I recently had a new sample wedding album printed and am reworking my portfolios in preparation for 2013. At the same time, news broke of Instagram - one of the worlds biggest photo-sharing services - revealing plans to sell users photographs against their will and without compensation. I got to thinking about the relationship between the traditional world of print and the infinitely complex world of digital media. Musings and reflections below...
We live in a digital world where anything we could possibly want to know, see or listen to is merely a click away. The internet bombards us with visual stimule and those of us who use social media like Facebook and Instagram will be well familiar with the mind-numbing process of scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of images searching for something eye-catching.
Good photography will always stand out on the internet. But the experience of viewing a web-optimised image (even a very good one) on a laptop or iphone will always tend to be a transient one. At best we might linger momentarily between clicks.
I actually began thinking about this recently when I presented a client with a 16x16inch framed print of one of my landscape photos. It might have just been politeness - I was standing right there with him at the time - but he literally POURED over the image, holding it up to his face, placing it on a table and stepping back to view it from a different perspective, tracing his finger across the lines. Actually I'm pretty sure he wasn't being polite. Because I did the exact same thing when the photograph arrived from the lab!
Whether hung on a wall or bound in a book, there is a kind of tangibility to photographic prints.
As a client, prints are a confirmation of value. They confirm the fact that you value the people or thing you have paid to have photographed, and the craft of the artist you have entrusted to capture those people or things. For photographers, prints signify the completion of a creative process that can otherwise last indefinitely. But beyond that, they demonstrate the fact that you take pride in your work. You are telling the world that your art and expertise also belong outside of facebook and flickr.
I showed my new sample album to a couple and her best friend at the weekend. Beyond their very positive reaction to the photographs, I was amazed at how much the girls interacted with the book itself - the texture of the leather, the gloss of the heavyweight photographic paper. It felt like such a befitting way to showcase a collection of beautiful images.
Of course there are a thousand reasons why any client wants their images on a DVD after a photoshoot. Almost all of the commercial work I do is for web-based marketing. And if Mum and Dad want to email a professional photograph of the kids to Auntie Jean in Australia, or share a set of romantic portraits on Facebook, I totally get that. It's what I'd do too and it's why I always offer both print and digital options to all my clients.
There is no point swimming against the current of change and photographers who resist the trend towards digital and social media sharing risk alienating themselves from their customers completely. Sure, there is still a great deal to be learned about the value of an image file consisting of 0s and 1s on a memory card. And these conversations with clients need to be approached in a posture of confidence and honesty that recognises the value of a digital image to both the customer and the photographer.
Sadly in the case of Instagram, the question of the value of digital media seems to have been almost entirely ignored. Whatever the outcome of that particular case, and however happy I am to help clients access their images in whatever format they require, I keep coming back to the same question:
Is the true value of photography measurable in ‘likes’ and ‘shares’? Or is a photograph actually worth much, much more in the non-digital world?
Thanks for looking!
Sean
© Sean Afnan 2012, all rights reserved
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