We Are All Monkeys Now
Most of us have heard the adage that, if enough monkeys were given enough time and enough typewriters, a Shakespearean play would come into being. I have no idea if this is statically possible or not, but many years ago a cheeky photo editor of the weekend magazine of the London Telegraph paper group thought he would try out a related question. If you gave a monkey a camera, enough film, time, and rewards, could a cover shot be produced? Would anyone be able to tell it wasn’t taken by one of London’s great photojournalists?
And so the photo editor arranged with the London Zoo a setup: for a reward, the caged monkeys snapped portraits of the humans watching them. The day’s take was edited and one image picked for the cover; it looked very much like what most of us photojournalists would have produced on a similar assignment.
Today’s digital cameras have brought new life to still photography. It seems everyone now is taking a photo with their camera. These cameras have given one and all the power to produce technically professional quality images even with their cell phones. Through social media, millions of images taken by millions of people in millions of places are shared. And share they do, as the big “photo agencies” and publications find an image that suits their needs from anyplace and any circumstance. These photo editors have adopted the monkey and typewriter model for image making, with millions of low cost and technically good images at their fingertips. Being able to cover the story with a camera as a journalist, and using exposure and focus to help tell that story, don’t seem that important anymore in a society that values form over content.
Why am I thinking of this now, after all it isn’t exactly new news? In the last few days a couple of news items have crossed my desktop reminding me of the story of monkeys, magazine covers, of replacement, quality and value.
A few days ago my friend, the archivist Lincoln Cushing referred me to the new Lytro camera. This is a true point and shoot camera: take the photo, upload it, and use a computer to focus anywhere in the frame, whenever you want, as many different times as you want. What a gift this is; not only does it mean that the photographer (as the reporter on the scene) no longer needs to think about where the important elements of a story are, but what the photographer thinks no longer matters. The person at the desk can decide for any reason that THE story is better told with a different focus point. Still, though, the image is at least taken by someone at the scene and selected by an editor at the publication.
As it happens, around the same time as the monkey cover came out, I was talking to the same photo editor about screen grabs from video. In those days screen grabs were really crap images; grainy, out of focus, unusable except in the most extreme cases. But the photo editor foresaw the day that all images for the paper would be screen grabs from “footage” shot either by scribblers using small video cameras (now phones), or by some sort of CCTV network. No need for cranky, temperamental photographers and agents who thought they should be paid for their expertise. The photo editor would just view the material and grab whatever fit best.
Then in a 24 October 2011 post John Nack wrote that “Adobe engineers & University of Washington researchers are collaborating on a method of automatically finding the best candid shots in a video clip.”
With screen grabs of Google Maps now art, and artists arguing that their screen grabs of the exact same Google Map frame are somehow different than another’s grab perhaps a new version of the monkey photographer’s cover can be done using the Adobe photo editing software. Will anyone notice the difference?
Robert Gumpert 26 October 2011
