Tokyo, ©Bil Brown
In the last few Substacks I have given you a story, maybe stories within stories, on the issues at hand. If you notice, I haven’t really called out anyone. When I have mentioned anyone it was general like “a photographer” or “an administrator” or other general title like “my friend”. I’m not here to draw attention to anyone in particular, just maybe describe some scenarios and give some context. When I did name someone it was because they were leading something, like the Club leader of a group on Clubhouse, or an infamous star/performer or icon. I’ve been very intentional about who I highlight. In no case do I think I have done anyone harm in these posts, nor is it my intention to do so. I’ve referenced people’s names as well when it punctuated their own artistic or intellectual property or ideas that they would have attached their name to as an art object or a direct quote. This has been intentional. I am going to attempt to pull these threads together in this final epilogue for these fragments.
My intention isn’t to cause more controversy, my intention is to draw attention to the very idea of controversy.
controversy (noun)
Similar and opposite words: disagreement, dispute, argument, debate, dissension, contention, disputation, altercation, wrangle, quarrel, squabble, war of words, storm
Let me focus on a few of the synonyms above for to complete the context. The words disagreement, dispute, argument have strong emotional charge. When you disagree with someone or dispute their claims and argue, things are going to get heated. Opinions fly and the need to defend those opinions also drive emotions higher. In the APA (American Psychological Association) definition in the elaboration-likelihood model, a variable that under conditions of high elaboration influences persuasion by providing information about the central merits of an attitude object. What is an attitude object?
attitude object
any target of judgment that has an attitude associated with it. Attitude objects may be people, social groups, policy positions, abstract concepts, or physical objects.
Conversely the most “poetic” of the synonyms for controversy are actually my favorite:
War of words, and storm.
I imagine rolling clouds of emotional gaseous mist coming over a hill as competing word-warriors are on the backs of majestically oversized house cats while holding double sided tridents of just speech. The Twitter accounts of their enemies worn as belts of discarded last year’s iPhones. The battle cry of choice cries out as Britney Spear’s Toxic plays backward-masking style in reverse in each individual ear through pro Apple earbuds as the Valley of Echo Chamber resonates each Simp and Thot into their own spiraling oblivion.
I’m listening to my friend talk on Clubhouse. He is talking about working with agencies and films, and how to get out of it by doing work outside of the mainstream. He’s talking about making adult films, something he has been doing outside of the mainstream now for four or five years. It’s not a polite chat, it’s real. With the rapid rise of OnlyFans, adult performers and even amateur models and some celebrities have been taking this content into their own realm, making their own money. During the pandemic, its become a job not a side gig. Sex Work is literally, without valid contention, work.
In another room some artists are discussion crypto NFT (Non-Fungible Token) platforms and how to trade your art as currency, like a bank, and take the money out of it like a teller. This isnt some philosophic chat, this is what is happening NOW.
Artists, not creators for hire or influencers, are taking the spaces and the former power structures once owned like never before. Distribution channels and old money models are changing. Web 2.0 ideas like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Social media in general are in the final stages. We can trade our digital art now, the more developed the better. No bosses. All digital spaces. This also goes for photography, but especially for motion graphics, memes, art after or similar to gaming platforms like Real Engine and more. This is no joke. It’s trading like the stock market, and if you start to understand the technology you can make it happen. Some platforms even have it with little or no investment except your time.
My friend, the photographer, podcaster, original Tumblr artist that stopped speaking to me, spoke to me about this years ago. I shit on it — I’m still skeptical but with NFTs being auctioned at Christie’s as fine art its undeniable. IT’s happening. He told me I was wrong. He was right. I saw other friends use bizarre words like Blockchain and Crypto with machines that were crunching 24/7/365 with apps open that looked like Win 95 or DOS from the 1990s around 2013. I heard of the DOJ and IRS coming down on other friends for acting “like a bank” and even one friend that had his house raided by heavily armed swat. This was not something that I wanted to get into, at that time it was early and the legal ramifications of actually being a bank was insane. I figured my success would be to follow the orthodox path of take photos for a client or shoot projects and make books for myself. I have been in the Digital arena since the late 1980s, but I never thought it would be so valuable. I thought my digital assets could be multiplied thousands if not billions of times, which did not hold the scarcity of a valuable product. That is until now, when we are the asset, personally. We are the currency. What we create.
Artists have to learn the new speak. Securing their online presence, 2 factor authentication and using different devices for different crypto accounts, creating a digital wallet, writing down back-up codes on paper and not screenshoting anything in the digital space that has any intrinsic value and can be traded on the open sea of NFT, bitcoin, blockchain or whatever it is that is here or coming. We have to keep our work and our minds secure, physically, digitally, emotionally.
Now is the time. Actually months ago was the time. Now is A Time, and it’s not exactly too late. Not yet anyway.
And as for these other spaces, and the darkness of it all. I feel like Social Media is on its last gasp. I personally have had to bolt down accounts over and over and over again just to be authentic and to be able to share anything of importance to anyone who can see my feeds. I opted out of using Twitter, all but abandoned Facebook except for a few photography forums and my Instagram gets only 0.7% interaction. I would delete them all if I didn’t think that I would lose touch of like half or more of the people I love and many that I respect. FOMO is real. I’ve met so many people via social media too, its such a shame that the platforms are what they are now. Bastions of political strife, disinformation and banning the best of the best work.
There are rooms on Clubhouse 24/7 entitled something like “finding your voice” or “how to connect” and various marketing version of the same speak. It reminds me of Antonie D’Agata’s interview where he said that all of it is perfectly logical when the political and financial elite make it to where we have none, no voice except for theirs. But that is changing too, when a Twitch channel, a Discord or Reddit forum can effect the stock market itself the social voice is edging toward becoming the dominant one.
These social spaces are filled with a global community, connected by a simple need in a complex social landscape of algorithms that only show us what we “like”. Machine learning that can emulate who we are at a very basic level and target us for what we desire. We only can be manipulated by what we actually want. Shut down by the fact we have a myriad of cultural backgrounds that each think their taboos are our taboos and what I once thought was puritan and vapid I now realize is just all of these fears, this negative liberty, in play at once. To convert it to positive vibes, we have to respect each other, what we see and what we feel and who we are. What I want, I want you to have too. That is freedom.
Having a 5 year old, and having raised 2 other kids (one just became and adult) I think I know a little bit about watching the development of a human being over time. We can collect a massive amount of data, but in some cases our processing of that data gets blocked somehow. This can be via what early childhood educators and researchers call stunted growth and its due to a number of environmental factors that impact normal childhood development. Fully developed countries have less of this, and stunting is a global problem in countries with less.
I feel like we can be visual linguistically stunted too, without the proper influx of tools. It’s like a starvation of something that could and is beneficial to cognitive process. I think the visual intelligence, and the ability to discern the complexities of what it is we see, is also literary but as the kids say — it just hits different. And outside of the actual communication of the emotive qualities of the visual language, it comes down to something else: access.
Access to visual literacy is socio-economic. This bubble has largely burst because of the advent of the democratization of access to photography, Anyone with a phone can take a photo or video, in high resolution, and disseminate it. Now, they can also make money, find allies, entice and even topple tyrannies… maybe. Or maybe not. This is all so fast, we don’t know the lasting impact yet.
Dare I say that there is more to it than the invigorating old school forms of photojournalism and documentary photography that have little economic impact. It’s been to a degree always an issue between editors and photographers, and then editorial and advertising. Maybe the empowerment for groups that have lost their voices via elite discussions of power when they are just trying to put bread on the table is something else. Something we have lost sight of.
Maybe Antonie D’Agata’s way is correct, or his assessment.
“Solidarity has to go through the flesh. Words and thoughts are not worth much. They just help to identify the nature of the gap between the other and myself. The common experience of sex and drugs helps me to fill the gap. Prostitutes and drug addicts resist economic oppression and social alienation with their own body and destiny. Violence is part of that process; it’s part of that world. Most people I meet in the margins of the cities had no choice and adapted to the conditions of life imposed upon them.”
With the advent of the new economies of Non-Fungible Token and even to a degree OnlyFans, can be looked at in the same light as a Reddit group saving a dying gaming giant from the past — their past — to control markets, the basis of the other, the elite, their economy. The underrepresented and socio-economic failed are looking for Performance Allyship, meaning they are looking for those that will do something. The power and hard work of making money for other people vs the hard work of making your own individual identity and personal economy that is shared with others that have their own.
In this it will look the same as the past, but it is not at all the same. It will continue to transform until it is completely different than what preceded it. The economies have finally attached themselves to what is happening now, at this moment. It’s like the slow reversal of fossil fuels as the currency and the point that all social networks, and Big Data has shown us: we are our the economy, our lives, our realities.
The pseudo-shishashin (fake diary) of Araki’s machismo (also a pseudo stance IMHO) has been taken over by the models themselves, and instead of waiting for the master photographer to pay them they go direct to fans. This is both aesthetic and economic, like a NFT — in fact I see them in the same light. Their own fake diaries may not have Araki’s unrivaled eye and ability to put together a photo book sequence that can be described as genius. I think it would not be the best idea to cancel “Arākī”, or others, completely. His nudes, classically enacted BDSM, and relationships with sex workers are a large part of his all encompassing body of work, this character known as “Arākī Nobuyoshi”. His work encompasses everything, literally, and I think long after his passing we will see the entirety of this and need to do a deep dive. I think at his best he is the ultimate photographer encompassing all of life, death, sex, ornament, celebrity, his own failing body and his own waning sexuality that in all of its bravado pushed women, and other photographers and creatives, to take it on themselves. Araki, in a way, is responsible for so much of what is transformative in photography today — even in reactive response or disgust of him.
In the same light, I have had to rethink my friend and his anarchistic swallowing of the Red Pill to regurgitate a sort of middle or centrist idea. I personally think centrist is just another word for “alt right”, which is just another word for control mechanisms that don’t actually benefit everyone, but really help keep the control structures in place. Not the control structures of a positive freedom, but of a negative one. A freedom that is afraid of giving up. I will always oppose this, but I can understand it. The fear.
I think there is a place for all of it, and we can learn to help each other, let me explain. It starts and ends with the digital realm, our dreams and nightmares within it becoming real.
We have to address other cultures ideas of power and values to what it is we are doing. I remember when I was in the Czech Republic and trying to have a life, make a living as a largely hidden visitor that never was actually legal the entire six years I lived there, I took a job as a stand-in for a tv series ironically on the life of Joan of Arc. We were shooting outside of Prague in the Czech countryside and unlike the American and Canadian actors, I had to get to the location via bus with the Kompars (the extras). My seat on the bus was next to another ex-pat in Prague from the former Yugoslavia. A haggard, weathered but elegant older woman that was it was obvious to me at one point had taken very good care of herself, possibly even had wealth to do so. She sought me out because most of the extras were cast because well, they looked like they came from the Middle Ages, teeth and all, and I was different. She spoke perfect English and we chatted.
“So you like the Czechs?”
“Yes, I like it here very much.”
“Have you ever been to Croatia?” I hadn’t, so I simply shook my head. “I find it horrible, these Czech girls looking down on me and people from my country. During Communism they would come to our beaches and be whores, now because something changed they decided we are the whores. I’m a doctor a psychologist. Can’t find a job in this shit. I have to do something, but I won’t lower myself to that filthy level.”
As I mentioned in previous Substacks, the first night I decided to interact with Clubhouse I fell into a chat with Elon Musk. Reflecting back on this it seems apt because we were discussion Cancel Culture and its relationship to individual economics, how people’s opinions really had a certain power in this culture at least. However, someone that is canceled in the US may still have a market in Europe or South America or somewhere on this planet that isn’t in the same celebrity perspective. The idea of celebrity is rather new, Elon said, and to a degree that is true. “Global phenomena” and star factors is something really developed by teams of PR to sell an individual as a product, to their befit but also the benefit of the industries that promote them. Other forms of social clout have to do with how you are educated to fit into the culture itself, and getting back a minute to Elon he has an interesting idea of how that education — like the Croatian doctor above mentioned — might work in the future.
Now certainly, no one is educated to take selfies or these fake diaries to sell to people so they can make a living (at least not in any traditional way). The Croatian Psychologist thought that she was somehow more valuable, and why?
The Japanese have this term Ikigai, which means essentially finding your purpose. I think most of us are stuck in the idea of what it is that we want to do, what it is we do well, and what it is we do for a living typically ignoring what it is that is good for the world, who it is we really are and what it is we actually value. Now I’m not saying taking selfies and selling them to a largely cis-male populace is necessarily one’s purpose. In fact as people have reminded me in the past, practicing photography isn’t the same as say open heart surgery and can’t literally save lives, but it can save souls and maybe mental health. Those of us practicing an art certainly believe we have a purpose! It’s maybe getting beyond the personal, the financial and the other mundane ideas of what purpose is and make something I like to talk about a lot:
Legacy, that is, what are you leaving for the generations that will certainly come after you. This takes bold moves, to break through the white noise of billions of photos and visuals being shared daily on the little black screen in your hand, and what is more bold than being absolutely candid about who you are as a person. This authentic self stands out.
This is why I believe the pseudo-shishashin (fake diary) ultimately works. So that people that are stuck in the rat-race of life (career, family, other) but want some freedom to be weird can project onto the person doing something outside of that. It’s a projection autobiography and we all like to see and read what others do. But why?
In the digital space, Tumblr never really went away, even the porn. Sometimes what was abandoned in a chase for social clout is always come back to. What spaces like this which flagrantly share things that have actual authors and owners, and the original cyberpunk push of Bitcoin and Crypto currencies that have now created the gold rush to NFT for artists is really about decentralizing power.
However, the meme, or gaming screenshots and work that potentially is criminalized space (copyright infringement and the whole legality of crypto around the globe is still iffy. So in this, you can see why I relate NFT to the other practices that are questionable, but still done, like sex work. Work that has been known to be done and have questionable legal or ethical boundaries.
Let’s just get down to brass tax here, where is the originality? Not only that, but where is the political art, the performance art, and the art that actually takes on the power structures besides the investments into crypto that maybe illegally fund (in at least 225 countries in the world, its illegal) the NFT marketplace?
But maybe this doesn’t matter. As of this writing we are still in a global pandemic and our big businesses and government aren’t taking care of most people. They are certainly taking care of their own, trying to keep their own power.
To the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, photography itself is just copying. “If you have a camera, you can make a copy. The activity is not monopolised by professionals.” (Daido Moriyama, Near Equal) I feel this to a degree, and I think that without the idea of an aesthetic or thought behind these things we call photos we can, as I have always said, only take photos of those things that are literally right in front of us. Contemporary portraiture tries to hide this fact with digital retouching by third party apps, converting an image taken on a color bayer sensor to monochrome or other filters and really its also about choice here. All of this is literally only a copy of whatever the photographer is seeing. In that, is photography even an art? Daido goes on:
“Realism itself is not exciting, and also conceptual and aesthetic art is not exciting. What I have to do by using photography is to think about the other important image in between, the world of the copy. Photography has no originality.”
To take a photo that is “good” or considered “art” or artistic you have to have a certain literacy, as well the audience has to have a certain literacy. You have to know say the history of what it is you are doing in some way, what you like, you may not have to actually know photographers that have done it before you. The eye gathers a lot of information. You know, they know. We all know a good photo when we see it.
Then there is that old saying attributed to indigenous Americans that say that a photo is, “capturing your soul” or finding out something hidden that the eye doesn’t see. Henri Cartier-Bresson would say that he realized that the photography he took during the war was violent, he didn’t ask to take it, he just took it. In some ways it can be considered theft. Time theft. A moment captured. All of these words inspire photography as an act of seep subterfuge. Maybe an act that is in of itself decentralizing, or can be. It certainly has a power. One that is now in practically everyones’ hands.
One video truth, what could be called “truth at 24 frames per second”, went around the world via social media when George Floyd was murdered at the hands of an agent of those that are said to serve and protect us and it caused a mass insurrection last year. In that it is still, as the second youngest of arts (digital itself being the baby) a transformative power. Maybe even in itself the essence of the attitude object, as it not only points out the target but in cases where it is used to reveal truth it is the artifact of contention itself.
For those of us that photography is our calling (or videography, cinematography, anything that is taken with the sole intention of being shared history on a 2D plane in 3D space) there is a lot of baggage surrounding this obsession to write it out with light. We forget sometimes that the images carry all the cultural baggage we have as well, from our upbringing and our gender, and although there is no formal translation like other languages between cultures there is a visual language that is different between the cultures inspired by Europe, the Americas (North and South) and those inspired by Asia or India and even those from the African mainland. The cameras themselves whether it be an iPhone or a Hasselblad, a Leica or a Sony A7 variant also carry their own cult. The ease of capture on your phone or the complexity of film development is a choice that communicates vast amounts of information about the person taking the photo, how much they care about the process and the subject.
Distribution of these photos has always been between the draconian editors of the illustrative press that expect one type of image or even technical standard and the groups of people that have just pressed the button and let Kodak do the rest. Only in the last 20 years or so have all of those images been able to be shared in real time moments after they were taken and not like dusty girlie prints in a shoebox under grandpa’s bed that he got from Irving Klaw of the infamous Betty Page. In both cases, whether it the Instagram TOS or Community Standards censors or the Senate house, there has always been this idea that certain photos once seen would be more dangerous than others. Typically these are the photos of nude or semi-nude women doing things that are sexually charged, sometimes and during certain politically charged times it has been photos that have shared other information. But let’s be honest, the most danger to the social order is giving people the power to share a virtual copy of their own bodies and feed individual desire. It’s why magazines like Playboy and Hustler were so politically powerful and it’s why we have to control the age of models that submit or in the case of the aforementioned Magnum controversy, the selling of press photos that depict underage prostitution.
To decentralize also means to remove constraint. To allow a new market, like NFT photos, to choose what images are worth may be surprising what comes up. I think you get what I’m saying.
These are times when we may really have to look hard at ourselves as a people. What has value and why? Is our ikigai complete if we don’t wonder what is best for society itself?