THE WHOLE FRAGMENT

I recently saw William Eggelston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum in New York.  The lush photographs were spread out over one floor: a teenage boy herding shopping carts in a grocery store parking lot, the empty surreal rooms of Graceland, the old-fashioned white china and mashed potatoes of a southern U.S. Thanksgiving dinner, a woman’s hairspray-perfect beehive in a small town diner. Eggelston’s famous photographs of the 1960s and 1970s still look fresh, revealing something of the the simple/dirty/strong soul of America.

What does it take to represent the U.S. today?

A friend was telling me recently that there is a sort of crisis in documentary photography – that the images that professional photographers are taking now don’t necessarily represent the USA any better than the images that “amateurs” are taking and posting online. For example, the photos of a 15-year old punk girl in Alabama of herself and her friends could be quite revealing about teen life, more so than images that a 50-year old National Geographic type might snap of teenagers.

We began talking about the (emerging?) role of the curator in new media and online media. e.g. People and/or websites that build a reputation for sorting through content produced by others and presenting it an interesting way – either as is, or in an re-edited form. This is possible with news stories, photos, and also with video. For example, the experimental filmmaker Bruce Elder’s “Crack, Brutal Grief” (2001) is made entirely from images pulled from the internet. His film is sometimes categorized as “open source filmmaking”.

Could the professional photographer/filmmaker/journalist be replaced by curators of ‘amateur’ media? Is the new media maker a curator? New content aggregation tools like Yahoo Pipes, photo sharing sites like Flickr, and open video sites and standards like Kaltura and The Open Video Alliance may be enablers of this kind of curatorial media-making.