(source)Last Wednesday's post on Jon Rafman got me thinking. Rafman, to remind you, collects images taken by the Google Street View team and re purposes them as his own through the action of editing. His message is made his by those images which he chooses to include, and those images which he chooses to exclude. In this way you could consider images part of a universal visual language, ie. the same ways in which we choose existing words from the communal dictionary to create a thought that is uniquely ours - we choose images from a world of communal sight, to create a thought that is uniquely ours....right?
As a photographer, I make images. As a photographer, I take images.
"I think, therefore I am." To update Descartes, perhaps the statement should be, "I photograph, therefore I am."
The distinction of who is a photographer and who isn't these days seems a bit silly doesn't it?
So, I started thinking. Thinking about knowledge and the freedom of information, and the collective unconscious, an idea proposed by psychiatrist Carl Jung. In his thesis Jung states, " in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche, there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes," Meaning, beyond those things we learn and experience, there are things that we. all. just. know. , regardless of our individual experiences.
Where am I going with this? , Here - When you are dealing with a medium as popular as photography it is hard to say what is -artist- and what is merely a function of being -human-. It is difficult to ascertain true authorship.
Which brings me, Here - back to today's Wednesday Work! There are many lovely blogs, websites, and projects out there started by individuals but whose ownership of can be claimed by many.
The first I would like to share with you today is a collection of images, constantly growing and continually curated by Philadelphia artist, Heather Veneziano. The images appear web-based and cross over large time frames, continents, and original intent.
The image above, and the the three to follow all posted on August 12, 2011, at Heather's blog: an odd kind of sympathy.
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(source) The second project I would like to introduce today is of the same vein, but working the concept from the other side. Take Picture Don't Steal, and interactive photography project developed by UK-based art director Matt Greenwood, calls on the want of the passer-by. Greenwood places disposable cameras, affixed to street poles, with the simple instructions "Take Picture Don't Steal". Greenwood then collects the images and posts them to the TPDS website. With cameras in place in Miami, FL, NYC, Toronto, the UK, and other's popping up around Europe, a different kind of pictorial collective unconscious is growing.
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And all of this not yet to mention Facebook or the growing number flickr/picassa/tumblr accounts! Writer and critic Susan Sontag nailed it way back in 1977. In her collection of essays, On Photography, Sontag surmised "recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced amusement as sex and dancing-" and to think, Sontag was merely referring to photography since the advent of roll film and the point and shoot! Now we've gone digital...
What to do with all of these images?
What to do with all of these images?
The fate of the photograph - unclear - but to take one more Sontag quote out of context, another from On Photography, Sontag states "the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it."
Where do you find yourselves today, dear readers? On the side of the glass-half-empty or the glass-half-full? (I know - Oh so serious...)
Well, I am feeling optimistic and at the chance of invention, I feel the exhilaration of inspiration.
Take that energy and run.
See more of an odd kind of sympathy, here.
And more of Take Picture Don't Steal, here.
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