Photography without a Camera
The alternative camera club started again this weekend and this week Mishka Henner spoke about the use of the mugshot in photography. More can be seen at www.trawlingthevisualwreckage.tumblr.com
Mishka was telling me after the talk that nowadays he very rarely uses a camera to produce work and as an alternative to the shutter release on a camera he use the "Print Screen" button on his PC keyboard to produce images. He scours the internet and its resources, Google maps, Google images, Facebook, in fact any image related website. Initially I thought, "This isn't photography!", and although I don't think it's something I would use myself I've come round to his way of thinking.
David Bailey once said, "It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary". Photographers simply see images and use them for there own purposes.
Somebody asked a question on "Answers.com", "How many images do people see in a day?". The answer on this websites suggests between 12000 & 15000.
So lets double that and do some maths. Lets say someone lives until they are 75 and they see 30000 images per day, that's approximately 821,250,000 images in a lifetime. 30 months ago there were 3,390,516,186 images on Flickr.com (there are far more now), so that's 4.12x more images than a person would see in a lifetime on 1 website. Fuck me! Maybe he has a point.
So using this method here are 3 images of mine from Area 51 in the Nevada desert using Google Maps. (I'm not convinced they are truly from the area but they are on Google maps!)
Mishka was telling me after the talk that nowadays he very rarely uses a camera to produce work and as an alternative to the shutter release on a camera he use the "Print Screen" button on his PC keyboard to produce images. He scours the internet and its resources, Google maps, Google images, Facebook, in fact any image related website. Initially I thought, "This isn't photography!", and although I don't think it's something I would use myself I've come round to his way of thinking.
David Bailey once said, "It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary". Photographers simply see images and use them for there own purposes.
Somebody asked a question on "Answers.com", "How many images do people see in a day?". The answer on this websites suggests between 12000 & 15000.
So lets double that and do some maths. Lets say someone lives until they are 75 and they see 30000 images per day, that's approximately 821,250,000 images in a lifetime. 30 months ago there were 3,390,516,186 images on Flickr.com (there are far more now), so that's 4.12x more images than a person would see in a lifetime on 1 website. Fuck me! Maybe he has a point.
So using this method here are 3 images of mine from Area 51 in the Nevada desert using Google Maps. (I'm not convinced they are truly from the area but they are on Google maps!)
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