Remember the photo album we would take from a drawer on special occasions or when visitors dropped in? There were little prints tucked inside triangular corners. Of that new baby. Of birthday parties with friends. Or a relative sailing away to somewhere distant on a passenger ship. Maybe having fun with the family dog or cat. Or that holiday when we all went to the beach one summer.

The photo album was a record of family events. We looked at those pictures and remembered…

Then along came illustrated newspapers. We looked at the images to try to understand local and world events. And figure out what specials to buy for ourselves or the home that week.

We went to the movies occasionally to escape from our immediate circumstances for 60 minutes or so. And we built our evening routines around TV shows we liked.

Other than photos, which we used to help us complete a task, looking at images was a leisure activity: they spiced up the real world in which we spent most of our waking hours.

Now, images look at us.

I live just south of Sydney along one of the most stunning stretches of railway line in the country. The train travels halfway up a cliff right next to the ocean for a good 15-20 minutes. You can see rocky points with surf breaking over them. You can see the horizon 30-40km out to sea. And even if you make this trip every day, it’s never routine. The light changes. The sky changes. The surface of the ocean changes. If you’re looking, that is. But very few people are. They’re mostly glued to their smartphones. Or tablets. Or notebook computers.

I mentioned the late 1980s at the start of this piece for a reason. It’s when the computer came into being with its ability to digitize images and circulate them around the world. Add the impact of social media (current figures: Facebook 3.05 billion members, YouTube 2.2 billion, Instagram 1.4 billion, TikTok around 1 billion, Snapchat 750 million, Reddit 500 million, Pinterest 480 million, Twitter (now X) 300 million, Flickr 1.2 million), TV streaming services, a 24 hour news cycle, outdoor advertising, satellite pix, and 24 hour CCTV coverage and you have a tsunami of images people are immersed in on a daily basis.

One could say with confidence that everything that happens in today’s cities and towns everywhere in the world is being depicted. Not so much in rural areas, obviously.

And… as with everything in nature… quantity becomes quality. Things can change their form completely. Keep adding heat to a kettle of water, and it boils and becomes something different: steam. Keep adding pictures to the urban citizen’s life, and suddenly, the pictures are watching us. We are there for them.

And by pictures, I mean the multinational corporations that manufacture image-recording machines.

As the philosopher Vilem Flusser put it in his Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1984), “Cameras are walking around in possession of their photographers.”

The media industry is so brazen it occasionally admits this itself. See a Sydney photo retailer’s bald claim below.

As an aside… I can assure Mr or Ms George (or whoever owns the place) that I created myself as a photographer, being entirely self-taught. Ok… so I spent six of the last thirty years in academia, acquiring two master’s degrees. But not because I needed university lecturers to teach me how to take a picture. I wanted to study photo-media art in all its manifestations so I could find out where to situate my work and my ideas. 

We’ve been turned into image-aholics. And I have used this metaphor because I think the comparison between wine and photography is apt.

Drink too much wine, and it will kill you. Drinking a glass or two occasionally with a meal and fine company and wine is one of life’s joys.

How do we survive and grow in a period of media hyperactivity? I was a working creative for 25 years and I’ve taught creativity for 15 more. One of the first things I would tell trainees and students is… never do what you are told. It’s the kiss of death for a creative person. It transforms you into one of the Walking Dead. If you are being asked to make material to order (I could have said create to order, but that’s an oxymoron, so I didn’t), you must be prepared to quit the job or be fired in order to keep your mind free. And preserve your self-respect. Obviously, I’m not talking about mandatories like prices and store contact details when working on a retail ad. I’m talking about your ideas: notions that “take one beyond experience” (as Emmanuel Kant put it). 

The same thing applies to us as regular citizens. We’ve got to stop doing what we’re told by Big Media if we want to reclaim our real lives and not turn into image-aholics.

Now, I am not a Luddite… I’m aware that most of us have a cybernetwork of friends/colleagues/supporters (some of whom we have never met) along with one or more tangible groups of physically available people with whom we can “press the flesh” when the need arises. It’s a case of each of us deciding how much cyber time is enough.

As this is an opinion piece written for FRAMES, a photo media journal, one needs to ask where those of us who use real cameras go from here if we want our work to stand apart from the torrent of mediocre, repetitive, and largely irrelevant images out there.

In the second part of this series, I will put forward some possibilities for your consideration…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lynn Smith is an exhibiting artist, curator, and mentor based in the Illawarra region of New South Wales, Australia. He has two Master’s degrees from the University of Sydney: a Master of Documentary Photography (by coursework) and a Master of Fine Arts (by research). The term he uses for his style of image-making is foto vague, encapsulated in the statement… See what’s there. Feel what isn’t.

INSTAGRAM
FLICKR