Friday, December 14, 2012

Like coarsest clothes against the cold

I haven't had much exercise this week. Well, on Monday I commuted by bicycle, 65 minutes in each direction, so that was something, but after that I have been using other things than my feet for moving forward. Today I managed to go for a walk after dinner, and it was nice. We are getting some more snow, the depth of snow figure is 37 cm, but I think the snow has compacted a bit, so there is in fact more snow on the ground than earlier.

PS. I guess you have heard of the curious case of Hera Bell, a photographer who was stealing a lot of photographs from fellow photographers and showed them as her own. It all started when a Finnish photographer noticed a familiar photograph (with a detailed but faked story) on her blog.

And now probably a significant number of photographers are checking to see whether their work has also been stolen somewhere. Well, I don't think mine is, and so what if it were.

I just realized that one viewpoint to this matter was provided by Cedric, who wrote a fine piece, on the importance of photographs vs. seeing: "Photography was starting to shift from being an act of making photos to a simple act of seeing. As such, the attachment to my photographs has been diminishing to the point where I no longer feel the need to safeguard them."

Cedric is here writing about backups and such things, but I think this could also apply to "stealing" of photographs. So what if someone sees something that is of value in a photograph and steals it. It is the seeing which matters. Maybe I'm too simple.

(Posting title is from a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.)

2 comments:

Cedric Canard said...

You are correct Juha, by "safeguard" I do not just mean backing-up but anything at all including the possibility of my images being "stolen". These concerns do not matter to me. It is not to say that I condone the act of stealing other people's work but rather that for me and my own work it is of no importance. In any case, I think most people do the right thing and ask permission to use images. Some have even paid me money even after indicating that they could have the photo for free.

Juha Haataja said...

Indeed, the fact is that people are often surprisingly honest, and even though I have put a Creative Commons license on my photographs at Flickr, people ask permission anyway.

The only photographs I want to preserve, though not going to extreme measures, are family photographs, they are a record of past days, but that is quite different from "trying to" see, which is the thing that makes photography interesting to me.