Whither digital images?

My Flickr albums

While we undoubtedly live in the most documented era of human history, it saddens me that these pixelated dispatches will be as fleeting as the moments they captured. So few hard copies of these images exist; they are simply floating in the ether. Maintaining digital archives requires constant attention and is a chore for any professional, let alone the casual image-maker whose archives, in all likelihood, will cease to exist when they die.

Dan Winters - Road to Seeing 

Many should rightly disappear, but I suppose it might be a matter of where photos are stored.  I have a couple thousand images at Flickr that I expect have been archived by Yahoo (now owned by Verizon).  These and millions of others like them are surely of some value, perhaps even monetary value, to future consumers and researchers.  The amount of memory required to store them is minimal.  Why wouldn't a hosting company hold onto them, even if their creators don't?  Might digital images prove longer lasting than anything printed to paper?

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Musical Accompaniment: Cyrus Chestnut - Natural Essence (2016)

Cyrus and his mates deliver an exhilarating recording.  Always a pleasure.

100 for Almaty (+12)

I had no photographic plan for Almaty.   As this wasn’t a trip organized months in advance, I did minimal research.  My objective, as it were, was to remain attentive and open to whatever might present itself.

I had an entire week for Eid, nine days including weekends at both ends, and so Mutsumi and I hopped a plane to Almaty, the former capital and still largest city of Kazakhstan.  Apart from never having been there and an interest in Central Asia, Kazakhstan was a convenient choice as visas are not required for US or Japanese citizens and as there are direct, 4-hour flights from Dubai.

Publication: The Big Issue North: Sept 2016

The OCA/Big Issue editor picked up one of my Japan images for the September 2016 issue.  This makes three in almost as many months.  Might an Almaty image be next?

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Musical Accompaniment: Steve Turre: Colors for the Masters (2016)

When I began this blog, I included in the sidebar a list of music links that I can see now will at the rate I have been adding them become impossibly long.  So why not a series of blog posts instead?  Here's the first.

• At Smoke Sessions
• At Amazon
• At All About Jazz

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Book Review: Hoffmann, T. (2014). Photography as Meditation: Tap Into the Source of Your Creativity.

Hoffmann, T. (2014). Photography as Meditation:  Tap Into the Source of Your Creativity. San Rafael: Rocky Nook.

This a review of half a book.  I started reading it before a summer trip and once on the road found myself too occupied with my new environment to continue reading.  I might have carried on had the writing and ideas been more compelling.  Frankly, I found them somewhat muddled and uninspiring and once off the road and back to my routine didn’t have the energy to start again.  Perhaps another day.

If you haven’t read much on meditation or contemplative art practice, you might find this book engaging.  It presents many ideas common to the subject and explored in many essays, lectures and books seeking to understand image making in relation to the existential questions of the human experience.

This is not a book-length treatment, but more of a diary or blog, with short entries on one or two ideas, many of them later reintroduced and looked at in relation to newly introduced ideas or concepts.  Among the issues of concern are practicing for the sake of understanding rather than for adulation, developing a voice, experiencing stillness, and using image making to develop a more penetrating understanding of existence.  Long-standing photographic concerns  - Barthe’s studium and punctum, and the objectivity of photographs, for example - are examined in light of contemplative practice.

Yakyu: Japanese Baseball Stadium Culture

On Shooting
My photographic goals for six weeks in Japan were hardly ambitious.  I had no intention of capturing the spirit of Japan.  I’ve practiced long enough to know that any representation is partial.  For most of the trip I had no photographic plan at all.  The only part for which I had were the visits to five baseball stadiums.

As with many projects, the conception was grander than the final product.  Perhaps what sets the good photographer apart from the average is taking the time to reflect in order to try understand why the output didn’t line up with expectations.