December 17th 2020
I have been doing this now for exactly 6 months and one week, if I count from the day I decided to devote this old blog to my new obsession with photography.
And I do count from that day because I believe that if you are going to take up the practice of an art form, whatever that may be, it only becomes “art” once it is released into a public sphere where it can be experienced by other people.
These days, it should go without saying, the internet or social media is most commonly where we find those “other people”, and in the context of social media it is probably wise to keep in mind the old Sartrean accusation that “HELL is other people”.
In the case of online photography that HELL is not so much the existential dread of exposure and the shame that might entail, but should be understood as something like a recognition that when you post what you think of as a kick-ass black-and-white street pic on Instagram you can be fairly certain that literally thousands of other kick-ass street pics are being posted in the hour or two on either side of your posting.
Imagine Vermeer carrying Portrait of a Girl under his arm and walking into the local gallery only to find that 500 other painters have just walked in and are lined up to show their version to the curator-in-chief.
Imagine further that each and every one of those artists used a camera obscura to guide their preliminary sketches and that they all bought their pigments from the same 4 or 5 local technicians, all of whom were masters of the craft. Imagine the small talk: Leica or Nikon? Fujifilm or Sony? Film or digital? And what about that new module in PhotoShop?
This is not to suggest that as a photographer I am even remotely on the level of a Vermeer but just to say that had Walter Benjamin somehow been granted a vision of Instagram his essay on the age of mechanical reproduction might have seemed to him itself ephemeral and meaningless, lacking all authenticity, and therefore never completed or published.
Smoke and Mirrors 