kill. all. grups.
Friday, March 31, 2006
We’ve lived it for years, but evidently it’s big news in New York that creativity, quality of life and a post-slacker fashion sense can coexist amiably with child-rearing and profitable entrepreneurship in contemporary urban America.
Adam Sternbergh’s recent cover story for New York magazine describes boroughs populated by people in their 30s and 40s who have grown up and produced offspring, but who have also failed to grow into their parents’ norms for work, child-rearing and recreation. In short, they (we?) wear frayed jeans and carry messenger bags, love those secular musical genres that the cool kids are into these days, and refresh themselves (ourselves?) by bringing the family along whilst gigging, snowboarding, hanging around in bars or traveling to music festivals.
Although Sternbergh’s narrative strategy primarily tends to make an appeal to the good old fashioned gloss of high disposable incomes, and to play on the insecurities of a post-yuppie audience of strivers, his writing does call attention to a significant way in which the visual semiotics of work is changing in contemporary culture.
And visual change is a topic of acute interest to FogStock and agencies like ours. In the past, the generational image of work would have been set on a farm, then in a factory, and then in an office. But now the visual markers of post-industrial labor are not just changing, they are being seamlessly assimilated with the visual markers of post-industrial leisure.
For stock photography, the notion that one could plant a suit in a picture and call it a contemporary business image has been an enduring cliché, but those days might be drawing to a close. If the scholars and public policy makers who advocate new urban economies based on promotion of the Creative Class are correct, then the semiotics of post-industrial labor will increasingly resemble home, family and play. Right?
posted by fogged @ 10:06 AM 0 comments
portraits & transactions
Thursday, March 23, 2006
The agency has recently signed a couple of new photographers that we are particularly enthusiastic about, and today we want to call special attention to Lyndie Benson.
Lyndie has many special qualities, but let’s get these out of the way first: married to jazz saxophonist Kenny G, she lives a life intimately braided into the world of celebrity; she herself has modeled and acted, and she played the Me of the 1997 production Allie & Me (an interesting experiment in improvisational filmmaking featuring Harry Hamlin, Dyan Cannon and others); and her photographic credentials include personal mentoring by the late Herb Ritts and a White House portrait of the late Buddy (the former First Labrador owned by Bill and Hillary Clinton).
All of that makes for a fine lead to a blog post, but none of it will get you signed with a commercial stock photography agency. Great photographs are the key there, and Lyndie’s portraits, especially of children, speak to an interpersonal style of photographic communication that agency folk rarely see in our professional practice.
Most successful lifestyle portraiture derives from a commercial spirit. In such portraiture, the performance of the sitter and the performance of the photographer intersect in a cultural, economic and interpersonal event that might appropriately be called a transaction.
Even when well and profitably executed (or because they are well and profitably executed), these photographs blend seamlessly into the image-saturated mediascape of contemporary life. But every now and then an image comes along that jars photo editors and cultural critics out of postmodern hyperreality and back to the real. They are photographs that are both polished and gritty, somehow Avedonian in their ambition, yet honest in their execution.
Lyndie’s black & white portraits fit that category. They depict photographic encounters that unsettle the hierarchical relationships implied when we conceive of photographs as transactions. Perhaps the photographer is still the agent of these images, the one who takes; but Lyndie’s best portraits depict a style of youth that is fully present to adults and assertive of its own agenda.
A case could be made that such presence is THE style of contemporary American youth, and that self-assured children such as those in Lyndie’s photographs will soon be the standard representation in commercial stock photography.
And at that moment, Lyndie’s portraits will be there to remind us of the kind of great photographs that derive from moments of presence, not streams of data.
posted by fogged @ 10:41 AM 0 comments
the new tides
Monday, March 20, 2006
Bill Gates thinks we’re wrong about all this.
Perhaps better known as the founder and Chief Technology Architect of one of the world’s largest media companies, Gates also founded and someday hopes to profit from his ownership of one of the world’s largest visual content companies.
A recent announcement by Gates illustrates an interesting opposition in his own conception of the ways that his companies are interconnected with the broader culture. Microsoft, a company that makes immense profits primarily by selling to large companies (and to large companies that make software purchasing decisions on behalf of individual consumers) is successful, in the company’s discourse, because it enables and promotes individual agency and creativity. Where do you want to go today?
Meanwhile, Corbis, also pursuing a business plan that primarily depends on its ability to sell to other large companies, was characterized last week as functioning in a different cultural category from the capillary system and the tides: "It will be like it is with e-zines and bloggers," Gates said at a Corbis marketing meeting. "In photography, you'll have the whole array of stuff that's just up there free, and then increasing levels of quality. The whole spectrum is being figured out. We're at the highest-quality end of the spectrum."
And, presumably, at the furthest end from individual uses and interwoven cultural practices of the new media economy.
Built into his statement is the presumption that clients who actually do things with images share his vision of what Corbis-style quality means, and that the interconnectedness made possible by contemporary technology will not rearrange commonly accepted hierarchies of quality, taste and aesthetics.
In a culture of participatory media, are mass media becoming more “real” than in the past? The cultural influence of visual realism is deeply embedded, whether expressed in contemporary television genres, advertising campaigns for skincare products, or cultish photoblogs. But the ebb and flow of the realistic and the fantastic has functioned throughout the history of mass media and photorealistic technologies of representation. It seems inevitable that people who make things with photography will soon resist the neo-proletarian chic of the photoblog: “Too flickry,” they will say.
So the guidance we take from Gates is this: a sense of quality legitimized by institutions is a little less important, we think, than a sensibility about that which is hard, that which is easy, and the self-awareness needed to make the right choice between them.
posted by fogged @ 11:51 AM 0 comments
peanut butter? chocolate?
Friday, March 10, 2006
As our friends over at Urban Honking/Ultimate Blogger 2 like to frame it, their quest to live a life of Reality TV-style celebrity and blog-style solipsism is a perfectly mismatched blend. But the lessons learned from classic marketing campaigns also run deep for us, at least as we strive to navigate FogStock through interesting and turbulent times in our industry.
A founding principle of our strategy moving forward is this: the stock photography industry as most of its practitioners have typically conceived it is Done. Over. Finished.
There, we’ve said it. Move on, nothing to see here.
Our argument is hardly a novel one: new technologies of production (high-megapixel, low-cost digital cameras), new technologies of distribution (the Internet), and new business models for using and licensing photography (online photography communities) are all contributing to a large and exponentially growing supply of licensable images by technically proficient (and not-so technically proficient) producers.
The question before us, as owners and employees of a small stock agency, is how to survive and thrive in the big squeeze between the elephant in the room and the tides. Especially since we are people who care about photographs, and who strive for a photographic practice that has meaning beyond the functional definition of images as monetizable packets of data and metadata.
So our immediate task is to find a couple of sweet spots in an ocean of images, a little bit of chocolate mixed with a little bit of peanut butter. This page includes a couple of images currently working their way through our production workflow that couldn’t be more different, and yet which exemplify the directions we think will be most productive for our agency, despite the visual oppositions within the pictures themselves.
We’ll have more to say about these images, and others like them, in future posts, but in the meantime, here is a poser: from the perspective of a cultural theorist, what is the most salient observation that might be made when we read these images together?
posted by fogged @ 3:09 PM 0 comments