The transition of photography to a digital realm has undoubtedly brought with it the emphasis of certain aspects of the art over others. Immediate visual impact and novelty are two such aspects that come to mind, with others such as hidden rewards and a revealing of the personality of the photographer being minimized. Immediate visual impact is not too hard to understand, because algorithms prioritize and reward it. But what of novelty?
Here, by novelty, I mean the act of producing photos rarely or never before seen, with some element or technique that is unusual to the given field of photography. Using wide-angle lenses in bird photography can lead to novelty for example, and capturing rarely-seen movements in sports is another.
The question is, is novelty something to be rewarded and prized? Or do we place too much value on it? And, if we do overemphasize novelty, is it because perhaps, novelty is one of the few things that can move us given that we have become more and more anonymous and irrelevant as individuals within the giant and often degenerate digital ecosystems produced by big tech, whose ability to exploit economies of scale to pathological levels has produced an unhealthy level of unfriendliness in human social interaction?
In one sense, novelty does something good. It gives us new ways of seeing the world, and opens our eyes to new possibilities within photography. Wide angle shots of birds suggest to us that we don’t always need a long lens for our avian friends, for example. And the first bird in flight shots gave us new insight into the revered freedom of the eagle soaring so high. By itself, novelty isn’t a bad thing.
Yet, like all things, novelty can also be pursued too far. When it comes to never-before-seen techniques and ideas in wildlife, it can take the mind away from the gentle experience of being in nature. And if too great an emphasis is placed upon novelty, then the level of novelty becomes something to be optimized. The grand overwhelms the subtle, and otherwise excellent shots that don’t have a sufficient level of loudness are ignored due to our sensitivity to the relative strength of the attribute being evaluated.
Indeed, this is happening in photography today. In the modern high-tech world, we are overloaded with information, and many of us easily become bored without some new height to reach, where the height is necessarily defined against variables that survive the torrent of the soulless algorithm operating on billions of photos from people we will never meet.
If a photo doesn’t catch some attention as it flies by, then it is demoted. The sort of content that rises to the top conditions our minds, and as a result, we become like the algorithm. Our glorification of the few photos that float to the surface no doubt plays upon our instinct to have at least something concrete to hold onto and learn from.
And no doubt, the photos that make it to the top are amazing photos. But at the same time, they are a subset of photos that are selected in such a way as to be compatible with our attention spans, which have been made short and crude from repeated exposure to the hurricane force of the machine. This force, in turn, leaves little room for the meeting of minds and the growth of the individual. It is an environment where we no longer grow together, but rather compete to get websites the most hits, and the most views.
Moreover, even if the “best” photos are in themselves fine photographs, they become a near-impossible standard that has been raised very high due to being selected over a very large space, a significant subset of which is produced by those who have lavish funds to create otherwordly results.
Thus, although a bit of novelty is a good thing, our current glorification of it is not, and our pursuit of novelty thus overwhelms the basic act of exploration through the photographic medium.
The emphasis we place on it stifles self-expression, and further shifts the value of photography entirely to the end product, so that it can be another drop in the fuel tank of the big tech platform. The solution for the individual photographer is simple: although there great learning potential in viewing the photographs of others, one should also limit one’s exposure to the great ocean of photographic anonymity because beyond a certain small dose, the obsession with ranking and hits and fame will only lead to a personal withering of artistic spirit.
And make no mistake: the pathological emphasis on relatively few variables such as novelty in photography cannot be reconciled with the existence of any large tech platform. The only way to regain a healthy balance in photography is to primarily share photography with a smaller group of people, to share photos as physical prints, and to take the time to understand the experience behind the photo. Ultimately, all these efforts are towards a single goal: the rebuilding of personal connections that have become surprisingly secondary due to the immense surplus of communication speed and bandwidth.