A bit out of context but, Who is Dustin Curtis? None of his sites mention anything beyond him being a villain and a superhero. Please, don't get me wrong, I'm not questioning his authenticity or relevance. But his posts usually end up high here on HN and generally the authors whose posts reach high have a bio page reachable. He is relevant and he created svbtle, but that's all I know. And I do respect his privacy, if he chose.
He's a talented designer and a couple of his blog posts were relatively well talked about a few years back (eg: http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html) and he capitalised on that. From what I understand of him he's not had any individual achievement that people care about but it's his ability to write with confidence that gives the impression he has a rich history of experience in all these many fields and so people choose to listen to him.
He did a couple of things. Svbtle aside, he was the first guy I know of to tell people to follow him on twitter at the end of every blog post. The practice has subsequently spread to the rest of the web.
http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter....
It is odd. A quick (naïve) google search returns no relevant pictures for the name either. I remember a long time ago his twitter description was something to the effect of: "I'm 23 and advise startups." What great wisdom would an (unverifiable) unemployed 23 year old have for startups? He's no Irish marathoner. Everybody is an "idea person" but it's not worth squat until you do something (more than wireframes or simulations) with your life.
Have we considered it's a joke? A simple joke a first, but over time grown sentient. Maybe there are multiple people in the cabal of Dustin Curtis: designer, over-generalizing pontificator, and website engineer. Elite trolling for people who already think they are better than everybody else. A Fox News commentator of startups, except most people are in so deep they can't see the deranged minds behind the narrative.
Does Dustin Curtis interact on any platforms beside twitter and his own website? nickb taken to a whole other level?
For some reason I get him and Dalton Caldwell mixed up. Its not the same person is it? http://daltoncaldwell.com/ They are both from SF far as I can tell.
Thinking about an expanded definition of photography: I've been experiencing this often with the combination of instant screenshot uploading apps (CloudApp, Scrup, et al.) in combination with realtime chat.
Photographs have been used for communication for a long time. Most artistic criticism is focused around the efficacy with which a photograph transmits an idea or message. Look no further than 2/4chan for an implementation of a "picture as message" service. I think someone could create a more structured service than the 'chans, but I don't know that I'd call it photography's "third act."
I use iMessage for this. It works great. It could be better. It works better than having a separate app I have to switch to. It works better than having to ask my friends to install an app that they have to switch to.
Still, I love that feeling of playing with a truly novel technology for the first time with a few friends, especially when it's presented in the raw with few extraneous features. There's a feeling of excitement and exploration that seems to decay in a year's time at best.
Exactly: what he is describing is almost identical to "group MMS". The one thing he seems to have different is that he is against having words at all, but once you are taking pictures of words you really should just support it as a feature: the essential property he is against is really just that the words need to be equal to the pictures (as in, a chat where you can post either a picture or words, as opposed to a place where you post pictures and then "comment on them" using words), not below/about the pictures. If the only problem with MMS is then that it is expensive, well: iMessage solves that.
The sentence you’re responding to is silly, but your comment is also completely off the mark.
Photography was used, among other things, for demonstrating medical conditions, for mugshots (and compositing many photos to capture a “scientific” “type” of different sorts of criminals or members of particular social classes), for scientific imagery, for understanding movement (Muybridge & al.), for propaganda (well beyond “journalism”), for faddish semi-scams (like the famous “spirit” photographs), for documentation of people and places (with types of photos it would be quite a stretch to call either “journalism” or “portraiture”), for making reproductions of other types of art, and yes, for fine art in itself (there were huge debates about whether photography counted as “art” going right back to the beginning, with the pictorialists e.g. famously making their images out of focus or otherwise blurry, scratched, etc. so that it could be “art” instead of a purely mechanical process). Indeed, nearly all of the uses of photography date back to the 19th century, they just weren’t as widespread as today.
Most of what you've named are what I meant by "generalized as journalism", i.e. as objective documentation of one form or another. I was just trying to point out that art as self-expression wasn't and has never been photography's primary "use". Good point though.
This is still prety far off base, historically. The most important contemporary art (as a genre) right now is photography. Its most popular movement, loosley called the 'New Topographics.' The 'origins' of 'topograpgic' photography, as a style, date well back into the 19th century, however. I think that says enough.
"The most important contemporary art (as a genre) right now is photography."
First, the truth status of this sweeping statement is hard to assess, but I think it's more wrong than right. If you had to complete your sentence "The most important...", I think you'd better put installation, or perhaps conceptual art, rather than photography.
It would be better not to make such statements at all -- doing so combines two notoriously slippery concepts, "art" and "most important". (If we can't define art, and good luck doing it, then defining most important art is well out of reach.)
Anyway, you and the comment above you are talking across each other. You're saying that photography is important to contemporary art. jberryman is saying that the most common use cases of photography are not art, and tend to be documentary, not aesthetic. Both of you can be right.
Topographics stems from the 19th century as historical fact. The rest of your post is just full of bluster. [1] Both the market and art-history have already conceded as much. So, I'm not sure what you are looking at, or what price point you are at, or what your vested interests are. Its honestly irrelevant.
It would be better not to make such statements at all...
I see quite a lot of art -- not being exhaustive, but for photography, I've been to solo shows by Jeff Wall, Cathy Opie, and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as various historical shows at the Getty. James Welling, one of the photographers in the book you cite, was on my wife's MFA committee. So I'm utterly unimpressed with your fragmented list of URLs.
I didn't say photography was unimportant. I said that it's hard to defend your statement that photography is the most important of the arts. I don't see you defending that statement.
I do see you putting words in my mouth, with quotes as if I wrote them ("at the cutting edge"). It's a tautology that photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art. So is painting. So is multimedia installation.
Your last note ("does art exist") is puzzling, because nobody here said art did not exist. I did say it's hard to define, and lots of artists are working to keep it that way. Is a sculpture made of fingernail clippings art (http://strose.lunaimaging.com:8180/luna/servlet/detail/StRos...)?
This is an exhibition catalog excerpt. The artist (from the 1850's) is being exhibited because of his links to XYZ (the guy with the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, linked above, in 2011). The Guy XYZ is a student of Becher (==New Topographics), the former a Pioneer of the original aesthetic now called Topographic/s. That, in a nutshell is the point I was making. Interesting stuff was happening in the 1800's. In Art. With Photography.
I didn't say photography was unimportant. I said that it's hard to defend your statement that photography is the most important of the arts. I don't see you defending that statement.
== I don't need to. Its not critical to the point.
If you have a true interest in the subject matter, its worth looking into further. I would encourage other HN readers to do the same, if they have an interest in it. The interesting stuff in contemporary photography is well-beyond what you've listed. I'd take that as an opportunity to learn more about the subject, rather than taking it personally. For the most part, it is German and Japanese leading the way. Books are your friend, and an increasingly good investment.
I had a difficult time reading this article, because it provided no source or argument for: "When photography was first becoming popular, it was mostly used as a form of artistic expression." Which completely ignores how photography displaced painting in the genre of portraiture, and made it more accessible. Then Mr. Curtis explains haughtily that communication is the new use for photography and that of course is an entirely different thing from artistic expression. In fact, artistic expression is bad because it inhibits us! I highly doubt the majority of people using Instagram are engaging in a visual language of symbol and metaphor (oops, that sounds like communication!)
So we have it that communication is better when it's easier and we are no longer shackled by the editorial desire to not produce a bunch of junk. Now, Mr. Curtis says, we can communicate that we like the hit television show Breaking Bad by taking a photo of our screen with a thumbs up! What a glorious age we live in.
Yeah, I have to agree. Photography can be used as a communication tool now, thanks to Treehouse and Snapchat? Thanks, Mr Curtis, for the insightful wizardly pronouncement to the masses. I'm sure photojournalists of the last 100+ years will be pleased to know that there now is a reason or platform for their efforts.
Seriously? Curtis lauds people writing a comment on a scrap of paper, taking a photo of it as a means to circumvent the lack of a commenting system on a website and hails it as "Photography's Third Act"? Wow, just... wow.
You're glossing over the author's solid point on the nature of design, that over-engineering can stifle creative input. In the example he provides, the users became distracted from the purely photographic form of communication by a text-based one.
I like a related point I think he makes: that adding a feedback mechanism to a photo site turns the site from being about photography to being about feedback. In other words, it moves from being a site where people post photographs they like to a site where they post pictures they think others will like.
Agreed, I nearly laughed out loud when I read that line. Ironically, this is a situation where one of those useless college degrees everyone here loves to hate (Art History, for example) would come in rather handy.
I found it hard to agree or disagree with you, because I couldn't imagine how images would be a more convenient than text to communicate. I would have loved more detail around the new use cases you see being part of this 3rd wave.
take a gander at some art history. when photography was first introduced in France in the first half of the 1800s it sparked a longrunning debate concerning the medium's place amongst other art forms, or even whether it should be considered an art form at all. Part of the debate was centered around public figures such as Nadar (who made photographic portraits of people such as Jules Verne and Charles Baudelaire). Nadar was so reviled by some for his insistence on photography as a high art that he was the subject of ridicule in the popular press, for example in this caricature [1]. It seems odd that something so banal to us as a photo should provoke such a debate, but photography had a highly disruptive effect on the rigid, academic art world of the day, in a way reminiscent of the anger caused by the introduction of the railroad not long before, or the way some individuals have predicted 3D printing technology could disrupt manafacturing and the power structures associated with it.
[1]"nadar raising photography to the height of art" by Honoré Daumier http://bit.ly/12qOL4Z
I have. Hence my reaction to the article's unqualified introductory move "when photography was first popular it was used for x." We don't know how the author measures 'popular' or exactly what time frame he's referring to by 'when.' It's the sort of statement that needs to be framed, explained and supported, not one that can easily be taken for granted.
Keep in mind that art is most properly classified as a subset of communication, so in certain cases a very similar vocabulary will be used regarding them.
You say the author is incorrect in implying that artistic expression may inhibit us, yet in his context, artistic expressions or attempts thereof do inhibit the users, because they're attempting to communicate artistically, rather than directly and immediately as the author wishes.
> You say the author is incorrect in implying that artistic expression may inhibit us
No. I didn't say any such thing. Please don't misquote me. It's not that I don't think that trying to make better content is inhibitive, it's that it's worth it. Quantity, populist or not, does not automatically usurp quality.
"Snapchat... . It’s an amazing app, and its insane popularity is just a hint of how I think we’ll use photos in the future."
Myself, and a quick survey in the room, of a bunch of various tech, and for that matter photography types - not one had heard of, let alone used Snapchat...
Same here (I thought it was something he made up, but I was wrong - http://www.snapchat.com/) and weirder... since he didn't link to it, and just kind of mentioned it out of the blue, I thought I missed the part where he told me more about it. I read it again and found I was wrong once again.
Well considering Snapchat isn't necessarily aimed at photography types and assuming you are older than the demographic that it is blowing up in (12-20 year olds), it makes sense that you haven't heard of it.
This app is pretty clearly about dick pics and has nothing to do with photography. This article is just the author patting himself on the back for running a sexting social network for preteens. Yeah, great job, buddy.
49 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 99.4 ms ] threadSo I have no idea either.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/24/forget-todays-drama-dustin-...
The site that he originally published articles through (http://www.dustincurtis.com) is worth a look just for the quality of the design. Probably his most effective post (the one that most people will have experienced the effects of) is this: http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter....
You can see his submissions over time on HN to get an idea of how he's known in this community. http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=dus...
Have we considered it's a joke? A simple joke a first, but over time grown sentient. Maybe there are multiple people in the cabal of Dustin Curtis: designer, over-generalizing pontificator, and website engineer. Elite trolling for people who already think they are better than everybody else. A Fox News commentator of startups, except most people are in so deep they can't see the deranged minds behind the narrative.
Does Dustin Curtis interact on any platforms beside twitter and his own website? nickb taken to a whole other level?
And this is the high point of design apparently...
Still, I love that feeling of playing with a truly novel technology for the first time with a few friends, especially when it's presented in the raw with few extraneous features. There's a feeling of excitement and exploration that seems to decay in a year's time at best.
No, it was mostly used for portraiture and things you could generalize as journalism. Photography as an accepted fine art is a pretty recent thing.
Photography was used, among other things, for demonstrating medical conditions, for mugshots (and compositing many photos to capture a “scientific” “type” of different sorts of criminals or members of particular social classes), for scientific imagery, for understanding movement (Muybridge & al.), for propaganda (well beyond “journalism”), for faddish semi-scams (like the famous “spirit” photographs), for documentation of people and places (with types of photos it would be quite a stretch to call either “journalism” or “portraiture”), for making reproductions of other types of art, and yes, for fine art in itself (there were huge debates about whether photography counted as “art” going right back to the beginning, with the pictorialists e.g. famously making their images out of focus or otherwise blurry, scratched, etc. so that it could be “art” instead of a purely mechanical process). Indeed, nearly all of the uses of photography date back to the 19th century, they just weren’t as widespread as today.
First, the truth status of this sweeping statement is hard to assess, but I think it's more wrong than right. If you had to complete your sentence "The most important...", I think you'd better put installation, or perhaps conceptual art, rather than photography.
It would be better not to make such statements at all -- doing so combines two notoriously slippery concepts, "art" and "most important". (If we can't define art, and good luck doing it, then defining most important art is well out of reach.)
Anyway, you and the comment above you are talking across each other. You're saying that photography is important to contemporary art. jberryman is saying that the most common use cases of photography are not art, and tend to be documentary, not aesthetic. Both of you can be right.
It would be better not to make such statements at all...
-- As you said.
http://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/hyman-writing.jp...
_____________________
[1] Citations for context, if you need them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_photogra...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhein_II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Topographics
Non-topographic 19th Century art with 20th C influence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cameron_julia_jackson.jpg
_________
Is "Photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art"?
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Photography-Matters-Never-Before/d...
_________
Does art exist?
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Objective_Eye.html?i...
__________
I didn't say photography was unimportant. I said that it's hard to defend your statement that photography is the most important of the arts. I don't see you defending that statement.
I do see you putting words in my mouth, with quotes as if I wrote them ("at the cutting edge"). It's a tautology that photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art. So is painting. So is multimedia installation.
Your last note ("does art exist") is puzzling, because nobody here said art did not exist. I did say it's hard to define, and lots of artists are working to keep it that way. Is a sculpture made of fingernail clippings art (http://strose.lunaimaging.com:8180/luna/servlet/detail/StRos...)?
This is an exhibition catalog excerpt. The artist (from the 1850's) is being exhibited because of his links to XYZ (the guy with the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, linked above, in 2011). The Guy XYZ is a student of Becher (==New Topographics), the former a Pioneer of the original aesthetic now called Topographic/s. That, in a nutshell is the point I was making. Interesting stuff was happening in the 1800's. In Art. With Photography.
I didn't say photography was unimportant. I said that it's hard to defend your statement that photography is the most important of the arts. I don't see you defending that statement.
== I don't need to. Its not critical to the point.
If you have a true interest in the subject matter, its worth looking into further. I would encourage other HN readers to do the same, if they have an interest in it. The interesting stuff in contemporary photography is well-beyond what you've listed. I'd take that as an opportunity to learn more about the subject, rather than taking it personally. For the most part, it is German and Japanese leading the way. Books are your friend, and an increasingly good investment.
http://www.amazon.com/Photobook-History-2-Martin-Parr/dp/071...
So we have it that communication is better when it's easier and we are no longer shackled by the editorial desire to not produce a bunch of junk. Now, Mr. Curtis says, we can communicate that we like the hit television show Breaking Bad by taking a photo of our screen with a thumbs up! What a glorious age we live in.
Seriously? Curtis lauds people writing a comment on a scrap of paper, taking a photo of it as a means to circumvent the lack of a commenting system on a website and hails it as "Photography's Third Act"? Wow, just... wow.
The first non-commercial uses of photography were for experimentation and artistic portraiture. I don't understand why you disagree with me.
I'm not saying there's no future for artistic photography; I'm saying that there are new use cases that haven't yet been fully developed.
[1]"nadar raising photography to the height of art" by Honoré Daumier http://bit.ly/12qOL4Z
I have. Hence my reaction to the article's unqualified introductory move "when photography was first popular it was used for x." We don't know how the author measures 'popular' or exactly what time frame he's referring to by 'when.' It's the sort of statement that needs to be framed, explained and supported, not one that can easily be taken for granted.
You say the author is incorrect in implying that artistic expression may inhibit us, yet in his context, artistic expressions or attempts thereof do inhibit the users, because they're attempting to communicate artistically, rather than directly and immediately as the author wishes.
No. I didn't say any such thing. Please don't misquote me. It's not that I don't think that trying to make better content is inhibitive, it's that it's worth it. Quantity, populist or not, does not automatically usurp quality.
Myself, and a quick survey in the room, of a bunch of various tech, and for that matter photography types - not one had heard of, let alone used Snapchat...