“Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you’re sure to find some of them.” – Daryl Zero

I recently watched one of my favorite films from the 1990s, the Zero Effect, and thought this gem applied nicely to photography.

“Their key insight is that creative ideas can only spread if they’re actually adopted by others. Too much creativity, and there’s not enough imitation—ideas die on the vine, because there are so many of them and few ever catch fire. For good ideas to spread, there’s an optimal balance to be reached between creating and imitating.”

Is Imitation the Hidden Key to Creativity? [Fast Company] via Caterina Fake

I’ve seen a clear theme emerging in a lot of stuff I’ve read in the last couple months on contemporary art photography and contemporary art in general. It is that people now increasingly believe that the age of contemporary art/ photography that ramped up in the 60’s and 70’s and ran strong through the 80’s and 90’s is now on the wane if not actually over, and that something else must be moving onto the stage, even though it’s totally unclear what it is.

And maybe more interestingly, they seem to be realizing, some more than others, that the main reason that contemporary art/ photography has gone on as long as it has and is still limping along is that the ideas that lie at its foundation – especially the ideas of conceptualism and intentionality – became institutionalized in the art establishment and the art schools and became things that critics and theoreticians talked about and teachers taught and students learned as a matter of course without anyone really questioning them or subjecting them to critical examination. This began maybe thirty years ago and is still continuing today.

People seem a bit reluctant to point specific fingers, but this is not, to me at least, surprising. The reason is that they themselves are responsible. Why? Because they all got teaching jobs during the big expansion of art programs in the 70’s (especially), and have become middle aged and complacent in their positions. You can’t blame them for this, but you can’t trust them either, to point the way to the future. They are too secure, too armchair, too invested in the status quo, however much they make a show of trying to shake it up.

If you really want to figure out what’s going to happen, forget about these people and pay attention to the under thirties, the unemployed (or working crappy day jobs), the entrepreneurs, the crazies, the geniuses. They’re the ones who are going to actually make the future. – John Legweak

“In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr..” [HCSP]

“My big theory is that in photography it doesn’t function as a narrative, but the photographer takes the place of the protagonist in the story, and you take the place of the photographer. I use the example of the last picture in the Americans, where Frank shows the picture of his child and his wife in the car. That picture makes you really think about him, about the journey. That’s what gets me excited about photography.” – Alec Soth

DOG DAYS BOGOTA: A CONVERSATION WITH ALEC SOTH [Big Red & Shiny]

For some reason, it kind of reminds me of this Jackson Pollock quote.

“New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements… the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.”

These apocalyptic ideas about the fate of objects contribute to my mistrust of them (and the assumed permanence of their existence in places like museums), but the greatest problem I see for objects in the art world are their tendency to be the vessels through which artists are controlled by those more powerful than themselves.

Brad Troemel [JOGGING]

I get very tired of the dissing of Flickr by photographers who don’t use it. It’s sort of like saying California isn’t worth visiting because of all the freeways in LA. There are too many distinct communities using this platform to make any kind of worthwhile generalization, and for all their collective might, HCSP, LPV, yousuck, etc, are drops in the bucket.

Flickr mitigates against a carefully edited presentation by its very nature and is interesting precisely because of that. It’s not that I’m interested in seeing your garbage or you mine, but rather that it’s interesting to watch someone’s visual thought process at work — like crawling under the house and checking out the foundation. So I like seeing what Todd Fisher’s posting even though I don’t worship his stuff as the second coming, and I love looking at Waxy’s family shots because those images give me a fuller sense of what he’s doing when he’s being “serious” whatever the hell that means. I can say that about a lot of photographers on Flickr — I like to see what visual ticks have got them going at this moment. The imperfect stab at a solution is often more helpful in understanding my own current photographic dilemmas than the really really good ones. And a lot less intimidating!

Chuck Patch [via HCSP]