A conversation today on twitter got me to thinking about photography, and culture and style and art and society. There was a photographer, who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, who’s work really demonstrates all that’s wrong with the world right now.

The photographer that brought up all these questions is a very successful commercial photographer. Very polished, styled images. There are a lot of things that I don’t like about them. A lot of his images are super low contrast, with no blacks (tonality, not people) at all, while also cropping off body parts willy-nilly. His lighting also bothers me- the photos strike me as the kind you need an army of assistants (well, at least two or three) to maintain-complex and unnatural. Not every shot should be into the light, all of them can’t be at golden hour, and sweat is never that perfectly placed. It’s a distinctive look, but it’s a plastic look, it’s one I’ve seen a thousand times before.

We live in a dissafected, disenfranchised society. There are the indebted, and there are the people we owe money to. The rich are few and far between, something like 5% of the population at any given time, depending on your definition of rich. Money as we think of it now has no basis in the real world, but is merely some numbers in digital domains.

Given that, where is art? It’s all gold and glam and crazy hair and tight pants. It’s abstract and disconnected and complex. It’s thin, insubstantial. It’s going to fall apart.

It’s the lack of substance that I keep coming back to in my thinking; those photographs, even of somewhat interesting subjects, were plastic and boring, stamped out of a mill of complicated lights and staged action-peaks that only look like decisive moments. They are the shiny object, to be consumed and tossed away without thought.

Where are the real photographs, the photographers of the world as it is? I’m not talking about people wandering to far flung regions to uncover the the worst of the worst, I’m talking about the local people, the ones doing projects and reporting on local things? Where are these photographers? They’re out there, I’m sure it’s not just me laboring under a delusion. I know because I’m one of ‘em.

Posted by Matt on 2009-03-25T00:00:00Z GMT