Mobile breathes new life into photography
May I first of all wish all my readers a happy new year. There aren’t many of you, so you can rightfully feel I really do mean it in a very personal way. And I hope you received all the photographic gizmos and gadgets that you’d asked Santa for and that you are well rested to go snapping into the new year. And I hope you didn’t worry too much about my 1 week absence over the holiday period - I hadn’t planned to skip a week (even though I did last year) though an impromptu drink down the pub turned out rather longer than expected and the blog went by the wayside. That’s what the Christimas holidays are for I guess.
Anyway, I digress. One of the few Christmas gifts that has not already made its way to a nearby charity shop (in many cases I’m sure, making the return journey) was a book called How Music Works by musician and former Talking Heads man David Byrne. He says that the experience of music is very much about context: in a literal sense, the venue you hear it in can make a big difference to how it sounds; less literally, you hear music differently if you’re already feeling a certain way; often the music we most remember is when we are most impressionable when we’re young. Some time ago I drew a parallel between music and photography. And an excellent article called Goodbye, Cameras in the New Yorker (which I found through the equally excellent FLTR magazine), points out that photography is also very context-sensitive. There’s loads of meta-data attached to a photo (your location, the time and date) of course with more data probably likely to be attached in the future (the author mentions radioactivity levels, fitness levels, social status, etc), but perhaps a more important context is the conversation that the photo generates online. The photo takes on a whole new lease of life when you see the reactions it gets from people. And many people’s photo feeds on social networks have been picture-tracks (ie like sound-tracks) to their lives. I self-indulgently mapped out mine a while back. Us mobile photographer types were already saying that social networks and mobile cameras generally have breathed new life into photography ages ago, but it’s good to be reminded of it by The New Yorker no less (come on guys, do try and keep up): social platform networks have breathed new life into photography and all those old fogies that go around moaning about people take photos on their mobiles should be reminded it of it at every opportunity.
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