I hope all you fellow Canadians had a great holiday weekend filled with beer, fireworks, and hangovers. Back to it…
For those of you unable to make the panel discussion on blogging at the 09 NY Photofest, Laurel over at I Heart Photograph has posted the discussion as an audio file. From listening to the talk I think it’s apparent that there wasn’t enough time to delve into a greater investigation of what blogging actually means to contemporary photography, however, I did come away with an encompassing point from all on hand - a problem with the archive. This is, at least for myself when I blog, something I have yet to resolve and in particular, it’s a problem with how blogs are meant to operate. As most of the panel pointed out, there is a tendency for those who are popular in the “photo/blogosphere” to cater towards a hungry readership - that is, to continually refresh not only content, but the depth of that content.
It seems like a contradictory concept doesn’t it? Most of you would probably agree that this is the format and limitation of a blog, right? Well, an audience member did address this (at least I think it was someone from the audience) by stating that the archive is continually re-accessed by Google searches, etc, but I will have to disagree. From looking at my stats from the past year, the amount of archived content which is found through whatever web avenue, be it searches or links, is wholly minimal compared to the posts that have been authored recently.
Yes there are continual searches for specific photographers, but they mainly revolve around the big four: Crewdson, Soth, Wall, and Sherman. For the less conspicuous ‘emerging’ photographers (which I might add make up the majority of content both on this blog and almost all photography blogs in general) these searches seem to be overwhelmingly absent. I’ve addressed this issue of history building before, but I can’t think of a way other than re-showcasing archived posts as a relevant solution. What do you think? Are today’s generation of emerging photographers being done a disservice by blogs due to their constant appetite for “fresh art”?
If you have any thoughts, or can offer a better solution, please don’t hesitate to email me directly or comment here.
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COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS
Ian Aleksander Adams added these thoughts on May 19 09 at 7:32 amI really like revisiting the work of people I’ve featured before, but I think they have to be involved in that process as well, at least by just sending an email when they’ve updated their website. Or having an rss feed I can subscribe to. It’s much easier to check in with a little prodding than remembering to check a million emerging artist websites on the off-chance they’ve been updated (which happens like, once every two years, it seems, with most of these blokes. sad!)
It doesn’t take much effort, but if you notice someone has featured your work in the past, keep them up to date!
Charles added these thoughts on May 19 09 at 10:48 amI don’t think you can say a blog does a disservice to photographers (any press is good press), and even though you might not see some of the work your and others blogs are doing, I think it does have an effect. That effect shows up not so much in repeated viewings on your site, but in future (re)postings on other blogs, and in people bookmarking a photographer’s site, joining their mailing list, etc. I don’t think you can expect most people to plumb the depths of any particular blog’s old posts unless they are really, really interested. And why should I be so interested when, instead of doing that work, I can just load up the next post…
(I’ve only listened to about the first 30 minutes of the panel so hopefully I’m not just recycling what was already said there)
Frog added these thoughts on Jun 24 09 at 1:29 pm“the big four: Crewdson, Soth, Wall, and Sherman.”
Do you mean to say that a lot of the hits on your site come from people searching for those artists? What a curious group, are they the most important artists for young photographers?
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