6X6

A review of 'Landmark: the Fields of Photography' exhibition

_{(Nickel Tailings No. 34, Edward Burtynsky, 1996)}

 

I am no fan of landscape photography.

There, I have confessed. And I seek no forgiveness for it.

I find it boring, obvious and excruciatingly repetitive.

How many glorious waterfalls can you savour. Or majestic mountain ranges? Or breathtaking fields of corn? It just never ends. Landscape photography at its worst is the Captain of Cheese in the annals of photography. Even more so with dollops of overcooked digital retouching added for good measure.

So it was to my happy astonishment that Landmark: the Fields of Photography successfully rehabilitated my taste for this respected photographic genre.

Landscape photography pioneered photography's role in the world. By capturing nature in all its glory and visceral force it brought Mother Nature to the masses. And they loved it. Landscape photography planted the future seed for tourism and environmentalism. 

Curated by the globally respected curator, William A. Ewing the exhibition was a refreshing perspective on a tired genre revitalised in its role of capturing the rapidly changing vistas of planet earth. From earthly scars, oil slicks, austere tourism, ghetto dreams to Nordic ice and wistful seas it managed to provide more than just a thoughtful stroll through the fields of twenty first century planet earth.

It certainly left a renewed imprint with me.  

Here is my pick of the best:

_{Permanent Error, Pieter Hugo, 2010}

 

_{Howl, Amy Stein, 2007}

 

_{Complaining Forest, Olaf Breuning, 2010}

 

_{Concrete Spillway Chute, 'Under the Nordic', Olaf Otto Becker, 2010}

 

_{Man who fell to Earth, Pierre Radisic}

 

_{Crude Oil Prices 2003 to 2008, 'Monuments', Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, 2008}

 

_{11,936 887 suns from sunsets from Flickr, Penelope Umbrico, 2013} 

6x6 Mobile Photography Round Up #6

Here is a very late issue of the 6x6 mobile photography round up on the latest things I find interesting in mobile photography and related stuff.

 

The Guardian tries citizen journalism with EE

It was encouraging to see the launch of Witness this week. Carefully not promoted as citizen journalism and a bit short on social plugins it is an interesting platform idea for the post journalism age. Apparently it’s deeply plugged into the Guardian CMS to help surface content within the paper. Some of the assignments are a bit vanilla but I am sure they will get a bit more colourful. (Love the playdoh volcano!)

 

WoW promises a lens to transform the future of mobile photography

I quite like the look of the feature packed integrated WoW Lens. I love my olloclip but having it permanently encased like the Wow lens will prompt me to use it more.

The Selfie gets some stylish wood

With all the talk about mobile photography growing up its a shame the unfortunate the poster child of the genre, the ‘selfie’, is getting so much attention. But this most narcissistic image of our Present Shock age has been beautifully rendered into wooden canvases by the artist Golpeavisa. The classy images evoke a melancholic take on the falseness of the selfie shot.

 

 

Say hello to Pongr - the mobile social photo marketing platform

Pongr has been around for a while. Their image recognition technology has been quietly developing since 2008. It seems they have recently rebooted to offer ‘solutions’ for brands to mobilise their visual assets through their Photo Response Marketing software. Its includes a  suite of gamification, direct response and shopper marketing applications where ‘brands can put their photos to work’. Pongr users can become ‘CEO’s’ of a brand by taking photos of their favourite brands and earning points and gaining super user titles. With brands thinking about investing in formal advocacy programs services like Pongr and their API will offer some interesting angles. (But the quality filters better be good!)

 

 

Memoto Lifelogging camera brings the quantified self to photography

Another Kickstarter project which is close to shipping. Memoto is a Swedish startup that mashes quantified self thinking with photography. This project looks very cool! Its a tiny automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory. It sorts hundreds of images into ‘moments’ and stores them in the cloud so you can retrieve and ‘relive’ your visual memories. I want one!

 

 

The world’s first open community coolhunting mobile game  

iCoolhunt’s marketing jazz states it is a ‘cross platform geo-social game that lets users collaboratively identify and track emerging trends on a global scale’. A big promise. It essentially turns photo sharing into a coolhunting game. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks great. Although I do wonder whether the real cool hunters will use it?

Why Vadering and Hadouken are the new normal for photography memes

The recent popularity of the Vadering and Hadouken photography memes is yet more evidence of the vibrant health of social mobile photography.

But what is the story behind these memes? And what does it tell us about the current state of mobile photography and social media?

It seems the Hadouken meme was of organic origin. Nested deep in the Japanese teenage manga culture of Dragon Ball, the meme re-creates Kamehameha style attacks. And is probably the most inventive photographic meme ever.

However, the Vadering meme has been accused of intentional viral marketing for the brand Chick-fil-A. Posted by Angry Baby on Reddit five days ago it was a ‘response’ to the Hadouken images. But it seems the Reddit community and other bloggers are suspicious and have claimed at worst it is staged and at the very least a poor attempt to ‘start a meme’.

Staged or engineered I love Vadering. Maybe its because I love Star Wars, but its genius is its simplicity and creative impact.

It uses a potent cultural signal and mixes it with some deft photography to create a fun and visually engaging idea.  

For brands this again demonstrates that using photo sharing platforms and visual motifs born out of internet culture can be a powerful way to ‘visually entertain’ their followers.

This in the same week that celebrities are posting branded sponsored images of themselves on Instagram and bypassing Facebook means that ways to capture the visual social web is only going to get more interesting.

So I think there are five points we can take from these recent photography based memes:

 

1. Mobile photography is getting more inventive. The level of creativity and required skill of how some of these shots have been set up is impressive. It shows how the ‘average user’ is getting more skilled in techniques like composition and other techniques.

 

2. Ease of access means more involvement. Because of the growing ubiquity of quality smartphones and a ‘social mobile’ mindset people are into it. Getting involved in meme activation and origination is getting way more mainstream.

 

3. Meme police are fierce critics. It is getting harder to manufacture a meme that has agenda free authenticity. Do they even exist? Whatever the provenance of Vadering it has spun into a visually arresting cultural motif. And this makes the purist critics smoulder.

 

4. Increased meme competition. Vadering spilled out of Hadouken very quickly. Connecting meme waves is an orchestrated act, but also makes everything a bit more competitive and interesting.

 

5. A growing visual appetite. The rise of the visual social web means it needs lots of feeding. Expect way more Vadering and Hadouken to come.

 

Here are a few other recent photography memes:

 

#Planking

 

 

#Owling

 #Draping