Self Portrait of the Artist as a Weeping Narcissus (free after Olaf Nicolai) © Norman Beierle, 2010.
A vicious ostrich, wedding mania in India, Nagatani’s Chromatherapy, scanner-hacked “pittance-cameras” and the scoop on the hottest new starlet of war photography; it’s fair to say that Norman and Hester are presently on top form.
Their generous sharing of finds along “the wondrous lanes and stray paths in the territory that comes with photography” often leave me gazumped and thinking afresh. Everyone knows I love Mrs. Deane, so it was great to read their take on what (photo) blogs do and where they might go if we choose to decide.
I hope you (and they) will tolerate such a large quote. It’s solid gold.
Blog posts are left as markers for the flock, to indicate where interesting fodder my be cached, where new projects can start, where questions can be engendered or where the ground becomes unstable. Each blog post can be viewed as a flag on the map, a point of interest for the visual tourist, for the data miner, for the visual entrepreneur, for the honey seeker. It can offer valuable information, or it can be a dead end, a tromp de l’oeil. At least it is an invitation to spend your time, however brief, with the text, the links, the visuals.
Aren’t we in a sense like hookers along the digital highway, pointing our fingers down in a come hither motion? I take it that in blog-land, regular visitors do their rounds, like we used to do our rounds on the flea markets, the used book fairs, the yard sales, the photographic equipment fairs in run down community centers. Now most of that now takes place on the eBays, Craigslists and Etsys of this world, and these companies profit from it, as do all parties, but the companies most of all by providing the commodity, the platform, the pipeline. Similar highways start to evolve for the photo world, does that mean we can soon expect the first blog equivalent of the chain stores?
More thoughts start to surface, do we want our blogosphere to become a market place? Do we commercialize or not, or maybe just a little bit? Or where will we find the means to support our idealistic and wilfully naive notion of a free exchange between equals? Of course, when given the choice, I prefer the vita contemplativa, but I am forced to survive in the vita activa, where there is no such thing as free love, and where everything either has a price or is considered worthless. If I would want to change that, I should be willing to fight for that, but am I, are we? (Photo) Blogging is seen by many as a fun thing that we do in our free time, not as a serious activity, or even as what it is also, a political act.
Not to promote arrogance, but maybe the hard core content blogger ought to be more self conscious about the role he/she could play. Sometimes — and curiously enough many of these sometimes occur when I visit places like Al Jazeera — , I feel as if we simply have been pussy footing for too long. What are we waiting for? Let’s go and make things happen!
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 6, 2011 at 3:47 pm
NICHE + UNIQUE = UNICHE (And Future Blog Survival Depends On It … Maybe) « Prison Photography
[…] AUTHOR’S NOTE: THIS POST FOLLOWS A COUPLE OF OTHERS ON (PHOTO)BLOGGING, HERE AND HERE. […]
April 7, 2011 at 12:47 am
Susan Noyes Platt on Blogging « Prison Photography
[…] quote this because for all the importance, thought [1, 2, and 3] and energy I put into blogging, it ain’t worth zip if I’m not connecting and […]