Dogs and Lunches, etc

If It Has a Ringtone, It's Not a Camera. Panasonic Lumix's advertising slogan didn't last long -- not, I think, because there would soon enough be a Lumix-branded mobile phone, but because it's a slogan that can easily be interpreted either way: that a celphone is less than a camera, or (oops) that a camera is potentially rather less than a cameraphone.

It's also less than a "camera-puter," which is an aspect that is neither camera nor phone.

In the simplest sense, the camputer is a portal for images direct from your hand to the internet. But what about pictures before they ever leave the phone? If they ever leave the phone?

I'll be the first to say that I find most Holga/Diana-wana-be photgraphy cloying and twee and it's pretty rare that even the most earnest results feel like anything more than just a rehash of Nancy Rexroth's "IOWA." So you can imagine my reflex reaction to programs that deliberately "crappify" otherwise-clear, direct images, burying them under just so much mannered noise. And you'd be right, at least about my initial reaction. Why my attitude has changed in the next photorant entry.

In the mean time, since I couldn't find one that entirely suited me, here are a couple of guides to the color modes (and below, frame styles) offered as presets by the Android camera-phone program Vignette. A similar chart can be found here, but it was missing skin tones).

The flash diet doesn't require using flash, and it isn't really a diet per se, but an alternative to keeping a food diary -- photograph everything you eat. A side benefit is that it gives you an excuse to make at least a few photographs every day.

For entertainment value I've given myself a little rubric:
    • Celphone only: twee "FX" apps okay
    • "One bullet": c'mon, it's time to eat
    • Context: ingredients, locations, companions

Here is a great thing about celphone cameras: they're not Hasselblads. They're more like a real "pencil of nature," in that a pencil has incredible range -- you can use the same pencil to jot down the grocery list or to draw a masterwork. The Hasselblad is more like oil paints -- wonderful for what it does, but too grand and technically involved for casual muddling.

The pictures show a recent bargain toy -- a 7-inch Pandigital Novel eReader (aka "PDN," or "WPDN" to specify the white variant), re-flashed to expose its Android underpinnings and updated to Android 2.1 "Eclair." I managed to pick this one up during a recent clearance at the nearby chain store Kohl's for a tidy $59 (apparently, a few folks even managed to get a $20-off deal -- an Android tablet for $40!). Even at the more-usual price of $199 the Novel is no iPad, but at that price you could by three or four of them (or at the discount, a dozen or more!) for the price of a single iPad (Addendum: Apparently they sold 440,000 PDN's in 2010). So here's a quick review of my experience thus far:

Paul Graham was kind enough not to name the unthinking reviewer who he says doesn't "get" photography -- which is odd, because you'd think he'd want to protect others from the potentially-insulting opinions he cites in this one-paragraph Jeff Wall book blurb by Carnelia Garcia in ArtInfo's February ART+AUCTION (Garcia claims to be a museum "PR Associate" according to her LinkedIn profile -- I won't speculate further).

What Graham's essay seems to miss is "how there remains a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get " a lot of art -- not just photography.

As a handy example I've added the James Gurney cartoon above, which he left us after a visit to Trion a few weeks ago. Gurney is a painter whose skill and talent are more than obvious, whose acclaim among other painters and the public are solid, and whose works are shown internationally in museums yet are essentially ignored (if not actively combated) by the same "sizable part of the art world" that Graham cites.

Why is this?

I think parts of an answer can be found in the closing chapter of the new Gerry Badger book, The Pleasures of Good Photographs, and also in the writings of a certain Norwegian-speaking Minnesotan who moved to the Silicon Valley...

Due diligence declaration: I do really love the work of all the photographers cited below. Okay, maybe not Richard Prince...

Another, more-recent Paul Graham lament about the lack of respect afforded "straight" photography. and a discussion(?) of the same essay/address, which oddly attributes a review of Jeff Wall photos to.. Jeff Wall? Misreading aside it has an interest list of conflicting viewpoints, like these:

I hear that del.icio.us and perhaps even flickr may go away soon. The new joke around the valley is: "if the US really wanted to kill Wikileaks, they'd have Yahoo acquire it."

In the mean time, you might like this.

When I purchased a new phone, I copied the pictures that had been accumulating in my old phone* into my computer. I've really just this week gotten to looking at them at any length.

Many were purely utilitarian images-as-notes: where did I park the car, various serial numbers, dinner plates, labels on grocery items. A few were shot out the driver's side window.

The new phone seems to be filling with pictures of the dog, which feels a bit strange considering how slowly phone cameras operate.

In 1986, the critic Andy Grundberg observed that postmodern photography “implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones.”

Perhaps telling is that a list of Grundberg's articles for the New York Times is dominated less by art criticism and more by obituaries: Irving Penn, Julius Schulmann, Arnold Newman, Gordon Parks, Avedon, Ellen Auerbach, Carl Mydans, Eddie Adams.

Which brings us to his difficulties with the very much living Robert Bergman (PDF):

This is a book of criticism, not theory [...] It is written, in large part, against the photography criticism of Susan Sontag. [...] who was responsible for establishing a tone of suspicion and distrust in photographic criticism, and for teaching us that to be smart about photographs means to disparage them.

Another, longer except can be found here.

A nice thing about Processing is that sketches can usually be easily re-factored as web-browser applets. Having some issues with this one, sadly (and only on some computers), so I can't just post a playable applet on botzilla (yet).

Here's a video instead -- rather than a help screen, you'll see that SoL tries to guess what you're doing. This is a direct capture, though you can't see the mouse cursor.

Download (revised) file -- this is a zip of the entire sketch, ready-to-roll as a Processing project.

A Processing sketch.

Download it here