A Rain of Frogs

In a field lived a metaphorical rabbit. Once the rabbit had been white, but years of living in the shadow of the great city had turned him a dark brownish grey. Though he was no longer white, he believed he was mostly a happy rabbit.

Each morning the rabbit would poke his head up out of his rabbit-hole and look around, each morning he saw the same thing. The grey, sooty grass that surrounded his home stretched as far up the knoll as his rabbity eyes could see. At the edge of the world, just barely visible, was the big city.

The sky above the city was much darker than the sky over the rabbit’s little world. Dark chimneys pointed skyward like soldiers and belched black smoke into the sky. The rabbit had an idea that once upon a time the sky had been blue, not brown, but he could no longer tell if that had been a dream or not.

After looking around, the rabbit would go about his daily routine. Forage for food, with an eye skyward for birds of prey. He was industrious, and worked hard to find sustenance in the grey field. In his mind’s eye, he saw that food had been abundant once, and that this field had teemed with rabbits just like him. The other rabbits, whether from his memory or his dreams, told him he was crazy to think about things like that when there was food to be gathered, and his tummy agreed with them. But like the blue sky, he couldn’t remember if they were simply a dream. In any case, there were no other rabbits in the field now.

The rabbit worked hard to scratch a living out of the grey field. Every year there was less to eat, every year the chimneys at the edge of the world grew taller and the sky got darker. The rabbit grew thinner. But he still told himself he was mostly a happy rabbit.

Some day the food would run out until it too would be nothing more than a dream, but the metaphorical rabbit couldn’t grasp this eventuality. He had enough to feed himself at this moment. Yesterday was a dream. Today he believed he was a happy rabbit, and tomorrow was barely a glimmer in his mind’s eye.

At the end of the day, exhausted from the toils of life, the metaphorical rabbit would lay on his bed and stare up at the sky through the rabbit hole above him. In his mind’s eye he could see twinkling lights in the blackness, but he couldn’t remember if the lights were just a dream.

I have just finished reading a Newsweek article entitled Is Photography Dead. I urge you to go read it, then come back here and let me know what you think. In the meantime, I am going to express my own thoughts on the matter.

I enjoy photography. It lets me capture feelings and emotions in a different way than sketching or painting can. I can immerse myself in mood and feeling, without having to consider medium. With a modern dSRL, I can not only capture an instantaneous fragment of a mood, but I can shoot dozens of frames over a period of seconds, then see how this mood modulates and changes temporally. And all for the cost of a camera. It’s fascinating.

When I first started reading it, I thought the article and I were in agreement, that photography is indeed art.

But then the article declares the death of the medium. It is dead because photography coupled with digitalization now allows photography to transcend capturing the “real” and allows the photographer (no longer an artist, note) to capture what I am going to call the “hyperreal”.

Am I reading this article right? Does it really say that because photography allows the capture of the hyperreal, it is dead. Photography used to be an art because it was intrinsically linked to reality, that its “special claim on a viewers attention” was as “evidence, rooted in reality”. And so now it’s dead?

What?

Painting started as an art-form firmly rooted in the real. Painters painted landscapes and portraits and all manner of things that were firmly real. But along the way, painting started exploring the hyperreal. Some of the most famous paintings in the world are art, and more rooted in hallucinogenic imaginings of mentally ill painters than in any sort of reality. But these paintings are considered more artistic, not less. Was the death of painting declared? I guess it might have been, by someone too inflexible to deal with change. Painting did not die, it merely passed from the confines of a childhood linked to reality to a hyperreal adolescence.

Art is almost impossible to define, but it is easy to define what it isn’t. Art is not about the real. Art is not about medium, or foundations in the real.

Art is about the relationship formed – sometimes across centuries and cultures and distances – between artist and audience. A relationship that transcends the real and becomes hyperreal.

And photography is not dead. It’s just growing up.

I have obviously been circling this particular drain for a long time, and I know I am not alone, but I am utterly convinced that the work I do means absolutely nothing.

As you all know, I work in the web industry. This industry is unique among industries, being populated by a motley collection of stereotypes; self-aggrandized graphic designers in ultra-hip eyewear, troll-like programmers happily sequestered in a dark room somewhere with an endless supply of diet cola, sycophantic project managers and sales reps, and every non-stereotype in between.

It is a varied tapestry of collaboration, and it should be really interesting to work with all these personalities. Nonetheless, I look back over my twelve year career in the field and find that I have done absolutely nothing that actually means anything at all.

It does not make the world a better place. It does not change anyone’s life for the better. It does not reflect my personal belief structure. It most certainly does not fulfill me or give me any sense of creative pride. What it does do is generate revenue for my employer and my employer’s client.

That, by itself, may be a good enough reason to continue on doing what I am doing, but I become less and less convinced all the time.

Perhaps it’s burnout, coupled with the general malaise that accompanies winter making me feel a bit blah about the web. Or maybe it’s my Gen-X sense of entitlement, or some sort of post-Boomer idea that we are all somehow special (indeed unique, just like everyone else), but I like to think that there is a way to do things I consider ‘good’ and still make a living at it.

About five years ago I found one of my old sketchbooks. I made some scans at the time, and today, while sorting files during the transfer of my data from my Powerbook to my new Macbook, I came across a few of them. This is my favourite. Red and green crayon wax on paper, circa 1985.

Remember when I said I wanted one of these?

I’ve finally replaced my trusty (but not rusty) 12” G4 Powerbook with a shiny new black Macbook. It is every bit as amazing as I thought it would be. It’s nice to have the performance breathing room to do the things I want without the computer getting in my way.

I haven’t had a black computer since the G3 Powerbook I had about five or six years ago.

My Powerbook will be going up for sale.