What’s up with selling the image of your friends
to some complete stranger? Yeah - I know
now.
On my photoblog
(please visit it - no one else does!) there’s been, for a good while now, a
“buy” link. If you were interested in a poster-sized Arhip
for your dull wall - you could order up a print, I’d mail it out (free postage
world-wide). This was seemed a good idea, it was fun and relatively easy, it
gave worth to shooting as much film as I was a couple months back, and in the
end could have been profitable (only just,
‘mind).But I wonder if Elliot has this problem… Or, do
you? We take photos of our friends and then what - it’s always great to show
them off - but taking hard copies round to have people’s mucky paws all over
your still-warm prints isn’t my thing. You can e-mail them - this is great
because people have belief that the images are private, although if your CC:ing
them on to a bunch of people this can be slow and selective and if you have a
small e-mail account troublesome to say the least (and receiving photos you
don’t care about from people who don’t know about compression is a bitch). You
could
stick them on CD and mail them, or pass them around (all of this making no sense
to anyone who uses a mac).The whole
emphasis of entertainment (photos, movies, music) on computers over the last 18
months, and it will continue, is on sharing. Mac users know all about .Mac and iPhoto - It’s so easy, so simple and
obvious - PC users will start getting it - even XP had the option to “e-mail
these” it would even ruin jpeg them for easy mailing and Picassa looks like it could take off,
If I say only one thing about Flickr
it is Click
Me!Sharing photos is really
great, but where do you draw the line between accessibly and privacy? Well, it’s
not through passwords, tried it… I know that not everyone wants Mum & Dad
landing here,
and clicking through the last few years of parties and extracurricular
crazyness, but that’s not really been a problem and we’ve all grown
up
now.
But,
I did cross the line with “buy”. It was the dodging Callum’s lens that ticked me
off at first, then seeing other peoples photos - how relaxed and at ease people
were - instead of edgey (usually terrible pose-ey) shots through my “made for a
gallery” images. Saunders once imagined what I did with my hours of DV and
thousands (1625 + 35mm) of photos… with the film, I’m afraid its to expensive
to keep for posterity… so I made the A\V Section, and I
won’t add to that it’s the only archive now. With photos - I throw them into
iPhoto (have
a look) and occasionally find a good shot and photoshop it up to something
grand if it’s really good it goes to the photoblog. With new stuff, it
goes straight to Flickr (with
thousands of other photos from hundreds of thousands of users), so if you want
you can consume it in high-def (have
a look) or leave a comment, add some
depth…I took a splendid photo of a
guy in the street the other day, he got really mad - I ignored him, whether I
noticed he was there in the first place or not - I was enjoying the amazing
folds in his jacket, not stealing his soul… I once took a photo of Saddam
Hussein’s decapitated bronze head and had it (not forcibly) removed from my
camera, but that’s another story… but these two instances illustrate the
point, taking photos for a love of colour, light and little crinkly bits on
cord… and then taking exploitative (investigative / documentary) photos. But I
don’t think the motive for taking a photo has anything to do with what I’m on
about today - If a random shot in the sky (i took a good few today below some
cherry blossom) turns out to be fantastic in texture - and the lines are fine -
colour perfect and it says summer morning - then great, I’ll publish it here,
same with any photo of you or that other random guy in the street - you are
furniture - in photoshop I’ve removed and added people and landscape for fun,
sometimes it works, usually it
doesn’t.Back to Elliot, check out Slower.net - he takes
great photos of his friends, many of them know what his game is - he’s a
professional photographer - doesn’t sell his work. Maybe that’s why everyone
thinks its okay - but thousands of random people must click through his
galleries every day… and that’s not exploitation - he takes an excellent
shot.Anyway. I want to take great
photos, so help me - I won’t sell your soul! If we all play along, we can do
something Great
(see
me). Just do what comes natural.
However
I’m not out to make a fast buck on my friends’ pretty
faces, so I’m removing “Buy” for the time-being. (Thanks
Louisa!)
Off
