THE COLOURS OF DECAY

It was a long bureaucratic procedure, but at the end the Department for Arts & Culture of the Lower Austrian Government acquired six pictures from my "The Colours of Decay" series for its art collection. I did the pictures for this series between 2009 and 2011 at locations in Lower Austria and when i did the printing two weeks ago I realized that some of the object don't exist anymore. They are gone, destroyed, were dismantled or have fallen into complete disrepair. So this pictures are more a less a historical cronicle too... 

Railroad Scrapyard Strasshof, 2010

Spinning Mill Teesdorf, 2011

Trautmannsdorf Castle, 2011

Trautmannsdorf Castle, 2011

Cement plant Kaltenleutgeben, 2009

Cement plant Kaltenleutgeben, 2009

THE COLOURS OF...

Die Farben des Verf...

Von Chris A. Dematté

GETTING INDEXED

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpredation equals photography. [Arnold Newman]

   Once there was a time when this sentence has its validity. Once there was a time when quality was more important than quantity,  the quality of a picture was more important than the quality of self-marketing. As a photographer you had a solid (year-long) education, in some countries (e.g. in Austria) a master craftsman degree was required for having a photographic business. The measure of your success was the quality of your work. And not the number of "clicks" your photographs are achieving, not your ranking on search engines.

Then came the Internet. And digital photography. And the phrase "If you buy a violin you own a violin. If you buy a camera you're a photographer" became a (sad) reality . Worldwide newspaper publishers are firing veteran photographers and are replaceing them with iPhones. In art not the quality of a photo is decisive, not the statement, the aesthetics, but the sales price only . Photo orders are only rarely awarded according to criteria such as quality, reliability, visual ideas and their implementation. Much more important today the "search algorithms", "keyword density", "meta tags", "canonical link elements". etc. In science there exist the rule "Publish or Perish". For a photographer applies accordingly: "SEO or perish". And so you spend hours and hours with "contextual advertising" or "behavioral targeting". And it stays on one end to perhaps 20% of its time to get creative. 

Brave new world ...

WHEN YOU HIT A WALL, JUST KICK IT IN…

Two weeks ago we where attending the Opening week of Les Rencontres d'Arles again. Quite an expierence. Sometimes a strange one. Ok, everybody has his own taste, I know very well that my work is not at all part of the mainstream, part of what is called "contemporary" (whatever this may mean...). But if there are about 50 exhibitions (we visited not all of them) and you can hardly find two or three you like, well then there must be something wrong. For me this year Arles has moved so much in the direction of "Zeitgeist" that there not much left over of what i would call „decent“ photography...

Many "Experts" are complaining that the market for art photography has completly broken down, that galleries are struggeling to survive. Well, for me that is no wonder if you look at the shortlist of the awards presented in Arles, if you look who has won e.g. the Photobook Award, the "Best of Portfolio Review" etc. If i would be a collector I wouldn't buy one single piece. Yes, it may be that in the art market "the name" is counting a lot. But at the end even collectors which are following this trend, should not get crunch only but at least some basic quality. Imho.

It is time to kick this wall in, it is time to give art photography the value back that it deserves. With quality. Not with rubbish...

ON BEING AN ARTIST - SOME STATISTICS

I am looking to some photographer's blogs on a daily base. Today I found an interesting article at Mike Johnstone's "The Online Photographer" blog (a blog i highly recommend btw.) about some statistics on photography. Here are in extracts some points which made me think a lot about being a photo artist...

• As of today, there are an estimated 7.129 billion people in the world.
• 6.786 billion of them have digital cameras.
• 804 million people are having a show. This number fluctuates. The average number of prints sold per show is .007.
• Approximately 2.6 million of the planet's residents spend some appreciable amount of time looking at other peoples' photographs.
• Slightly fewer than 1.3 million people have a book out.
• Cumulatively, about $44,800,000 was spent for photographs in 2012, which sounds good at first, but roughly half of it went to 21 photographers in L.A., NYC, Toronto, London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Berlin, and Tokyo.

If I would have known about this stats... well, to late anyway. ;-)