Clayton Cubitt: The future of photography is now

Imagine an always-on 360 degree HD wearable video camera. With a constant feed of all that she might see, the photographer is freed from instant reaction to the Decisive Moment, and then only faced with the Decisive Area to be in, and perhaps the Decisive Angle. Evolve this further into a networked grid of such cameras, and the photographer is freed from those decisions as well, and is then merely a curator of reality after the fact. Any ”live” input would consist of a “flag” button the photographer presses when she thinks a moment stands out, much like is already used in recording high-speed footage. The grid might not even be traditionally photographic, rather more like a 3D LIDAR array. A primitive test of this has already been used artistically in Radiohead’s 2008 video for “House of Cards.”

None of this is science fiction. Artists are already commandeering Google Street View to hijack omniscient eyes for their own expression. Nick Knight has been using 3D scanners for fashion work for over a decade. In less time than it took me to originally learn and master film and darkroom technique at the beginning of my career I’ve seen digital tools transition from massively expensive and low-resolution to ubiquitously cheap and high-resolution.

It’s taken over 165 years for photography to truly fulfill its promise to be the ultimate democratic art. I’m thrilled to be alive to see it.

— Clayton Cubitt

Don’t Be an Ass: Credit the Artist

If you’re posting someone else’s work, credit them. Don’t deliberately remove the name of the artist. That’s just wrong. If your reasoning is that it’s your own personal scrapbook, then keep it personal. If it’s public, the least you can do is credit the artist and link back to their site, or at least their Wikipedia entry.

When I see something I like not credited, I try to track down the source — if for no other reason than to find more art by the same person. Consider this a small payback to the artist whose art you liked enough to post on your Tumblr. Use Google Reverse Image Search or TinEye to track down original visual art — they’re both easy to use, and takes no more than 10 seconds to do a search.

— Nikola Tamindzic, photographer

Yes x1000, and I would add another reason, beyond it just being the moral (and legal) thing to do for the artist you admire: do it for future knowledge. Do it for future curious creative people like yourself. Tools like TinEye would be so much more effective if everyone who published an image would post the credits with it, so that it could be properly indexed. Not some vague emotional poem-line about how the image makes you feel, the actual artist’s name and their title for the piece. In the art (and adult) world, provenance is key, so do your part and preserve the chain of custody, the praise for the things you love, or even the shame for the things you hate.

This counts for everyone, but triply so if you’re a young artist/designer yourself.

— Clayton Cubitt, photographer

Clockwise from left: master magician Matt Holtzclaw, me having a stroke, miss Amy Wright, and Einstürzende Neubauten, by Clayton Cubitt.
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Clockwise from left: master magician Matt Holtzclaw, me having a stroke, miss Amy Wright, and Einstürzende Neubauten, by Clayton Cubitt.

Future of magazines

Fashion magazines should take note. At the end of the day, they will stay in business not by selling us clothes or by feeding us something we’ve seen hundreds of times before, but by allowing our imaginations to take flight. The Internet can give us runway pictures and analysis faster than any print publication ever could, but it hasn’t yet figured out a way to capture the experience of a great fashion editorial. If magazines were smart, they’d hold on to that.

— Raquel Laneri in Forbes

Via claytoncubitt. More here, here, here, here and here.

Clayton Cubitt, Long Portrait of Graciella Longoria

Graciella Longoria on the first anniversary of her father’s death in a car accident.