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May 24, 2009
According to PhotographyLot the The New York Photo Festival had a panel session on photography and blogging. An excellent example of blogging photographers is Camera Obscura.
Laurel Ptak has an audio of the session A selection of the photographic work at the festival can be found in the special issue of Visura magazine.
PhotographyLot's summary of the photography and blogging panel discussion states:
A few issues were raised – on the fact that the internet has replaced face to face discussion between peers, that blogs can be used as propaganda for your own work, that writing a blog is time consuming and so forth. Cara Phillips pointed out that one problem with blogs and with the internet in general is the constant demand for new content. I agree. This particular blog originally started as a kind of online notebook, one which I had hoped a few other people would be able to contribute to. Before long I was feeling pressure to post new content regularly, as that’s what all the other blogs seemed to be doing. This false need has since subsided for me but I do see it as a problem for blogs.
I can attest, from writing junk for code as a photographer that this kind of blogging is time consuming, whilst the nature oft the blog means that a constant supply of new material is needed in order to keep the blog alive. Limited content means that the blog is dead. As the current ethos of junk for code is to try to deepen the discourse on photography, I mostly avoid simple the practice of quotation and link to other blogs or sites in favour of producing more original and different content.
The problem for blogs that Photographylot sees relates to archives:
If you come to a new blog, how often do you read content beyond the most recent few posts? What happens to all the old posts? As Jorg Colberg pointed out, the accessibility of the archive is key here. Seems like bloggers need to become librarians of their content. As a closer to the discussion, an audience member stated that he thought blogs should exist alongside traditional media but should do what the print media cannot, in that personal opinions, short commentary and analysis can be quickly and widely disseminated, along with images and links to photographers and content that a printed daily, weekly or monthly may not have the space for. In short, blogs are useful and needed to be treated with care, both by their readers and by those who write them.
I'm not sure what to do about the archive problem. It is a problem since, as Joel Colberg points out, most blogs.... are being organized in a temporal way in that new posts are sorted by when they were published - when in fact, their contents usually is not temporal. That makes accessing the archive difficult.
These ideas only scratch the surface of photography and blogging. A more substantive issue would be how to deepen the discourse around photography culture caught up in a technological fetish, favours craft, dislikes aesthetic theory, and works within a decayed modernist aesthetic of beauty as (significant) form.
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most photography blogging ---eg., Joel Colberg or Camera Obscura--- is about show casing a photographer each day. So we have lots of photographers being showcased but little in the way of writing about photography. How does that deepen the discourse around photographic culture?