from still photographs to fluid flow .

Lots of think about !

The  continuing changes in the creation and distribution process of  camera images  is changing the very nature of the  medium  as we know it.  

This is one the most interesting interviews i have read in quite some time. 


He argues that the rise of digital changed the very nature of photography by moving it from a fixed image to a fluid one. The swift pace at which we create images is only matched by the pace at which we discard them and yet, paradoxically, we’ve never been more engaged with images. Photography is less about document or evidence and more about community and experience … and that’s not a bad thing.

“The way we relate to imagery is changing,” says Mayes, who thinks the pace of change is astonishing. Fortune magazine reported in September 2012 that “10% of all photos ever taken were shot in 2011.” That same month, Mark Zuckerberg said Instagram, just shy of two-years in existence, passed the 100 million users. Instagram users, who are signing up a rate of one per second, have taken over one billion images with the app. Such frenzied activity will account for some but not all of of the 250 million images uploaded to Facebook every day.

Mayes suggests that comparing this new fluid image to the old fixed image is like calling an automobile a horseless carriage. We’re trying to define the new in terms of the old to the detriment of understanding its potential and unique attributes.

SM: There are theoretical differences between analog and digital, but essentially it comes down to the fixed image and the fluid image. Analog photography is all about the fixed image to the point that fixing is part of the vocabulary. The image doesn’t exist until it is fixed. It can be multiplied, reproduced and put in different contexts but it is still a fixed image.

The digital image is entirely different; it is completely fluid. You think about dialing up the color balance on the camera, there’s no point at which the image is fixed. That fluidity cascades out from that point – issues of manipulation and adjustments are obvious and rife. More importantly than that, images now live in a digital environment. Given that an image is defined by its context it exists in a perpetually fluid environment in which the context is never fixed. Images’ meanings morph, move and can exist in multiple places and meanings at one time. Fred Ritchin, professor of photography and imaging at NYU describes it as “Quantum imagery.” Digital photography is anything and everything at any single moment; it has contradictory meanings all at once.

What the cell phone does is it takes all the attributes of digital and magnifies them.

 “The images you were making weren’t documents; they weren’t for record. They were just a stream; just an experiential process.”

SM: The way we relate to imagery is changing. Our new relationship is less about witness, evidence and document and much more about experience, sharing, moment and streaming. The cell phone is a harbinger for something hugely significant.

If you think about the number of photographs in the world, the number that is taken by photojournalists as documents is so small as to be insignificant.

We tend to understand technologies in terms of what went before – famously we referred to the automobile, at first, as the horseless carriage. We are going through this same process with the cell phone. We keep trying to contextualize it in the old medium and with old terms. A print exhibition brings the new image making back to the old methods of presentation.

Control is gone. The formal training of the professional photographer to control the equipment and to control the representation is gone. 

Is the everyday person empowered by being able to share photos instantly.

SM: It used to be my complaint that our voices were being strangled by the gatekeepers who were Hearst, Murdoch and the usual suspects, but now we live in this more dangerous situation now where we have this perception of free speech and wide access to information, but actually the strangle hold has just been replaced by Google, Amazon, Apple. The filtering process is really profound.

We are increasingly finding that our image is being misrepresented, or represented on our behalf, and probably more than it was before because journalists used to be the gateway into magazines and distribution. Now, many of us are being represented and according to these gatekeepers, algorithms, processes. There’s no journalist asking permission to take your picture, there’s no advertiser asking to use their image. It’s insidious. The proliferation of our own pictures that we put out there voluntarily is then being co-opted, in a way that as private individuals we were never subject.