Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/04/09
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 11:06 PM 4/9/2008, Alastair Firkin wrote: >This is a great and very thought provoking post. Technology is >threatening many occupations. Artists have always had to struggle in >becoming recognized, and this is another issue, but the working >photographer is "suffering" what skilled medical typists and those in >the recording industry are suffering. Medicine is no different. Newer >techniques threaten the viability of practitioners whose skills become >obsolete. Once, university training would set you up for life, but the >rate of change is the issue. Alastair You raise many fine and worthy points, but bear in mind that the pace of technological change has been exceedingly rapid for centuries, and the plaints of those displaced by new methods and means go back at least since the time of the Luddites close to 200 years back. The telephone was invented in 1876. In 1880, the Republican Party in the US nominated James Garfield for President, and he was the first nominee to be advised by telephone of his selection to be the Party's standard-bearer. My grandfather was born a week after the Convention and was named for Garfield (yes, yes, my grandfather was born in 1880 and was named Garfield Small, and my father, born in 1916, was James Garfield Small). My point in this genealogical exercise is to point out that my grandfather was born when the telephone and typewriter and Linotype and elevator were brand new to the world, yet he lived to see man walk on the Moon. When he died in 1976, aetate 95, I was serving in the Army: at that time, we were phasing out typewriters for word processors and typewriters would be out of the Army's Orderly Rooms in another decade. Think of the technological change between 1880 and 1976. Certainly, the pace of change over the past 95 years has been no greater. This conversation is really a muddle of conflicting threads: -- where are the snows of yesteryear, and didn't we do things better back in the Longago? -- technical expertise versus technical change -- economics in the dying world of journalism -- the role of the dedicated photographer-as-artist -- career paths for aspiring commercial photographers On the first point, I have little to say. I have not successfully made the jump to digital but, then, I am retired and, for that matter, do not take many pictures these days as I am still to build a new dark room. Up to the first years of the last century, there were a lot of manufacturers producing horse-drawn wagons in quantity. Only ONE of these concerns, Studebaker, made the jump to automobiles, and Studebaker has been gone these 45 years or so. Some things were done better in the old days, certainly, but other things were not. Most things are done a lot better today: in general terms, most of us live lives substantially better and at substantially less cost than did our parents. In 1880, agriculture was the most labor-intensive industry in the US and, by 1970, it had become one of the most efficient, and the laboring sector had fallen from something on the order of 30% of the population to less than 5%. On the second point, those who stay on top of the technical heap remain competitive, and those who fail to do so drop by the wayside, and that is just the way of things. In the 1930's, photo editors were distressed when their folks insisted on using Rolleiflex TLR's and the next generation were horrified by the spreading use of Leicas and Contaces and then Nikons. On the Questar List, we recently had a discussion on the spreading influence of computers, and it was interesting to note the number of folks who first came into contact with computers in the 1960's and continue to use modern computers today. Those guys have kept their technical skills honed. My late ex-wife first went to work in 1963 as a typist in a steno pool at an insurance agency in Cleveland, Ohio. She knew shorthand. She knew how to type. She was a bit intimidated by the IBM electrics of the era but, shucks, I've used these myself and they clack and wang and bang and take half an hour to warm up and, even then, can kick back most meanly. (The Selectric, that last of analog typewriters, was a God-send for its simplicity when it appeared in 1965 or so, and the Wheelwriter an entirely new universe but, as is the case with my K&E Log-Log Duplex Decitrig, where the hell HAVE the snows of yessteryear gone?) Of course, she had to wear elbow-length white gloves, below-the-knee skirts, and high heels every day. And where are steno pools today? My mother was a G-Girl, a term she hated, during the Second War: at that time, the US government employed a cowflop-load of typists, and the US Army Clerk-Typist position used to be common. I doubt that the US Army even has any 71B's left on the rolls anymore. Who needed stenographers once dictation gear came out (though a good steno could whump the hell out of a typist using dictation recording gear every time, and more accurately)? And who needed clerk-typists once the Army did away with typewriters for most purposes? On the third point, print journalism is effectively dead, though it hasn't learned of its own death yet and the funeral is not yet scheduled. How many of you read a daily paper -- I do, but I am very much in a minority even here, I suspect. Slashes are being made everywhere to preserve some remaining last gasps so long as the corpse can continue to made to look alive, but it is dead. (In a similar vein, Fletcher Pratt began his history of the first years of the 19th century in the US, THE HEROIC YEARS, with a comment on the results of the elections for President of 1800: "John Adams was dead. Through a foregiveable oversight, they neglected to bury him for another quarter of a century, but John Adams was dead." The same certainly applies to print journalism today. This has had huge impact over the entire industry. The head of the Tribune Group (Chicago Trib, LA Times, &c) recently challenged his staff to tell him why their Washington Bureau needed 67 folks. Instead of dealing honestly with the reality that the Tribune Group is leaking money at a rate which would have led to admiration by Zeiss Ikon in the 1960's and that SOMETHING has to be done to plug the leaky life-boat before it founders, journalists nationwide are jumping up in horror and protest to speak of this "attack on journalistic ethics" and "the bean-counters' assault on professional excellence" and the like. As we used to say back in the day, "if you aren't part of the solution, then you are part of the problem", and such is the case here. In the end, either the Tribune Group will axe most of its DC Bureau and tell the others to get about their jobs, or it will founder and America will lose great newspapers will all 67 of these guys will be out of a job. Tough times call for tough solutions. Note the failure of most newspapers and many magazines to fail to update their plants. Compare, say, the Roanoke (Virginai) Times with the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch. The Roanoke Times recently invested a gazillion dollars, and six-pence (for those of you who know your Cecil B DeMille movies!), in Heidelberg presses. It took them almost two years to get them to run properly but, by God, this is a newspaper with a crisp, clear look, with almost all of its pictures in color, vibrant, real, attractive, albeit with an editorial policy which would have embarrassed N. Lenin, while the Times-Dispatch recently built a state-of-the-art press building but held onto its old presses, so I now enjoy a daily paper which is dirty, muddy,, has very little color, and where I occasionally have to use a magnifying glass (I am well-equipped there, as the son of a gemologist and as a photographer), albeit their editorial policy is only mildly Bolshevik. The fourth point is the toughest. Photograph IS art and quite a few really talented photographers have gotten to make solid livings from their skill. But, in the end, if the market isn't there, that's the way of the world and so be it. To draw a minor parallel: in the early 1700's, the British polity was split by scandals involving the number of skilled woodcarvers creating elaborate figure-heads and stern frames and the like. They were almost all canned when George I came to the throne, that German usurper. And these wood-carvers, having lost their fat and well-paid government sinecures, had to go out in the REAL world and meat facts-as-they-are. Most of them ended up carving reredoses and the like for Anglican churches around the world: I believe that St John's Parish here in Richmond, Virginia, has some such carvings in its structure. I do acknowledge that a lot of newspapers are now swapping credits for amateur shots but understand the flip-flop on this: That fan cannot get a press pass to attend a press conference by the Governor or get inside the police lines when they snip the ribbon on the new Mayor's Office. So, yes, there is still a need for photographers capable of getting the shot who have the connections necessary to get such credentials and that is true in Nashville, Tennessee, and Dodge City, Kansas, and Lexington, Virginia. No newspaper can survive without at least a couple of regular photographers, whether they be staffers or hired guns. I don't care HOW good your Photoshop sills may be -- and mine are non-existent -- but you just cannot take a cell-phone shot of Hillary Clinton giving a campaign speech from the back third of the crowd and make it a front-page illustration. You need a shot taken by someone -- professional or amateur -- who has the gear and knows the gear and who can get inside the police lines. Most artists starve in garrets for a reason: after all, a prophet is without honor in his own land. Most photographers, even back in the Day, never went commercial. In today's world, yes, it can be tough, but think of all of those Skilled Buggy-Whip craftsmen whose jobs evaporated in the US between 1900 and 1920. Tough toenails, kid. Live with it. On the last point, niche photographic career fields survive and will survive. I do not see a day when Hermes will want its advertising pictures e-mailed to them by some kid with a P&S digital camera. And most technical work -- scientific, military, medical, industrial -- is wide open. What has been severely challenged is photo-journalism, and that has never employed, I would guess, an educated guess, mind you, more than 20% of those who call themselves professional photographers. (SHUDDERBUG ran an interesting and very minor article around 1993 or 1994 pointing out that about half of the professional photographers in the US were employed in producing company, school, and baby shots, and, pray, hold your artistic snobberies: some of the better-able of these folks made six-figure salaries as they had it all down to a matter of time and process, and they held their artistic thoughts to themselves while shooting the GUL Corporation Drunken Softball Game at the Company Picnic in 1994 or cranking out 12,000 prints in December, 1997, of Mom and Dad, Big Brother, New Baby, and Family Dog. I've known some of these guys -- one told me once that he HATED photography-as-art and only had original oils on the walls of his house, though I never saw this in person. If a 17-year-old High School senior came up to me today and asked about the possibilities of a career in photography, I would advise him to take a lot of classes on digital photography and computers -- PHOTOSHOP and the like and WHICH computer gear you need and WHICH digital cameras are proper for a given job. And then I would suggest that he angle in on just what he wanted to do, and concentrate on that. Portrait work? Lab photography? Processing and interpreting KEYHOLE shots for the US military? Go for the gold. But, yes, there will always be openings for capable photo-journalists:. Folks today make buggy-whips and make a living at it. And there will always be openings for photo-journalists. A couple of final notes: -- H Beam Piper noted the possibility of these changes in journalism in his 1963 FOUR-DAY PLANET, while Phil Dick spoke for years about the replacement of the daily newspaper with the "homeopap", which you would get out of your computer terminal every morning. Other Science Fiction authors suggested the same (SF does not "predict": authors simply develop a cohesive set of background conditions. And, after all, these are just bloody stories!) -- I have shot pictures since 1961. I have most if not all of my archive and, unlike Weston, I will not burn them though I suspect my son will have a week-long orgy doing so once I shuffle off this mortal coil. Every so often I get a shot published. Some I have done on commercial contract, including a couple of CD covers and publicity shots and the like, and some I have sold as I was at the right place at the right time. And sometimes I have had the right picture someone needed, and I have let them run the shot with a by-line, which has, with one lone mistake, been given -- the lone mistake being a credit to "Mary Small" back in 1997. My sister would have appreciated the credit but she had left our environs twenty years earlier and was, at that point, busy arguing in the Hereafter with my Grandmother. I normally carry a camera with me. And it is usually loaded -- meaning "it has film in it" and bear in mind that I am digitally challenged. If I happen upon a scene of interest, I will shoot some shots. If I feel that it is newsworthy, I will contact the local papers and offer it to them for a credit and their paying for the processing of the film and, every eight or nine months, I get a hit. Wow, as another noted. -- I live in the Richmond, Virginia - Petersburg, Virginia corridor, actually a tad closer to Petersburg (which a bunch of my folks spent a lot of years back in the US Civil War trying to return to the Stars and Stripes). We have a bunch of neighborhood rip-'n'-read local publications, put out weekly, None have a staff photographer but all will pay (price unknown) for shots of events such as Board of Supervisor meetings and the like. The bigger events they hive out to contract photographers, and I am too lazy to jump through the hoops necessary to do this. I am retired, and the thought of getting out of bed at 6 in the AM to cover some ribbon-cutting offends my proprieties. I will get up that early one Saturday a month for the Virginia Defense Force, but that is the limit of my interest. -- Those interested in the topic of economic shifts might consider public libraries. Circulation figures have plummeted dramatically for decades, and so local-government politicos are hard-pressed to explain new libraries as more than prestige items. The libraries which have done well have aggressively worked out a web interface. I miss the days when I went to the library to browse but, then, I can now find a book mentioned on the 'Net which I wish to read, and can then reserve it on-line so that I can drive by my local branch once its in to pick it up. Cool stuff. They also do great with DVD's and Books-on-Disk. My local library flubbed getting the latest release of MIDSOMMER MURDERS early but damned if they didn't get the entire new release for the next season of FOYLE'S WAR two months before its official release; of course, I am 28 out of 30 or the like on all four right now, meaning I will not be boring my wife by forcing her to watch the experiences of the Hastings CID in 1944 for quite a few weeks. -- Every so often, I get fired up to do such a long and undoubtedly turgid statement. I probably should BLOG but I have no idea how to BLOG: I am challenged by a lot of modern technology. The horrifying part of that is that I am only 58 and that my people live well into their 80's or 90's before croaking from terminal nastiness -- we usually sit up in our chairs while reading the Sunday paper and exclaim, "I TOLD that So-and-So" ... and then we roll over dead. (Actually, humor aside, almost all of my folks die peacefully in bed at a VERY advanced age: my mother, who did so, reminded me a week or so before her own death that, "only the good die young". We ARE a nasty lot!) Sorry to have rambled on so long. Marc msmall@aya.yale.edu Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!