Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

At the panel about the new photography at the Musée de l’Elysee last Saturday in Lausanne, two questions came up which I found really interesting and worth sharing:

Firstly, is there a profound difference between photography before and after Flickr, in terms of how the moment is treated? Traditionally, the idea of finding (or crafting) the perfect and decisive moment has been the idea behind taking a photograph. There are limited exposures and subjects are fleeting, so better use them well. Nowadays, many of the old-school people argue, photography as such has become an indifferent process in which an almost infinite number of photos can be taken and stored and every artistic decision is gone. Is that really true? I actually don’t think that the classic kind of photography is dead as you can see so many people on the net work aesthetically with their cameras. There is, however, a second kind of photography which appeared with photosharing and which follows its very own paradigm. This photography is the kind which is much closer to what Flickr actually introduced, which is that cameras become just as much tools of communication as they are tools of photography. Here. the moment is a slice in time and the metaphor related to the moment is more one of a stream of consciousness out of which we take impressions than isolated aesthetic products. Very sensibly, Flickr call this the photostream. It’s for that differentiation I feel that I need to maintain my different Flickr personalities, plugimi is more about the crafted moments whereas saschapohflepp is the stream of impressions that i want to share with the world.

The other interesting question was, whether a screenshot from Second Life would qualify as a photo. Another one of those SL-paradoxons. But, I’d rather argue for yes I think. It’s difficult to make a point for that, but as a virtual simulation where individuals have real encounters and interact with the world, a representation of it should count as a photo. Maybe it only comes full circle this way since digital photography is half virtual already if you argue from the standpoint of representation through data. Many people are feeding their photostreams already with shots from their second lives (often alternating with photos from their first life), which for Flickr increasingly poses the same question. So far, their answer is no, by the way.

On a totally different note: Has anyone ever researched about how *much* music actually is becoming part of our working reality only due to the fact that we work and listen on the same machine?