Posts tagged nostalgia

thepoliticalnotebook: A considerable number of people consider photos taken with the iPhone to be automatically not photojournalism, no matter the content or composition. Despite that, there is a significant body of work in conflict photojournalism by very talented photographers that uses the iPhone, often filtered using the Hipstamatic app, to depict scenes of countries in wartime. Damon Winter did it. David Guttenfelder did it. The very interesting documentary project called Basetrack is doing it. Recently, to accompany his New York Times story, “The Bad Guys vs. the Worse Guys,” Ben Lowy shot photographs in the same way. He says of using the iPhone, iPhones enable a greater intimacy with a subject in a way that traditional cameras can’t. People are so used to seeing you pull out a huge camera and then acting a certain way. iPhones are still new enough that you get more realistic, less subjective, images contentwise because you aren’t pulling out this huge camera. And indeed, the photographs taken by the iPhone give more of an air of actually being there, and have a far more candid, intimate tone.  The FJP: Let me agree and disagree.  Here’s the agree: It’s silly to say that a photograph taken with a type of camera (in this case, the iPhone) necessarily is or isn’t photojournalism. The iPhone-as-camera is a tool. Nothing less, nothing more. I’ve experimented with it in news situations and find that because of its limitations you need to get closer and more personal with with your subjects. There’s no megazoom on these. And getting closer and more personal is a good thing. Here’s the disagree: Back in September we quoted Nathan Jurgenson’s essay about faux war photography and the nostalgia of war. Jurgenson’s critique of filtered apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic rests on their approximation of reality. Yes, they can produce amazing photographs. But by adding the nostalgia that filtering apps provide, we’re stylizing the present to give it a sheen of the past. The results produce very interesting documentation but I don’t think you can call it photojournalism. There’s just too much fabrication going on. —Michael

thepoliticalnotebook:

A considerable number of people consider photos taken with the iPhone to be automatically not photojournalism, no matter the content or composition. Despite that, there is a significant body of work in conflict photojournalism by very talented photographers that uses the iPhone, often filtered using the Hipstamatic app, to depict scenes of countries in wartime. Damon Winter did it. David Guttenfelder did it. The very interesting documentary project called Basetrack is doing it. Recently, to accompany his New York Times story, “The Bad Guys vs. the Worse Guys,” Ben Lowy shot photographs in the same way. He says of using the iPhone,

iPhones enable a greater intimacy with a subject in a way that traditional cameras can’t. People are so used to seeing you pull out a huge camera and then acting a certain way. iPhones are still new enough that you get more realistic, less subjective, images contentwise because you aren’t pulling out this huge camera.

And indeed, the photographs taken by the iPhone give more of an air of actually being there, and have a far more candid, intimate tone. 

The FJP: Let me agree and disagree. 

Here’s the agree: It’s silly to say that a photograph taken with a type of camera (in this case, the iPhone) necessarily is or isn’t photojournalism. The iPhone-as-camera is a tool. Nothing less, nothing more. I’ve experimented with it in news situations and find that because of its limitations you need to get closer and more personal with with your subjects. There’s no megazoom on these. And getting closer and more personal is a good thing.

Here’s the disagree: Back in September we quoted Nathan Jurgenson’s essay about faux war photography and the nostalgia of war. Jurgenson’s critique of filtered apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic rests on their approximation of reality. Yes, they can produce amazing photographs. But by adding the nostalgia that filtering apps provide, we’re stylizing the present to give it a sheen of the past.

The results produce very interesting documentation but I don’t think you can call it photojournalism. There’s just too much fabrication going on. —Michael

The New York Times

Nostalgia for Old-Timey News

It’s good to have media critic Jack Schafer back. He’s been writing at Reuters after being let go from Slate earlier this year. Yesterday, he had this to say about veteran newscaster Ted Koppel who’ll be joining NBC’s Brian Williams for a new news magazine show called Rock Center.

Ted Koppel, my favorite media punching bag, has stepped back into the ring for another beating.

And so it begins. Shafer criticizes Koppel for his persistent nostalgia for the way news was once done, and for pining for the good old days when news organizations had missions and didn’t tell the public what it wanted to know, but what it needed to know.

Koppel’s consistent nostalgia for the old days must not go unchallenged. No thinking person would trade the current mediascape—which gives us instant access to newspapers around the country and around the world, from the BBC and Al Jazeera, to the Reuters, AP, and AFP wires, and to narrowcasting websites of all sorts— for the ancient one in which the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the newsweeklies, CBS News, NBC News, and to a lesser degree Koppel’s also-ran, ABC News, ruled the news universe.

Koppel can only think that journalism has lost its “mission” if he spends more time on TMZ.com than he does on the Guardian. The rest of us who care about news are feasting our way through an endless, high-quality banquet.

The source of Koppel’s news angst isn’t hard to locate. He pines for the 1980s because that was the high-water mark of the now-displaced “media regime” in which he held power. I lift the phrase and the analysis from After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment (Cambridge University Press), a new book by Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini.

Williams and Delli Carpini explain how technology and the end of the Cold War “have destabilized the media regime of the mid-twentieth century, challenging the premises of which the Age of Broadcast News were based and accounting for current debates over the eroding boundary between news and entertainment.” It isn’t the first time that a media regime has toppled. Williams and Delli Carpini provide history lessons tracing earlier media displacements—the rise of the penny press in the 1830s, for example, and the development of the halftone print in the 1880s, which made newspapers more visual, and later triumph of broadcast journalism over newspapers. Somewhere in history’s dustbin a 110-year-old newspaper guy is making the same complaints about Walter Cronkite that Koppel is making about the current scene.

Glad to have Shafer back, and looking forward to reading Williams’ and Carpini’s new book.

Faux-Vintage Afghanistan Photography and the Nostalgia for War Via Nathan Jurgenson: The recent and popular Hipstamatic war photos depict contemporary soldiers, battlefields and civilian turmoil as reminiscent of wars long since passed. War photos move us by depicting human drama taken to its extreme, and these images, shot with a smartphone and “filtered” to look old, create a sense of simulated nostalgia, further tugging at our collective heart strings. And I think that these photos reveal much more. Hipstamatic war photographs ran on the front page of the New York Times [the full set] last November, and, of course, fake-vintage photos of everyday life are filling our Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter streams. I recently analyzed this trend ina long essay called The Faux-Vintage Photo, which is generating a terrific response. I argue that we like faux-vintage photographs because they provide a “nostalgia for the present”; our lives in the present can be seen as like the past: more important and real in a grasp for authenticity. If faux-vintage photography is rooted in authenticity, then what is more real than war? If the proliferation of Hipstamatic photographs has anything to do with a reaction to our increasingly plastic, simulated, Disneyfied and McDonaldized worlds, then what is more gritty than Afghanistan in conflict? In a moment where there is a shortage of and a demand for authenticity (the gentrification of inner-cities, “decay porn” and so on), war may serve as the last and perhaps ultimate bastion of authenticity. However, as I will argue below, war itself is in a crisis of authenticity, creating rich potential for its faux-vintage documentation. Read on.

Faux-Vintage Afghanistan Photography and the Nostalgia for War

Via Nathan Jurgenson:

The recent and popular Hipstamatic war photos depict contemporary soldiers, battlefields and civilian turmoil as reminiscent of wars long since passed. War photos move us by depicting human drama taken to its extreme, and these images, shot with a smartphone and “filtered” to look old, create a sense of simulated nostalgia, further tugging at our collective heart strings. And I think that these photos reveal much more.

Hipstamatic war photographs ran on the front page of the New York Times [the full set] last November, and, of course, fake-vintage photos of everyday life are filling our Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter streams. I recently analyzed this trend ina long essay called The Faux-Vintage Photo, which is generating a terrific response. I argue that we like faux-vintage photographs because they provide a “nostalgia for the present”; our lives in the present can be seen as like the past: more important and real in a grasp for authenticity.

If faux-vintage photography is rooted in authenticity, then what is more real than war? If the proliferation of Hipstamatic photographs has anything to do with a reaction to our increasingly plastic, simulated, Disneyfied and McDonaldized worlds, then what is more gritty than Afghanistan in conflict? In a moment where there is a shortage of and a demand for authenticity (the gentrification of inner-cities, “decay porn” and so on), war may serve as the last and perhaps ultimate bastion of authenticity. However, as I will argue below, war itself is in a crisis of authenticity, creating rich potential for its faux-vintage documentation.

Read on.

life: LIFE.com asked Instagram users to submit photos taken during August 2011’s Hurricane Irene — and the response included pictures that ranged from dramatic and even chilling to simply and surprisingly beautiful. Here, a selection of our favorites.  These are wonderful images in and of themselves but they remind me of a post of ours about how faux-vintage services such as Instagram are feeding into a sense of nostalgia for the present.  At the time we quoted Nathan Jurgenson who wrote: Faux-vintage photography, while seemingly banal, helps illustrate larger trends about social media in general. The faux-vintage photo, while getting a lot of attention in this essay, is merely an illustrative example of a larger trend whereby social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past. It’s also interesting that the documentary history of LIFE’s photography is just that, documentary without the filtered artifice that Instagram brings to our photos. That said, still digging this image. — Michael

life:

LIFE.com asked Instagram users to submit photos taken during August 2011’s Hurricane Irene — and the response included pictures that ranged from dramatic and even chilling to simply and surprisingly beautiful. Here, a selection of our favorites. 

These are wonderful images in and of themselves but they remind me of a post of ours about how faux-vintage services such as Instagram are feeding into a sense of nostalgia for the present. 

At the time we quoted Nathan Jurgenson who wrote:

Faux-vintage photography, while seemingly banal, helps illustrate larger trends about social media in general. The faux-vintage photo, while getting a lot of attention in this essay, is merely an illustrative example of a larger trend whereby social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past.

It’s also interesting that the documentary history of LIFE’s photography is just that, documentary without the filtered artifice that Instagram brings to our photos.

That said, still digging this image. — Michael

life

Where does our nostalgia for the present come from? In a fascinating longread, Nathan Jurgenson explores the rise of faux-vintage photo apps such as Instagram.  In this essay, I hope to show how faux-vintage photography, while seemingly banal, helps illustrate larger trends about social media in general. The faux-vintage photo, while getting a lot of attention in this essay, is merely an illustrative example of a larger trend whereby social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past. Jurgenson explores the technologies being used (smart phones and apps like Instagram), various understandings of authenticity, augmented reality and visual theory. He’s currently working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media. Definitely worth a read. Photo: Instagram 365 #88 by exoskeletoncabaret via Flickr/Creative Commons.

Where does our nostalgia for the present come from?

In a fascinating longread, Nathan Jurgenson explores the rise of faux-vintage photo apps such as Instagram. 

In this essay, I hope to show how faux-vintage photography, while seemingly banal, helps illustrate larger trends about social media in general. The faux-vintage photo, while getting a lot of attention in this essay, is merely an illustrative example of a larger trend whereby social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past.

Jurgenson explores the technologies being used (smart phones and apps like Instagram), various understandings of authenticity, augmented reality and visual theory.

He’s currently working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media.

Definitely worth a read.

Photo: Instagram 365 #88 by exoskeletoncabaret via Flickr/Creative Commons.