Can we be Original anymore?
In the digital age, the world constantly shrinks around us with every post on every media outlet available to anybody watching. Our ability to view is greater than it ever has been before but that doesn’t mean we are seeing anything new photographically regarding content or context. ‘The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly all different’ (Szarkowski, 1976). Objectively speaking, if you were to look at every single travel and photograph in the world it would be impossible not to find anomalies where there are differences, for instance the individuals in the photo are going to be reliant on personal relationships and family members… but is that what originality really is? The issue with mass media and the sea of images online is that even if you do something original, by putting it online or in a position to be seen then somebody else will see it and either consciously or unconsciously replicate it, then the pattern follows.
‘Postmodern culture is often characterized as an era of ‘hyper-representation’ in which reality itself begins to be experienced as an endless network of representations’ (Mitchell, 1995, p.16) Mitchell was talking about the printed image regarding publications like National Geographic but now the words are more relevant than ever as it seems that we live in a world where either everything has been discovered or whatever is created is looking towards nostalgia for inspiration instead of a drive for innovation. That is not necessarily something I dislike; my tastes seem to be set in an 80’s cinema aesthetic and I continually enjoy finding what are essentially variations on a theme.
References
Szarkowski, J (1976) William Eggelston’s Guide, New York: Museum of Modern Art
Mitchell, W.T. (1995) ‘Representation’ in Lentriccia, F. & McLaughlin, T. (eds.) (1995) Critical Terms for Literary History Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Todd Hido, 1951, 1997 from “Houses at Night”:http://www.ahornmagazine.com/issue_6/interview_hido/interview_hido.html
Ideological Influencers
I would certainly describe my practice or at least my aesthetic to be influenced by western culture, my main source for discovering image is on Instagram and it would be inevitable that some of my work reflected that. Whilst I do not aspire to take photographs for the National Geographic I do wish to have my work on walls in galleries and have featured in magazines and websites such as BJP, Lens Culture, Der Grief, FOAM… It is because of this that there is part of me that will take a photograph of something that I have now told myself will be a good match for the destinations I aspire to reach. In the way that the National Geographic presents the world as a stereotype I am also perpetuating a trend that is a representation of what is deemed important enough to be featured on Instagram pages (stereotypically) with a large following for other people like me who could also be thrown into a stereotype.
This echo chamber that myself and many others operate in impacts and also is impacted by the arts networks in that new artists are influenced by works from what they see in exhibitions or publications, this influence carries forward into their work which is then picked up by publishers and repeats the cycle. Somewhere along the line, a picture is posted on Instagram by a popular photography zine of a car under a tarp set against an interesting, bright surrounding with muted colors, it has over 5000 likes and a hundred comments of thumbs up and hearts and praise. The image is then pushed to the top of the hashtag pile because of how many likes it has and more people see it. What isn’t know is whether the likes and comments are actual users or bots and that on the majority of photography pages the photographer pays a fee to be featured – it is not a truly organic process but nobody talks about it because they don’t want anyone to know they paid to be featured. The knock-on effect is more and more images of cars begin appearing in hashtag groups that are in turn followed by other photography pages who use them for sourcing content and it continues until something else becomes more popular. The internet allows photographers like myself to effectively sit in Plato’s Cave but we at least get to have some say in the images projected onto the cave wall, effectively choosing our own reality. As Baudrillard puts it ‘We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.’ (Baudrillard, 1994, p.79)
Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
CRJ 