Fragments: New Media and Visual Literacy
Part one - Commercial Photography, Models and Fake Diary
So I have spent the last week or so on the new social media app Clubhouse. Now what I think about it, “Oh, another social media app to waste my time… What time? It’s a pandemic, its not like time is relevant anymore. Why not, right.” Well, that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is how this social extension of Podcast culture hits (which I must admit, has never really drawn me in – I would much rather have person-to-person communication, which I suppose Clubhouse DOES fulfill). Particularly in the way, for my purposes here, how it addresses some observations I have for Visual Literacy.
For me to get into this discussion, I have to go WAY back to December 2020. Yes, that seems like a lifetime ago. Well there was a blog (remember those, not a Substack or a Medium post, but a blog) that was admittedly mean-hearted, but most things are nowadays, that went after the venerable photography agency MAGNUM for something that was brought to general knowledge on this photography marketing website that mostly had gear reviews. Following? Well then it goes further, the CEO of MAGNUM — a tech-giant addition to the administrative end of the agency that is owned by its photographers — and the President of the agency (because they have both a CEO and a President, something maybe most countries could follow with in 2021) responded the the allegations the blog put on a single photographer. I don’t want to go deeply into the controversy, because its been covered fully elsewhere in an article. This of course caused what Magnum’s CEO would call under her breath in internal communications “Trial by Twitter”, and to complete the Social-Circle, a member of MAGNUM’s educational wing had to respond on Instagram. Whew!
It’s some things that were stated on the Instagram post that I will focus on here. He said,
“I do believe that the main problem at play here is the lack of visual literacy of a large portion of the photography spectators and photographers inside Magnum Photos and across the photography world. We are offered almost no visual education in school. Due to the preconceived notion that ‘images speak for themselves’, photographers embarking on their on their professional careers do not often consider ways in which they might reinforce biases portrayed in photographs and visual materials through their practice.”
Now, I’m not going to go much into the rest of the post. It was quite erudite and personal and you can find it yourself if you want to go deeper into the references to some flagrant discriminatory histories that are very prevalent in EVERY industry, and need to be quelled. What is important to my discussion here is the reference to Visual Literacy and how to dismantle the inadequacy of photography’s brief but important history (especially for democracy and capitalism’s overreaching, never-ending thirst for images), we have to first understand not only the technical, gear related history of the art, but also why and how the prevalent industries that depend on photography even came to be.
Back to Clubhouse for a second. I of course was drawn to a few of the groups, set up as clubs that had discussion rooms, for photography. One of the largest on the app is one called Behind The Lens. BTL is self-proclaimed as a “safe place” for creatives of all genres — by all genres it means, photographers, make-up artists, models and others in the commercial photography arena. The Club was created by a photographer named Chelsea Lauren, and the group has a Discord page to work out the things like scheduling talks, gathering community and more things that a Discord channel would be better suited for. This is great, seems promising, however back on Clubhouse I found it to be a bit different. But before we get into this, let’s talk about another social site that is basically dead in social media terms, Tumblr.
David Karp and Marco Arment launched Tumblr in 2007. On February 19, 2007, the first version of the Tumblr microblogging service was founded by David Karp and Marco Arment. They launched a more complete version in April 2007. Arment left Tumblr in 2010. A TechCrunch article in 2013 noted that almost one fourth of Tumbr was adult content.
Yahoo bought it, then Verizon, needless to say the platform changed hands many times. When one owner would purge the adult content the micro-bloggers said they would leave, and they did. There were of course originally many photographers and creators there, as well as well, kids. I remember my then 13 year old daughter having a Tumblr, something she may have gotten the idea from in Elementary school. Some photographers I knew made entire careers on the “anarchistic glamour” of the platform, but one thing we don’t talk about is what it also gave was a sort of visual literacy, a history, as well as a way to communicate. The creators and photographers on Tumblr were taking selfies as well as sharing themselves, making visual posts that integrated popular imagery, memes, gifs, films, text, video games and others. This digital community driven deep-dive was likely one of the first places the NFT economy started (besides obviously the video games and other new media that fed its memetic prominence). Now that Christie’s has made the NFT visual economy mainstream, what Tumblr highlighted will likely not go away anytime soon. What does this mean?
To be blunt: Porn and visual noise sells, but what are we buying? Now, it is literally currency.
So my photographer friend and I came to a point of impasse during the pandemic. Granted, we are both strong characters but it came out of the blue for me. Other friends tried to point it out, and even my wife’s friends when looking at his Instagram said, “well, you know what he’s about.”
I didn’t get it.
The Magnum Instagram post I mentioned earlier was a bit more clear, in the same paragraph that it mentioned Visual Literacy the author of the response to a blog said this:
“Though there is no set rules of formalized guidelines which a photographer can adhere to in order to guarantee respectful and transparent conduct in relation to the subject they are photographing, I do believe in the transformative power of a reflexive approach to photographic practice that interrogates the white-supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy.”
At this point I added in my head, “did I stutter…”
When my friend kept sending me articles from questionable sources and telling me to listen to Podcasts and watch YouTube videos that were the “New Media” (a term that has been used since at least the 1990s for anything that was digital based, after 30 years not sure its really that new). When I would question the information given, he would say, “you aren’t using your critical thinking.” or another ad hominem attack. If I went completely against it, he would stop talking to me for awhile, the ‘while’ got longer and longer until he stopped talking to me altogether.
What I found in his barrage of articles, vlogs and the podcasts I could stand was sort of a culture I first really saw in my spare time as a Star Wars fan a few years back when a bunch YouTubers and Reddit users decided to take down Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. The term SJW, meaning Social Justice Warrior, was used as a pejorative by these New Information accounts. The channels started with the plot holes any film could have, and then started to call the new Jedi-in-training Rey a “Mary Sue”, meaning she was too powerful “all of a sudden for no real reason” other than she was a female character. They blamed show runner and Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy, and more. Written out here I think anyone can see that negatively calling something that deals with social injustice by a woman is sexist minimally, but even more, its the very definition of toxic. I immediately started to be on garde for these types of discussions. Fast forward to mid-pandemic and I was hearing the same speech from a very good friend.
The switch of SJW from a positive activist term to a negative term happened around 2006, with a game. The game depicted SJW women and LGBTQ activists fighting police and militias in the streets. It was bloody, sexist, racist, disgusting and shared widely on sites like 4Chan or Reddit. Recently an update to the concept was released on the popular Steam platform that says that calling each other names like SJW or trolls to shut each other up is kind of pointless. The description of the new game quite aptly points out, “Social Justice Rogues fight fire with fire. Throw flurries of vitriolic character attacks, confuse enemies with smokescreens of alternate accounts, then delete your accounts and withdraw into the shadows of the net.”
Or maybe just stop texting your friends.
I remember one argument went from the importance of the Joe Rogen to how I didn’t understand Bitcoin and Crypto. He was right. I didn’t. Now that I am starting to realize what the shift is… these are minimally interesting times, and more likely something that may define the next part of the 21st century.
My first Clubhouse chat was in a room with Elon Elon, it was on Cancel Culture. I think Elon Elon was actually Elon Musk at 3AM PST here in LA it wasn't his main CH account, but it was his voice. We threw some ideas around about how I thought CC was quite possibly real democracy at work and how taking down the biggest offenders was also just par for the course. The speaker, Elon Elon, mentioned how celebrity was a very new concept and mostly in history it was localized. Power was localized. That just maybe no one should be that powerful. Since CC was mostly a US based movement (although I have seen it happen to international figures as well in fashion and even photography when Nobiyoshi Araki was called out by an ex muse) all the people would have to do is take their market to another region. Maybe it would follow them, maybe it wouldn't.
In exploring the app further, this is when I ended up in the Behind the Lens chats. I eventually got bold enough to talk. One instance that happened last Monday I can say is of note.
After listening to a few rooms that discussed the importance of heterodox voices, or dissent, and their importance (one by Eric Weinstein the person that coined the phrase Intellectual Dark Web). I decided to comment in a way I thought was opening the discussion in a chat hosted by Behind The Lens on “Controversial Creative Statements.” A model was speaking on allyship and sexual harassment of models by photographers. I had a point to be made so I pressed the “raise my hand” button and was let into the cue to speak.
Now I may need to note here, evidently ALL of the chats on CH are recorded. All of them. If you yourself go to record a chat you a message pops down that says, “Heads up, sharing a recording without a speakers’ permission violates the Community Guidelines and will result in suspension. Thx!” However, I saw no where prominent that said the app itself records EVERYTHING, I had to hear it from a moderator in a room. Needless the say, if I do not remember exactly what I said in the chat I am about to describe, contact Clubhouse, they have my permission to transmit it. THEY RECORDED ME.
When I was cued in, I spoke about a few things. I talked about what Derrida calls "the law of genre", and how the fashion commercial world was confused from my perspective from a few different points of view. First and foremost, their use of what in Japanese is called pseudo-shishashin or “fake diary”, made famous by Nobiyoshi Araki.
Back in the 1990s when Araki started to become relatively famous because his book Sentimental Journey entered him prominently into the art world in the West some young photographers picked up on his frank sexuality and candid style in a few places. Photographers like Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, Mario Sorrenti and others who were working in high fashion as well as some of the editors of the illustrative fashion press started to accept and promote sexually charged imagery.
Araki himself in interviews often brags, in the way that is culturally accepted in the machismo camera culture that brought him to prominence in the late 1970s and 80s, that he “fucks his models” implying ALL of them. As an article from a long time critic of Araki in Japan points out, this is much more lounge in cheek, because most of his most famous models up until 2000 were actually girlfriends of his. But books like his Taschen released Tokyo Lucky Hole show a deep dive into the sexual underground of a long gone Red Light district of Shinjuku, Tokyo. To look at his history, and output, you have to understand the context. Araki was also famously quoted to say, “I wondered what would happen if I photographed every moment of my life.” 400 books later, it’s hard to say he didn’t do just that.
In 2019, Araki was accused of by one of his long time models of bad business practices, how he would often put her in compromising positions and photograph her when she wasn’t prepared and then sell the prints for a lot of money when he would only pay her sometimes. One thing of note is, the long time muse KaoRi didn’t actually accuse Araki of any sexual assault, and there was no suggestion of direct sexual contact between Araki and KaoRi. This however didn’t deter some of his detractors for making it a #metoo moment.
It may be of note here that Araki’s fame was created by the camera culture of Japan, trying to sell as many cameras as humanly possible it used his sort of crazy demeanor to make generations of young male photographers love him. One writer Morimura Yasumasa even suggested after the 1991 publication of “Sentimental Journey - Winter” which solidified his fame as a photographer, Araki was sought out by women trying to empower themselves through nude imagery.
“To my mind, to the women, quite simply, Arākī is no more than a tool of sorts, a tool for self-portraiture. Really they should take their own portraits, but in the absence of a camera, or the requisite photography skills, who wanting a handy way to take a self-portrait is not going to make use of an old guy in possession of a camera, who takes good photos, and moreover is a bit of a ladies’ man? Arākī is this convenient tool”
To Araki, the models were simply characters in his pseudo-shishashin. He was creating a body of work that depicted him not like his now infamous book about his relationship with his wife up until her death from cancer, but like the camera magazines and the Japanese machismo would carry him forward. And for those in the West, this was exactly what would sell the waning illustrative fashion press and even the designer clothes who’s sales were also plummeting. This is exactly what Derrida warned in his Law of Genres, which first lines were, “genres are not to be mixed, I will not mix genres, I repeat; Genres are NOT to be mixed, I will not mix them.” The commercial fashion world was using blatant Porno Chic to sell, again. Yes, again. Because it had tried this in the 70s as will with Helmut Newton and Chris Van Wangerheim, and previously in the 60s with the British bad boys of Duffy and David Bailey, who incidentally was the inspiration for Antonioni’s film of a fashion photographer, Blow Up.
So why is sex such a selling point? Who came up with this idea? Interestingly enough, it was Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the founder of both modern PR and Propaganda that was used by the Nazi’s, all the way back in the 1920s. In fact, Bernays was also equally responsible for the original SJW movement being used as a sales tool for cigarette companies, when he gave Lucky Strikes to Sufferage movement women and sent a photographer to photograph it in 1929.
Bernays also quite literally wrote the book on Propaganda. Which I suggest everyone read when talking about visual culture. I might also mention that Hitler’s Nazi party used Bernays to define their propaganda strategy. Talk about toxic…
On Clubhouse in the Behind the Lens chat, I started to go over some of this as quickly as I could — as with large rooms with many people time is limited. I also mentioned my own brief but shocking stint with online cancel culture. Back in 2018, I was put on a list of photographers by an anonymous Instagram meme account Shitmodelmanagement. The list was extensive, and included many photographers still working today. Photographers that had multiple reports were defined by an asterix next to their name. The list was taken down from the main account, as it was a link to a Google doc, but it still exists on of all places a Tumblr. I think it is an important list, not only because it makes young models aware of potential issues, but also because it shows the extent of pseudo-shishashin and its other variants in the commercial modeling world.
Unfortunately, the list was rather inaccurate.
My photographer friend from earlier in this article was visiting from New York, he later moved here to LA, when the Shitmodelmanagement list hit and I found out I was on it. I racked my brain on any interactions that were questionable or even slightly off. I am a weird guy, I will admit, so it could have been me chatting about something I thought was of mutual interest or anything. My wife, a model, contacted the account to find out what the issue was. Nothing. Her friends, models, I believe four of them, also contacted the account. Nothing. It wasn’t until the social currency of my friend with a brand and over 100k Instagram followers contacted the Shitmodelmanagement account that the person running it responded. They wrote I had opened a book that was unwanted, said unwanted things, and that was it. That was enough to be “canceled”.
After the initial shock, I contacted a prominent photographer and model activist that we knew of and asked her what I should do. She said, “don’t make it about you, let these voices be heard.” I had a friend, and indie model that lived in my building someone who had watched my young daughter with her boyfriend say she couldn’t support me in a closed Facebook Group she didn’t realize I had already been let into. The model activist I had contacted, who evidently also didn’t know I was in the group, started ragging on my sincere questions to her — saying I had “blown off her social media presence” in the past and now I was looking to her for some validation? What? The friend with a large Instagram following who went to bat for me and found out the issue from the Shitmodelmanagement account was attacked for not being an “ally”.
This was getting really bad. So I ended it.
I went onto my own social media platforms and recorded a video statement. I would not be working with commercial or fashion models again until the industry itself worked itself out. I was done.
After I finished my story to the Clubhouse chat, I realized that one of the moderators had kicked me out of the room. I knew two models that I had worked with multiple times in the room, and contacted them on Instagram. One said, in real time, what was being said about me:
“First of all thank you for kicking him out, he was very toxic.”
and
“I’m not saying Bil was not inappropriate and I’m not saying he was. But to be on the list you don’t have to touch someone or be physical to someone to be traumatiser that is an important lesson.”
The model in question that told me has a Lolitaism fetish, she says it is the “ultimate self love” and she feeds off the attention. She said she was afraid, “they would come after me” if she said anything.
Behind the Lens is a “Safe Place” though.
The other model I knew in the chat was more generous.
“i think the creative industry has so many shitty loop holes and they are becoming very obvious now. but we all don’t know how to actually navigate it and there are no concrete solutions for many issues yet either. But a lot of people with fear and trauma that shut down. as soon as any topic that they are uncomfortable with comes up. Then there’s the dedication to ‚being right‘ that can also be unproductive. which i witness a lotttt on clubhouse. the ‚my way or the highway attitude‘. especially with people who are not generally used to having a ‚stage‘“
And this I agree with. In retrospect maybe I was too nuanced for a public forum, my voice too commanding as I am quick to speak and express my ideas. The room was set for “Controversial Creative Statements” but in retrospect, was my statement controversial? Or just combative? Is this writing controversial or simply defending a culture that needs to go away?
To be continued… next up The Archive Question. Can we understand our history and keep it, or should it be repealed and locked away?
Fragments: New Media and Visual Literacy
Maybe we're fully dystopian enough now to imagine another kind of NFT marketplace, where the items being collected are a statements of abuse. I.e., an unprivileged person lodges a (possibly anonymous) complaint about another (possibly anonymous) person. That complaint becomes a digital "fact" and is recorded on a blockchain. At some future time when one of the parties in the complaint becomes famous, rich, successful, or interesting in some kind of social network way, the complaint could be de-anonymized in exchange for digital currency.
How much would the market pay for historical evidence against famous abusers?