Tag: photography

Give us those nice bright colors, give us the greens of summer

Holiday Inn

By now you’ve had a little time to make your peace with the new Instagram icon. In the accelerated, media-savvy world of Internet 2.0 (or whatever release number we’re on), there have been already been critical essays on how bad the redesign is (for an example, see this Adweek piece) and a backlash about how old farts just hate change of any sort (for an example, see the comments section of the Adweek piece). Instagram themselves shared a statement about the change, with the usual design-speak explanation that skeuomorphism is old news, that the icon is a doorway into the app and that the app GUI is tailored to the way users use the lightweight photo-manipulation / sharing system.

Insta

For me, the rationale is depressingly predictable. In the mobile scene, the clinical eye of Jonny Ive has cast its gaze over everything, and we’re told that all users want is an interface that gets out of the way and disappears entirely into a mist of flat gradients and semi-transparencies. Never mind that bright colors and heavily-stroked geometric forms are as invisible as traffic signs—which are, after all, brightly-colored, heavily-stroked geometric forms—in about five years they are going to be as dated as 90s’ bevels and drop shadows.

But I get that Instagram wants to move on. When it first launched (only four years ago) it was known primarily for its filters, which gave a patina of vintage charm to the most ephemeral of digital productions, the smart phone photograph. Instagram was adopted by the hipsters, who delighted in making their locally-sourced artisanal breakfast sandwich look as though it had been photographed in 1973 by a Poloraid Land camera, or as though that afternoon’s thrift-shop find had been kicking around since 1932, as evidenced by the sepia tone of this faux silver print. Of course, everyone hates hipsters, especially hipsters, and Instagram was snapped up by Facebook, which means it’s time to move on and embrace a more generic identity.

But what’s lost in the rebranding is the sense of play. Social media platforms operate on one level as convenient publishing systems for nonspecialists to share information, but on another level they are games whose rules become defined by their user base. Tumblr is technically a lightweight blog platform, but its character comes from the community drawn to it, whose users have developed a protocol for the correct way to appropriate media and repost it. Snapchat’s character arises from the community’s interest in intimacy and immediacy. Twitter is where everyone wants to be the most clever. For its brief life, Instagram’s quirks (square photos, obvious filters) have combined with urbane hipster tastes to encourage an aesthete’s view of the world: photos of alleyways, wrought-iron fences, graffiti on brick walls. No doubt Facebook wants users of all stripes to embrace the application, and your aunt and uncle may have no use for another picture of a manhole cover, but they might consider dropping $40 on a photo book of baby pics.

Still, I had a lot of fondness for the Instagram camera icon. In the iPhone’s sea of flat infographics, it was the one hold-out for charm and play. It was sort of oddball, it was sort of ugly. Mostly, it was distinctive, and that loss of distinction is the saddest part. When I was a child, the Holiday Inn “Great Signs” still dotted highways in the midwest. Incongruous and garish, they spoke to the past futurism of the Atomic Age. I remember looking for them on the horizon under the stars during family road trips. They were weird, they were unique. And when at last Holiday Inn decided to replace them, they went for the most bland, most uninteresting alternative. No child would search the night sky for that sign. And no one will pause and smile before tapping the new Instagram icon.

Great sign
Not great logo

 

Violators will be shot

My comments last week were a bit of a mess and I want to clarify. I’m not in favor of abolishing copyright or of people trying to profit from their work. But I do worry about what seems to be an ever-broadening sense of entitlement on the part of rights holders. Not only have copyright terms been extended to a point that they have long ceased to be incentives to creation (why should Disney create new characters when they can continue to coast on ones that are 90 years old?), but  also (and more troubling), rights holders are increasingly demanding absolute control over every word, note, or pixel that they produce. Forget about Warhol not being able to paint soup cans. We’re living in a world where the French government claims copyright over any image of the Eiffel Tower at night.

Bullet hole brushes by obsidiandawn.com

In at least one work on Maisel’s portfolio site, the image is largely made up of someone else’s sculpture. Perhaps he had the sculptor’s permission; I doubt he bothered to secure the permission of every architect whose work he’s photographed. Of course all these photos are transformative. But all these photos rely upon the existing work of other artists, some to a greater extent than they rely upon any choice Maisel made or technique he employed. Whether Baio’s work was transformative is something we can argue about but not something that will ever be decided in court.

When I read discussions of this situation here and elsewhere I’m struck most by the type of comment that begins “Well, I make my living as an artist, and I think…” More often than not, the comment goes on to defend Maisel and any and all claims of the rights of the artist against an antagonistic world. The implication is that the interests of the artist—and by extension, of Art—are served best by the broadest interpretation and application of copyright holders’ rights. But is this true? Are artists better really better off playing hardball? And perhaps more importantly, how does such behavior serve the culture at large?

One word that I’ve seen a lot in defenses of Maisel is “respect”—as in, people need to respect the work that photographers do. That would be a reasonable point if Maisel’s approach had been proportionate to the imagined harm. As it stands, it’s like supporting Old Man Potter at the end of the block who likes to take out neighborhood dogs with a shotgun when they enter his yard. He’s only defending his property.

The word I’d like to stress is “humility.” All arts are derivative, but photography especially relies on photomechanical processes for its production. As much art as the photographer brings to the process, she still depends on pre-existing subjects. These includes the myriad work of architects, fashion designers, engineers, and even other photographers that make up the scenes she captures. I would hope that photographers, perhaps more than other visual artists, would understand that art is fodder for art, and that if we make it necessary to contact, ask permission from, and pay every possible rights holder out there, we are pricing a lot of people out of making a lot of work, and that’s also bad for artists—and everyone.