, my experience brought to mind this recent post by Jörg Colberg at Conscientious on the irritations of dysfunctional web pages, especially those that appear to be intentioanlly dysfunctional. You should see this follow-up too. I have until now resisted the urge to "pile on" in this matter. But it really does amaze me how frequently I too come across web pages where artists seem to make it their business to prevent viewers from actually seeing their work. Like Jörg, I find this completely perplexing.