TimMoore

This guy should be invited to the next State of the Union speech and congratulated for his charitable efforts. Of course that’s a fantasy, but still…

Thank you, ya I will have a back up with me and get the insurance. I’m sure everything will be fine, I’m just really paranoid about things like this, especially when I’m midway through a project and I’m shipping my main work computer.

Your argument isn’t necessarily a new one and has been one that’s been launched at photography since its beginning. It has always been considered as a medium that robs the artist of creativity, cameras were and still to a lot of people considered a shallow and empty medium, This was true with the Brownie, with the development of the 35mm camera, Polaroid, digital, and so on. This homogeny or streamlined effect is actually one of the photographs biggest strengths. It reduces the process to show only the vital elements of a process and lets us appreciate creativity with no barrier to entry. It’s always been a populist medium where a great work is valued by the “decisive moment” it captures. Creativity has nothing to do with the look or style, aesthetics are a by-product of an impulse or idea someone had throughout their day.

I’m really working hard to not bring something like Barthes or Sontag into this, but I’ll just boil it down to creativity is something when a person stops what they’re doing in their day because they see something in the world and they want to capture it and give it a new context, when they use a device that was meant to talk to people to take an image. Photography at it’s basic core has been about measuring light and that’s never going to go away. You can still drastically alter the look of the photo on a phone based on how much light there is or how even that light is. Creativity is the choice of getting close to your subject or far away, taking multiple shots and picking one that pleases you, even if you don’t know why. Those are all creative decisions that don’t even get into looks, colors, filters, etc. The homogeny of our tools might be happening, but it’s not going to happen to us as individuals. There are too many factors in life that make up an individual’s viewpoint that our ways of expressing those views can ever be homogenized.