cataloguing life

As you know, if you read this blog with any regularity, I love photography and cameras. This photo was taken on my morning walk in the park today using my iPhone. Huge nylon chili peppers (wind socks?) hang from an old cottonwood. I assume it's inspired by the much-anticipated appearance of Grammy Award winners Mumford & Sons at the Solar Festival on Thursday evening in that very same park. It's expected that 11-13,000 people will descend upon Taos starting tomorrow. Where they will all sleep, how they will eat, use bathrooms, get enough water, is still a mystery. Roads around the park will be closed to vehicular traffic. The Solar Fest organizers have always been paranoid strict about keeping non-paying spectators out and this event is a biggie. They're already putting up barriers so people can't sneak in through openings in the fences around the park during the concert.

and then there were none
But music is not what I really want to talk about. I just learned that on May 30th, all 28 photographers at the Chicago Sun-Times were fired in one fell swoop (including a Pulitzer Prize winner). The higher-ups decided that journalists with iPhones will now provide visuals to go with their stories. One photographer, Rob Hart, is cataloging his experience using his iPhone (see Tumblr for his pics and blog). It's ironic and sad. Alex Garcia, photographer who blogs at Shooting from the Hip, and also lost his job, said:

Reporters are ill-equipped to take over. That's because the best reporters use a different hemisphere of the brain to do their jobs than the best photographers. Visual and spatial thinking in three dimensions is very different than verbal and analytical thinking. Even if you don't believe that bit of science, the reality is that visual reporting and written reporting will take you to different parts of a scene and hold you there longer. I have never been in a newsroom where you could do someone else's job and also do yours well....They require different ways of thinking.... He goes on to say he is not worried about himself, but about the profession he loves.

I agree. This is a cold sharp-edged time we live in where corporate-think is dominant. What are the corporates thinking? (Is it really about union-busting, as some suspect?) We're all trying to adapt to changing technologies and trends and many of us (including professionals) are loving digital photography, iPads, computers, and finding new ways to use them (e.g., David Hockney and his iPad paintings), but at the expense of photojournalism? Whenever I'm in a writing workshop and a topic comes up like "if you could change your life, who would you be?" (you'd be amazed at what people write) I always say "a photojournalist." If I worked at the Sun-Times, I would have been fired last Thursday, too.