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May 23, 2009
Emma Connors in the weekend Australian Financial Review reports on the turn to creative activity as a result of the recession in Australia. The contracting economy it seems, causes people to ask themselves, "Why should I be doing this job and what else would I like to be doing"? It is a very reasonable question, and one I have asked myself.
Connors says that so many are turning to creative writing. People going to writers' festival are no longer interested in just reading. They want to write, and they are seeking information about how to get published. It is a general phenomenon as courses in the creative arts or communication and cultural studies are booming.
It is not just writing----it is also happening with arts and crafts and photography judging by the popularity of Flickr --taking photos and publishing books--what many are calling user-led content creation--or produsers to use Alex Bruns term.
There are limitations to this shift towards various forms of DIY production since, as it is not possible for many to economically survive as a full time writer or art photographer in the marketplace in Australia, and so the creative work can only be done whilst also working part time to earn money to life on. Maybe most photographers will be amateur photographers with real money-making jobs on the side that they don’t tell their colleagues about.
Secondly, large amounts of user-produced content is increasingly being harnessed by corporations (including the ABC re writing) as value added to their services. Will the art industry continue to cling to art’s traditional analog status, to insist that the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art, as a response to this?
The context of this shift to user generated content is that whilst news photography and photography of all kinds is flourishing professional photographers are suffering---eg., the difficulties facing photojournalism, from street corner news photographers to the deans of the eminent agencies Magnum and vii. Alissa Quart in Flickring Out: Photojournalism in the Age of Bytes and Amateurs says that photojournalists have:
been struggling with downsizing, the rise of the amateur, the ubiquity of camera phones, sound-bite-ization, failing magazines (so fewer commissions), and a lack of money in general for the big photo essays that have long been the love of the metaphoric children of Walker Evans...Yet, paradoxically, visual culture is ever more important. It seems that everyone now takes photos and saves them and distributes them, and that all these rivulets supply a great sea of images for editors to use. This carries certain risks. If they are taking snapshots, amateur photographers are likely not developing a story, or developing the kind of intimacy with their subjects that brings revelation. So what’s the actual photojournalistic value of all of these millions of images now available on Flickr and other photo-sharing archives—so many that they can seem like dead souls?
Professional photographic storytellers are competing with the millions-strong army of amateur photographers whose work is housed on Flickr, which editors cull for cheap or free images, and the rise of amateur-supplied agencies, including iStockphoto—owned by the largest stock agency of them all, Getty Images. There are also outlets that claim to separate the digital wheat from the chaff, like PhotoShelter, a “global stock marketplace,” or the jpg Magazine, which threshes out a few hundred images submitted by Web amateurs and publishes them on paper.
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though Alissa Quart is concerned about the decline of professional photojournalism and thinks that it is bad she does acknowledge that there are bright spots to the amateur-image revolution. She says:
She argues that this doesn't help photojournalists as they try to conceive, shoot, distribute, and get paid for complicated images of difficult places.