It is Saturday the 31st of August 2024 and this is the future of photography. The future of photography. Everybody, this is Adrian and with me is Jeremiah. How you doing, buddy? Hello, hello, hello, hello, greetings. So, no Chris with us today, unfortunately. He is busy as a, you know, summer is a tricky time for the three of us. I often, actually, I feel like I haven't spoken to you for weeks until we just logged on. Oh, you haven't. No, because I haven't. Yeah, exactly that. So, but, you know, normal service, I suppose, will be resumed as we head into September. Or maybe you should treat that as a probability rather than a guarantee. Well, yeah, looks good so far. It looks good so far. Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, one of the reasons we're not about, sorry, on the on the podcast all the time, is because we're out doing fun things because it's summertime, be it, you know, vacations, holidays, whatever. And that, for me, is what was inspired today's conversation. So, I was out yesterday. I had a day out with my kids. We went to London and we went to the Science Museum for those who know it. Well, even if you don't, it is an amazing place. But the other thing we did was we went to a place called the Paradox Museum. And that got me thinking because the Paradox Museum is, well, I'll leave a link in the show notes. It's not really a museum. It's more of a sort of experience you can go to. And the idea of it is that it's a fun place to experience first-hand things like optical illusions and the power of perspective and things like, you know, what happens when you have, you have what looks like drips of water suspended in the air. But that's because it's a strobe light and the frequency of the strobe is set to match the frequency of the, of the all sorts of stuff like that, you know, and think, and yeah, we had a great time. And everywhere we went on the floor, there was a stickers that said, you know, take your photo, stand here to take your photo. Because of course, when you have these optical illusions, yeah, the right point, you know, to get the right perspective for the illusion is a thing. And I thought, well, these are the new, are these the new Kodak moments, right? You know, I usually stand here, take a photograph. And then I thought, well, do you know what? The photography is completely integrated into this experience. Of course, you can enjoy it without, you know, without taking photos of everything. And, and there was at least one parent who was there with their children, who was really fussing about getting precisely their, and they were slowing everybody down as we tried to go through these, through these little vignettes that were all all around this place. Well, yeah. Hey, so that got me thinking, right, have we, we've now reached a point of, I don't know whether the saturation is there, or, or integration, or democratization, or all the above, right? Where photography for everybody is part of mainstream daily lives, which is quite cool, I think. And, and that is, I don't know, there's got to be some threads to put on in that, Jeremiah, you know, we haven't got much of a plan today, but there's got to be some friends to put on. Allow me to pull on a thread here. This is this, an indication that memory, collective or individual, is basically going away. The preciousness of a memory has been replaced by capture, because, you know, the Kodak moment was something very special. You went to the Grand Canyon, you gathered everybody overlooking it, they all stood together, you held up your camera, and you said, "Smile." There was not an upset, and that was your picture, and maybe you did that over the course of your road trip, and that would rekindle, recapture, or motivate your memory in discussing and talking about the experience. Now, if, if you know, if you've been to any collective event, whether it's a sporting event with, you know, 90,000 people around you observing the same thing, all capturing it, you know, on their phones, a political convention, a concert, whatever it is, even an individual museum experience, I noticed. People are obsessed more with capturing the image, or an image, i.e., Kilroy was here, for those who remember that. Just a little scribe to say, "I existed at this point in time in history, and, you know, for me." But the overwhelming sameness of the thousands of recorded videos, of the very same thing, which we know will be available on TikTok YouTube, you know, meta, whatever it is, within a few hours of the experience anyway, in an experience that maybe you didn't push the button, but it was effectively the same capture. And so I bring this up in the thread to pull about how the presence of the photographic moment, like if you're on a, you know, cliffside landscape, and there's those put a quarter in or put a shilling in, and you get these little telescopes. And it's like, this is your viewpoint, you know, this is the optimum, right? Basically the aesthetic choices, the narrative of what you're seeing, and even to a certain extent, the composition based on the eyeballing of these lenses has effectively been replaced by the camera. And so I do notice that people are moving into capture, whether it's selfies or the situation, and not, I want, this is going to sound really weird for someone who was obsessed with photography, as well, but that moves you away from the real subjective memory of the moment. I, this is going to be a short conversation, because I completely agree with everything you just said. But yeah, and the ultimate example for me, or what one of the, certainly a very, a very good example for me is blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. And you've heard me mention this probably twice a year for the last three or four years, because yeah, every time one of my kids' birthdays comes around, right? You can experience the moment, or you can film the moment. And having done both, I very much these days prefer to experience the moment. And so, but there's a lot of stuff in what you just said there. So, and that was one of the later things. You also talked about everybody being in capture mode. And, and yeah, there is, there is that, and, or is it that the, is it that the, the half life of a photograph is, is so much shorter, because, yeah, you, you capture it and you post it and people in your family group on WhatsApp or your people and following you on Facebook or whatever, will go, yeah, I'll click the like button or thumbs up or whatever the equivalent is, right? Whatever system you're using. And then it's gone. And very rarely, because there's so much, and it's so disorganized, you know, these archives we make, right? They're not really archives at all at that point, either. They're more like buckets. Yeah. There are storage bins in storage bins. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's like, it reminds me sometimes of the, the, the words that like the hyperscale, the hyperscale cloud companies use AWS, Amazon web services, they're, you know, their storage thing is literally called a bucket, right? Yeah. They, they call it an Amazon S3 bucket and you drop your data into the bucket. And Microsoft on their cloud, as your even worse, they call it a blob. Don't even have a bucket. They just have a blob, right? So it's, and, you know, by the way, just, you just kind of triggered something with me is, is the, do we collectively, especially generationally, which, which, you know, the awareness of the fragility of the planet and the water uses, the electricity and energy uses, et cetera, are significant in terms of a, you know, a poll on the planet in a very, very dangerous way. And while the, you know, those of us who will very carefully, you know, recycle our bottles and bags and cardboard and all the rest of it and convert our kind of plant waste into, you know, food for other plants, et cetera. We'll think nothing of sitting in a concert with, you know, 40,000 people taking the same video and posting that video, which in turn is stored on a cloud uses energy to what end I say. And I'm not trying to disparage people from recording memories of their family and all of that's very precious. But doing so with a consciousness of knowing that there is a real difference between capturing a person who is, you know, giving a concert and you're sitting back in the balcony and they are basically one pixel or two pixels high. And then just because you were there, it's important for you to capture that in a minute or 10 minute video, even compressed, put it in your phone, upload it to the cloud, have it disseminate. How much energy does that use? And are you aware of your responsibility, both in terms of usage? And the reasons you use, I understand the emotional uses of capturing your family, or, you know, your children in that very special moment, your dog, take thousands of pictures, maybe dog pictures are responsible for global warming. I don't know. I think it's cat videos on Facebook, is it mostly? It could be and, you know, the entertainment business certainly has equal kinds of responsibilities to it. But I always wonder in, you know, in a crowd of footballers, you know, taking a video of something which, you know, is up there on YouTube and captured much better for purposes of research and entertainment as well, are going to be there. And so is it not a waste of resources? I think it possibly is taking images that everyone else takes. It's the old adage of like the pool cameraman in, you know, reporting where they'll allow, you know, one or two reporters chosen by the group and one or two cameramen, they will record and share their images with everyone around. Well, that makes sense. Creating the conditions where, in a way, to experience something you must photograph it is something worth discussing. That's an interesting, yeah, that's a really interesting thought to end that with you. So just on the electricity thing, before I try to respond to that last question, I'm my best understanding, which is limited, but my understanding is that in order to improve the quality of life of everybody in a planet to the level that you and I enjoy today requires that we use far more electricity than is globally consumed today. So I think for me, the issue is less of consumption is more of generation. So how do we, and I say this, actually here in the UK made the news this week, the Shetland Islands, a small group of islands off the coast of Scotland, are now net exporters of electricity to the mainland because they've just opened a new wind turbine farm. The Shetland Islands are officially the windyest place in the UK. The windyest place in the UK, and they've now opened a new onshore wind turbine farm, 100 plus wind turbines, which may not sound like too many if you're from a big country like, I know, Canada or somewhere, but in a little island in the sea, that's quite a lot of turbines. So there are steps moving forward, and many UK government included have set target dates for 100% renewable electricity and stuff. So there's steps moving forward, but the amount of electricity we need to generate sustainably to improve the quality of life of everybody globally to the level that many of us already enjoy is enormous compared to what we don't do that. So yeah, it is, I think you're right, possibly a needless use, if not a waste of resources, right, to have 40,000 pictures of the same thing. But yeah, I don't know, anyway, it's a food for thought. The question is, can we use the 40,000 pictures of the same thing to actually generate more electricity then? Well, we certainly can use them to a way to reverse engineer. Well, we certainly can use those to consume more electricity, because we can use them all to train our AIs, which are quite, quite thirsty as well, aren't they the AIs. So, but you ended that with, you ended just there with a question of, correct me if I get this wrong, right, you said, do we need to be creating something to be allowed to capture it? Is that what you, is that what you meant to say? Is that, do we have to capture something in order to experience it? Okay, sorry, now I misunderstood. I was thinking that you have some sort of, okay, you're only allowed to capture it if you're actually doing something, creating something, then you're allowed to capture. But if it's, if it's, yeah, if you, it just seems that the compulsion, and I'm no different than anyone else here, I'm not standing separate here. But there is a instinct now, culturally, I would say culturally, that implores one to make sure that you are, in fact, experiencing something by taking a photo or a selfie, or a video. It just seems pervasive when I, when I move through the culture here, and I see people crossing the streets staring at their phones, or standing in a group, and taking selfies with a certain specific background. You know, here in Venice Beach, we have a lot of tourists. And so one is constantly reminded of the, the capturing of the, you know, whether it's the upside or downside of the community, the visual landscape, the quirkiness of it, the beauty of it, constantly being photographed. I don't say this because I'm against it. I'm just saying that the experience of travel now, specifically, if we want to talk about that, is really so much about photography. And, and like I do remember, you know, when I was a, you know, late teenager, I traveled extensively all through the Middle East, North Africa, etc. And I remember that, I mean, maybe I took a few pictures, I seemed to, you know, a couple of snapshots, but I, I don't, I have really deep memories of all of that, but I have a lot of recorded stuff. And where I would take my camera, do I have the, you know, I, the same experience, I may remember taking a picture of this incredible mountain range. But it's different if I didn't have a camera. So I, this is all to provoke the thought process of kind of being aware that, if you were in the paradox museum and looking at a certain X on the ground to totally experience the, that moment or that illusion, and really had to focus on it and basically react, rather than fiddling and fiddling and fiddling with your gear to take a, basically a facsimile of the experience. Now, you could maybe have both. But in my observation, I think I don't see that. I see that once people have the photo, they, it's like, okay, we can move on now. Yes. Yeah. So there's definitely, there's definitely an element of that. I definitely saw people as like, right, you know, like literally sort of hurrying their children along once they go, but sort of quite, you know, almost militarily, you know, forcing the children into the right spot for the photo, as if the, as if the taking of the photo was the point. Right. Well, yeah, I mean, I, I feared that, that I'm going to get a lot of kind of hate mail and okay boomer, you know what I mean? And again, I just want to admit that I am no different. I take way, way too many pictures and keep them and upload them. My, you know, I have at least 150,000 images on my Lightroom, you know, managed thing and a negative as well. But I, but I'm always thinking about the differences of experience in taking pictures on a smartphone or on a, what we'll consider a proper camera or a view camera or no camera and just experience. I do take photos with no camera sometimes. I do, I look at things and I go, you know what, that's a photo, right? And whether or not I keep it or not is less relevant. But I do, I do catch myself sometimes walking along, yeah, that's a photo. And I don't, in that moment, I don't necessarily need to, to take out a camera or my phone and actually take the photo. I just go, yeah, and I funny you say that. I have regrets when I do that. In other words, I go, Oh my God, is that a great photo? And usually I'm peering out from a moving car and going, Oh, look at that. And then it's gone. And I, but it's etched, you know, it's etched into my brain, but I do have regrets that I didn't. So that's, that's really interesting. I tend not to, I used to take a lot of photos out of train windows when I was commuting a lot more pre-COVID days, you know, that sort of thing. I don't do it anymore. And part of the reason I don't do it anymore is that the cameras are too good. I used to quite enjoy the rolling shutter effect that you got from, you know, an early phone camera, you know, that would give you a depth in the photo, because of course, if you're on a train, you're moving at a pace, right? Not necessarily super fast, but this definitely adds a depth to your photo because the things right in front of you are really blurry and the things in the background are hardly moving at all and things like that. And you get, you get a depth of field that is described by the amount of rolling shutter effect rather than by whether or not things are in focus. And I always enjoyed that. And I'm like, yeah, I'm quite happy with that. It kind of fits in my, my sympathy for the graphical kind of photography rather than, you know, rather than factual kind of photography. But yeah, it is, I don't know, it's a strange one because you could share, you go back and I go back to the paradox, is it? Right? And by the way, that everybody listening, there is a link in the show notes to the TFOP photo album where I have put a small number of photos that were taken yesterday with me and me and my kids, right? And you know, just because it's fun, right? And I put out, and Jeremiah, you mentioned when you saw it, there was one which is a London underground tube train, right? And you said, oh, that's a fun one. And yeah, and so the, the, and the basic thing is, is that this thing is built upside down, right? As you can tell from the photograph. So the idea is you, you go and make your poses and the assistant that takes your photo, you give them your phone and they take your photo so that you can all be in it. And then it looks like, yeah, and then you, of course, you rotate the picture by 180 degrees and every, it looks like the tube train and the platform are all the way up and you're hanging off the ceiling and, and, and hanging off the tube train and stuff like that. It's, it's good fun. So there's, there's an element where we wouldn't have been able to experience that without the photo. Right. And, and so, so at that point, I think the photography element is, is a bonus, not a bonus, sorry, it is additive to the experience. Yeah, it's part of the, it's part of the experience, much like if you're a, a fair, and you know, they have those painted foreground, you know, with, you know, two pirates and a pirate ship and the heads are cut out and you put your head through. Yeah. Now, if you do it, you don't really have much of an experience. No, because all you're seeing is the back of it, which is plywood and supports, but anyone in front of it is going to capture you as a cartoon version of. And, and, and so yes, in that case, the capture is, is the experience as you were pointing out. Yeah. Yeah. You're making, you're making something at that point. You're making something at that point. Right. And, and it's fun. And, and so you, you know, I can think of, you know, a good few reasons why a positive reasons, right? You know, why having this level of ubiquity of photography, integration of photography is a good thing. So, so you get that, you know, that the photography there in that example, and in many of the things in this paradox museum, the photography, you know, capturing it enables you to experience it more, not just, oh, it's, you know, I'm, I'm getting distracted by the process, although there were, there were clearly people in there who were being distracted by the process of taking the photograph rather than enjoying the experience. So, it is a double answer, but positively that adds to the experience. Positively, I don't think that I would ever take a photo without a camera. If I hadn't been a keen photographer for so long, and my brain, and over time, trained my brain to, to, to, to notice things, to, to value what I see, to, to question what I see. You know, and, and I think, you know, another, another positive, positively a lot of the photographs that I've taken over the years have been tiny little vignettes of the, oh, there's a little bit of play of light and shadow over there. Oh, or there's a, there's a detail or whatever. And, and those are positive because those end up give it, you know, gives me the ability to, to make something creative and have a creative event, right? It, it, in just a few seconds possibly, but, but otherwise, you know, would have perhaps been something I never noticed or something that, that, that I lost. So, there are lots of positives, but like you said, they were also the negatives of people getting distracted, you know, poor, poor use of resources. If we have 40,000 pictures of exactly the same thing, how is it that we dig into those buckets, blobs and, and dumps of photos to actually get any coherent sense out of them, very hard to do, most beyond most people's energy levels to try and attend, right? So, but then there's another thing is like, you know, we are, I think as, as artists, and you can maybe answer this better than I can, but, you know, we're trained to think of our captures more than just cut or, or, or things that we make, more than just things that we make, if we're trying to, trying to think of them as building a body of work, a portfolio, a legacy, an asset, a thing of lasting value, right? Whereas there's a different philosophy here at play, I think, which is, it's a stream, and you dip in and out of the stream, you know, this, yeah, so, so, and it's, it's, it's just all interesting to me. I decide, I don't think I have any strong opinions one way or the other about what's right and what's wrong, but it just really felt like, oh yeah, this is proper integration of photography. You'd never have had a paradox museum like this in the days of film photography, because the delay between the experience and seeing it would have just been too long. Everybody would have liked scratching edge and go, well, what's all this about, right? You know, it's like, or they'd have not all been in the thing because somebody has to step back and see it, or it, we, as stuff like it's tricky. It's tricky. Yeah, you know, the, the idea of also, what is an indelible image is also really interesting and provocative. There are some moments where I did not capture, as we discussed, but the image remains indelibly etched into my brain, into my memory, in the same way a photo does. I mean, I can see it clearly, and yet I didn't capture it, but I noted it, and I noted it extremely quickly, less than a second, just like, wow, look at that. And yet it remains part of my memory. And I'm fascinated by the differences in, had I captured it, would I have then let it go? And only been reminded of its power when I looked at that image. And now, I have no image to reference, but I have it indelibly etched in my memory. And that's something that, you know, is, is probably more a neurological discussion with someone who knew what they were talking about. I just know what I, what I feel, and what I think, you know, I, I'm sure that when somebody goes, I mean, you know, example is I was in New York on the darker side. It was in New York for 9/11, and experienced all of that trauma in real time, with no TV, with my eyes. And I did manage to take a, I was shooting film, and I managed to take some, a role of film after the event, just not that long after, like just a few hours of, of people's shock and, and, and dismay and collective, kind of, I guess, coming together in some way. But the images I have are so powerfully embedded, because I wasn't hiding behind a lens. I wasn't trying to capture anything. I wasn't trying to make a, I wasn't doing a reportage. I was just living my life. And yet the imagery, as we've seen secondhand through media, but that those secondhand images seen through media are not near as emotional as my memory of, you know, seeing the buildings coming down in real time, or people leaping off that. Those are, those are extremely, they're trauma, certainly. They're also visual. And they're not captured in any way other than my experience. Ditto, if you've been, you know, on a boat at sea in a storm, you know, and you're hanging on, you know, you can't really get your camera out and focus those images, even though they're, they would be aesthetically incredible. You need to plan for that. You need to lock down a camera and protect it from the elements and make sure it's not going to go flying over the end, be able to trigger remotely, so you have to prepare for that. Well, if you're not prepared for it, it doesn't mean the experience isn't powerful. But I think that there are, are, you know, certainly war photographers, I think, Natchway talked about this in his interviews when you are shooting traumatic experiences by lifting the camera up to your eye and effectively hiding behind the lens, you are distancing yourself in a safe place that allows you to keep working even though in life it would be overwhelmingly tragic. And so that's in many ways how, how war photographers deal with the negative. I think that, you know, flipping the script on the positive, there's something really joyful about just seeing your child exploding with joy, you know, having seen, you know, something funny or an animal do something fun that is not captured, that is just there for the human moment. And so, you know, it's probably, you know, for wherever this podcast is going, you know, trying to bring up the thinking, you know, we're not presenting a point of view here, which is rare for us. I think we've got plenty of points of view, but we did not nothing conclusive. There's no consensus here. We don't think that. Well, consensus would be no fun, would it? It's really just a way of enabling people or giving people the permission to experience life without a camera or with a camera and understanding that it is in fact different. Yep. And I think if you know that it's different, then you can make a choice. I'm going to, maybe I'm going to try and recreate that moment of joy from my child, you know, it's not the same, but maybe that will trigger my memory of that experience. So maybe, maybe the thing I need to do this year, then when the kid's birthday's come around and what have you, is I need to stage it? I need to work and stage it. Or I could take my new Insta360 Go and put it on the HAP clip and then just enjoy the experience, but knowing that I'm capturing the point of view or the magnet that goes on your chest or whatever it is that you got and capture it from that in a parallel way, right? So in a way that I'm not, I don't need to worry about, you know, missing out on the experience, I can fully embed in the experience, as long as I remember. Jessica Verthog, I am a camera. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, for those who are not aware of the reference, like in 1917, he walked around with a camera strapped to his body. 1917. Wow. Okay. I think I think that was it. Again, my memory could be fading because I wasn't there to take a picture. Sorry. Yeah, so interesting. So I don't feel the need, I don't know about you, but I don't feel the need to draw any conclusions from this conversation today. Just nice to have the opportunity to think about this stuff and to share some ideas, get some out there. So, yeah, I think the question is, how does photography affect one's experience of the world? Yeah, yeah, maybe we should go burn by the Raybann glasses, right? Then, yeah, then we don't have to worry about it, right? You can just, you know, because whatever you're looking at gets recorded and stuff like that, and it's just... Because I don't want to record everything in my life. I don't want to record it. You know, I just saw something came onto my feed of like a little thing you wear around your wrist, and it records everything. Yeah, there's weakness and no, that's like, I don't want that. No, no, no, I don't want that either, no. Life's too short to try and process everything in that way. If you, yeah, some of it, you just have to process in the moment and then let it go, right? Well, I think that's the point that we're trying to... Maybe that is the point we're trying to make. Maybe there is. Maybe there is a conclusion. Quickly, let's go to the picks of the week before we lose ourselves down the rabbit hole again. So, what have you brought us this week, then? Just some new work, or not new work to me, just a really interesting photographer called Matthias Leininger, and I just thought people should explore his work. I just think it's special, beautiful, simple, evocative, black and white, and what never ceases to amaze me is that there are always new ways to shoot and discover the world around us with the simplest eye that really creates a complexity of emotion, and I'm always dazzled. Interesting. Yeah, some quite, as I said, powerful is not quite the right word, but some very graphic, very, very thought-provoking images here. This is an interesting one for me because I've just clicked on this link for the first time. I haven't seen this work before, and it's immediately presented as a series, and yet I've just flipped very quickly through the internet page, a link in the show notes, folks, of course, and it's not immediately obvious to me what the series might be because there's a range of different things. There's some portraiture, there's some, what I would call dress-up portraiture, but some people might call finite portraiture, then there's some landscape, there's some pictures of odd things like technology and some macro work, all in the ones, so I'm looking forward to reading the article that goes with this and just see what is the concept that draws all these images together as a series. That's quite interesting. Quite interesting. Cool. Well, my pick of the week is also photography, not from one person, but from a range of people. Recently have been announced the 2024 winners of the iPhone Photography Awards. I think it's not called the International iPhone Photography Awards, is it? I forget. Link in the show notes anyway, and there's some fantastic stuff here, actually, all taken with, and you can go back through the archives of multiple years, but the 2024 crop of winners, there's some really interesting photographs, and not interesting because they're taken with phones. Interesting, just really good, interesting photography. Again, because they have a range of categories, there are a range of different types of genres of photography and thoughts like that, but I don't know about you, Jeremiah, but these days I don't look at a photo and think, "Was it captured by a phone or a real camera?" It doesn't matter. The only question I have is, "Is that a real photo or is it a show?" Well, there's definitely, yeah, that's it. Well, there's been several... And I've started to do this consistently now, because the quality of AI is so good, and that's a subject for another day. Another podcast is AI-changing photography on a deep, deep level. Interesting thought. Well, I'll tell you what, another good thing to do with this website is to go back to... You can see the evolution of a phone photography, but interestingly, you could also see the evolution of the technical quality of the sensors and the cameras and stuff like that, and maybe there's some lines to think about there about how the kit that we had available to us. The archive goes back to 2008, so a year after the iPhone was announced. You've got almost the whole life of the iPhone in this collection of photographs, just to see how the images themselves have evolved. Maybe I'll ask the question, did the kit influence the images that were made at that point in time? Did it force creativity rather than constrain? Who knows? But yeah, always interesting to see, and I thought that was a good link given the whole of the concept for today's conversation was, "Stand here, get your phone out, take the photograph." By the way, I'm compositionally, too, the evolution of the vertical frame. Very good point. Yes, norm. That's interesting. Those of us who grew up with the horizontal frame as the norm, though I'm in love with the square frame because it's so difficult and balanced, but I think that that is something that we now assume is a normal frame now. Do you know what? Bonus points to any listeners who can get in touch with us in our discord, telling us what year that tipping point was, right? A landscape aspect ratio as the standard versus the vertical, the portrait aspect ratio. Cool. Well, there we go. That was very enjoyable. Thank you. Plenty to think about. That's us done for this week, I think. We will sign off here, and we'll be back next week, hopefully all three of us next week. Yeah, we will see you then. Take care and goodbye. Bye-bye. You've been listening to The Future of Photography. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your other podcasts. Find the show notes and more information at TheFutureOfPhotography.com and subscribe to the channel. Thank you.
