Is tilt-shift photography's auto-tune?

There has been a big debate going on in the musical blogosphere about the auto-tune. Kanye West has his fair share of responsibility for this as his last album, 808s & Heartbreak, didn't contain any rapping whatsoever and just involved him warbling into his vocoder. This man cannot sing to save his life (if you listen to the live versions of any of the "808" tracks, even through an auto-tune his voice manages to be ropey), but he decided that sing he would by getting a computer to do it for him. There is a lot of hate for the auto-tune as people see it as a way of hiding a total lack of ability behind a vocal gadget. In theory I would tend to agree with this perspective, and yet I liked Kanye's album, and I think the auto-tune has been used brilliantly in other contexts (see DJ/rupture for more on this).

Recently, has had me wondering whether photography has found its equivalent of the auto-tune bête noire with the explosion of the tilt-shift phenomenon? In the last year or so, tilt-shift has been spreading across the globe like swine flu (I think flickr may actually end up losing an arm to it), to the point where  if you can't be bothered to figure out how to take a tilt-shift photograph, this program will make one for you from. Whereas I actually fall into the pro-auto-tune camp (although I am still pretty close to the fence) I have less patience for the tilt-shift phenomenon. I think this is a case of the technique (gimmick?) being too overwhelming for there to be room to do anything personal or individual with it. Monsieur Colberg recently commented on something similar in regard to Thomas Ruff's recent "jpegs": the difficulty of getting beyond the technique to the idea. I don't think tilt-shift is inherently evil...I even sort of liked Naoki Honjo's Small Planet, which is one of the recent 'fine art' contributions to the t-s world. However, I can't help wondering if the series works despite the technique rather than because of it.

Taisuke Koyama

During my exceedingly short trip to Tokyo earlier this month, a friend of mine took me on a whirlwind up-and-coming-photography tour of Tokyo. First stop was at the G/P Gallery, in the new NADiff a/p/a/r/t art complex in Ebisu (which incidentally has an excellent art bookstore). They had a small solo-show (14 prints) of the young photographer Taisuke Koyama's entropix series. I had made a mention of Koyama's work in the piece I wrote for Images magazine last year highlighting some of the Japanese photography on show at the 2008 edition of Paris Photo. I didn't get to see enough of his prints at the fair, but I found the couple of images that I did see interesting.

Entropix is a series of visual fragments, seemingly haphazard abstractions that still retain a link to their subject (paint peeling, pink fabric, tarmac, sheet metal). The images are highly detailed, feeling like microscopic, molecular studies of the surfaces of the city. Koyama's compositions are both strong and simple, and they retain an instinctive energy reminiscent of Eggleston's shotgun approach. The (digital) prints are good, although I prefer the smaller prints to the larger edition (1.2 x 1.8m), which I found diluted the impact of the images a bit.

I ran into Koyama later on that evening at a discussion organised by Akira Rachi at CAMP in Hacchobori (more on this later) where he was presenting entropix and had a chance to chat briefly to him. He will be coming to Paris Photo with G/P again this year so this will be a chance to see more of his work. And if you don't feel like waiting until then, a catalogue of the series is also available from G/P. One to watch.

NY Photo Festival 2009 Round-up

Following on from my last post, here is one of the great things about photo-blogs: no sooner is the NY Photo Festival over than the reviews are already springing up all over the blogosphere. The picture I am getting so far is a bit disappointing. Don't worry, I won't be adding to the debate seeing as I don't normally review things that I didn't see, but here are a few of the comments I've come across so far.

One thing I do find strange is Daniel Power's responses to these comments (he is one of the organisers of the festival). He has been quick to respond to any criticism (including all of the posts linked to above) and I think it is normal that he should stand up and defend a project like NYPH, which is just getting off the ground in a pretty tough economic climate. That said, I find his responses a little too punchy, as if he is determined to refute every single piece of criticism, no matter how small. It seems to me like a missed opportunity for a young festival that is growing up in the age of the photo-blogosphere: this kind of free and informed feedback could help it find its feet.

NY Photo Festival Blogging Panel

Photo-bloggers of the world, rejoice. Photo-blogs have reached that critical mass where 'blogging panels' like this one at the NY Photo Festival now take place about the role of blogging in photography. If you missed that defining moment in photo-blog history (chaired by the almighty JM Colberg of Conscientious fame), you can see practically the whole thing here (or the full audio here if you're not into the shaky handheld video thing). This could change your blog forever...ok it won't, but some of the panellists do have some interesting thoughts on the subject.

Is this really the future of photography?

The Creative Review blog has a post about LPA Futures, a competition designed to "find the next generation of commercial photographers." The prize: five young photographers get to have their careers "nurtured" by the Lisa Pritchard Agency. There are lots of these awards around these days for young photographers and god knows that they need it as it is certainly not getting any easier to earn a living from photography.

However, I have to say I find the prize-winning images on show here depressing. Individually they are technically proficient, and a couple I even found arresting, but what depresses me is that they could all easily have been taken by the same person (or maybe 1.5 people). I don't see any diversity in this group: they all have the same cold, detached approach to their subject, whether landscapes or portraits, and convey the requisite "contemporary" emptiness, which has become so omniscient. I even find the treatment of colour remarkably similar by four out of the five photographers here. If this prize really identifies the "next generation," then the clones are soon going to have their day. I am not aiming my criticims at any of these young photographers, and hope that they will all be nurtured by LPA to great success, but it would be pretty tragic if the future of photography was as homogenous as this.