Stephen Mayes on Photography's Futures - We all need to fail to achieve?
This has just come to my attention and badly reported so two months later I'm posting it. Fantastic interview…...
Here is a man that crosses representation of Damien Hirst through being a founding director at Getty Images and Director of Archive at Art & Commerce. He has represented the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Steven Meisel and David LaChapelle. Credibility gets no larger - these are Stephens words as of 16th Jan 2014 recorded by Stephanie Cabrera
"Social media is impacting our work in so many ways it’s hard to know how to pinpoint any single aspect of the changes that we’re experiencing. But fundamentally, everything has changed with the emergence of a visually sophisticated population that uses imagery as easily as conversation to exchange ideas and to express themselves. Facebook users casually share pictures to tell us how they feel, where they are, what they’re experiencing… This is new and it’s exciting. Suddenly everyone is fluent in the language of photography and we can really push the limits because anything we do as professionals is being read in new ways by a sophisticated audience that understands as much as we do about the image. I think that the imperative to experiment is personal to each of us and we all deal with change in different ways. But there are very few photographers who are so securely established that they can afford not to experiment in order to adapt to the new rules, if any. I would go further to say that failure must become an essential part of all our work; if you’re not failing it means you’re working in a comfort zone and as the visual world changes at breakneck speed, to live in a comfort zone is itself a failure! However, don’t bet the ranch on any single experiment: try many things and be prepared to fail often but in little ways. The impact of stock is hugely undervalued, even by those of us who work in the industry. Stock imagery is designed to reflect social values so that it can be a vehicle for commercial communication. But actually the production of stock imagery is a circular process that both reflects culture and also shapes it. It’s inevitable that the values we express become reinforced through the massive distribution of our work; our imagery seeps into every pore of society and our messages slowly push the boundaries of how society views itself. This can be as small as showing a new hairstyle, or as significant as representing racial minorities in authority positions or same-sex couples bringing up kids. What we say is absorbed effortlessly into people’s consciousness and the world moves a little bit every time. No single stock image will change our understanding of the world (although I recently heard an awed reference to Getty’s Gandee Vasan who was the first person to create the image of a goldfish jumping from a small bowl to a larger, which is now an everyday cultural reference) but collectively we’re rolling the ball uphill. Have you heard of Snapchat? Today in December 2013, it’s the world’s largest platform for photography with 400,000 image uploads every day; and the strange thing about Snapchat is that every upload exists only for 10 seconds after the recipient opens it and then the image vanishes. What does that mean for the future of photography?… Every day I’m amazed by what’s happening".
Bloody riveting stuff - thank you!
