I Wish I Could Just Worry About Influence, But Right Now It's More Dire Than That
How a social media junkie decided it wasn't worth it
I’ve been slacking on this Substack. I apologize, but not really. It’s not like I have many readers. In fact the reality is my various social channels have grown to 20,000+ over the years I have been on the platforms like Twitter or Instagram and in the early days it did some good. Now a days it’s not such a certain thing. With the algorithm feeding only 3% of my followers or less (I’ve been told there is no such thing as a shadowbox, but even my wife can’t find my profile when she looks me up). I think my ideas are just not commercial enough. Maybe even dangerous, in the way that the person in the room that says what’s on her mind is dangerous. As the 1970s ad said, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
I haven’t moved on. I’m still posting to the 100 or so people that consistently get my feeds (on Twitter, its exceedingly less – granted I stopped using it 5 of so years ago and only started using it again recently during the NFT debacle). I think now I am posting because I am simply, a junkie now. I want to reach out. I want to be heard. It’s now endemic, if not chronic. I want you all to know me. But not really know me, just know of me. Isn’t that strange?
There was a time when your body of work would be the thing you were pushing and pitching. There was a time when there would be people that would publish you, instead of publishing yourself. There was a time when if you wanted a group of people to come together, like in a gallery or a show for your art or music or even spoken word, 100 people would be a lot. Now we scoff at 1,000 followers as too little – even 20,000 seems minuscule when you have influencers with 500,000 or 1.4 million. Such a strange time.
It’s really monoculture, the algorithm. There is no tension to the interactions. We are fed what we believe or want to see, or worse… we are shown what the companies that feed us the feeds have decided is safe. When has art ever been safe? Art that was worth a damn anyway. It’s not like machine learning can understand nuance or humor. Its not like the people who get offended can understand the differences of cultural norms or more.
When did we stop being critical? Has the discussion turned because of the so-called gatekeepers? An entire generation that never had to deal with being called a loser, or even losing. Criticism is important in Democracy. In fact I think its a vital part of freedom of speech. If we don’t learn how to take criticism and learn from it (even the kind that seems like an attack) then what are we? It can’t all be toxic, can it? If we have lost our ability to listen to criticism we have also lost our ability to be critical. This means the work we do as artists will stagnate. This means that anything goes. If something is good art, then that means there has to be bad art. The art festivals and auction houses certainly think so. They have had to go back and rinse and repeat generations of art before us. Maybe there is a good reason: we are too concerned with our PR, our pocketbooks, our digital wallets to actually work on a critically solid body of work.
In my own practice, teaching is part of this stage of my career, although very little – I am no marketer, I am a doer. I make art. I am supposedly in mid-career, how long will that last? Until I’m 60? I have undeniably created a body of work. Multiple. I’ve went through the motion of publishing it, putting it on walls and certainly on social media. I have a professional website. You can even buy things on this website. Some have.
I’m told that you don’t want to go too low with your work. That you don’t want to make it exceedingly accessible. That you want to make it scarce to make it valuable. I’m a photographer. There is no medium in existence that could push a series as large as the number of photos I have. What would a 10,000 page photobook even look like? How expensive would it be? Who would buy it? Are individual photos really worth anything? Is this why the art market has to this day marginalized photography. Have we even once addressed the fact that a digital image is entirely different than a photo on film? To date, they seem to be treated the same way. But then, a digital photo isn’t digital art in the same way is it. A photo is a memory, the art is in who took it and HOW it was taken. The HOW is becoming the problem, the WHO is now all we think about.
I feel like I just want to make a vlog on YouTube and talk about my camera collection. Many do it. They get a lot of views. They get people paying them to push more gear. They get the Squarespace sponsorship on every video. They have thousands if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of views. I feel like I just want to talk about my Leica SL2, or my Mamiya 7II and get someone to say how cool it is. Maybe talk about the latest price hike of film and how it makes me sad. Maybe give a little history of flash photography or the cis-woman who used her Leica to be one half of Robert Capa. All this is interesting, not gonna lie. I get obsessed about it too. When I sit down to do a vlog, all I can talk about is basically the same thing I talk about here. Is it even photography? I think it is, but then maybe I expect people to come to me with less of a question about how to zone focus and more about WHY even shoot that photo at all. But maybe that’s not how the algorithm works. Maybe it doesn’t want something more abstract like a talk about the freedom we have to photograph whatever we want. Whatever.
You see, the idea of freedom of speech is essential, freedom of expression. The Greeks called it parrhesia, the boldness and freedom of expression. The Greeks based their entire politics on it, their culture of art – I did a YoTube on it. I related it to photography. I implied that other YouTubers (not that I am really in that club) should shoot less the empty parking lots and gas stations at night, or even walls, and start being a bit more BOLD in their imagery. Of course, because of the frequency or whatever of my posts and channels hardly anyone saw it. I didn’t really expect them to. I couldn’t really do anything else. This is what I felt I needed to express.
Like this Substack. Sometimes I think you think I don’t know that the subjects I cover aren’t photo related. You want to know a secret, my photos aren’t either. I don’t shoot to show you what a photograph is, I think in this day and age we can take that for granted – anyone can do it, in enough resolution to print it on a billboard. If you want to know how to do it, do what my daughter’s expensive college art professor told her to do: YouTube it. You may not even have to spend $30,000 a semester to get that answer.
So, I am going to teach portraiture. On Halloween. If you think I have something to teach you in person, come.
I also have some prints, some affordable some collectable. You can find them available on my website.
See, there. I did my self-promotion pimping of my work for the day. Have at it if you think it suits you. I will write here again when I have something substantial to say.
BB