I've been giving this some thought over the past few weeks. I've had digital cameras for some time now. Nothing fancy you understand. Just the basics. I was never really interested in photography actually. To the extent, that though I have numerous children, I have few photos of them when they were young. So it's ironic now that I have a digital camera I've become a junk photographer. Now I can shoot any old piece of crap and really, what I lack are good pictures of my kids. Ironic.
So what is junk photography? As I mentioned, I've been giving this some serious thought. In the beginning there was the portrait painter. Painting portraits of people wealthy enough to be able to afford to have an artist render them for posterity. They did a good job too. We expect oil portraits to last for hundreds of years. A century and a half ago, perhaps more, photography became feasible and to a certain extent, in the hands of professional practitioners, wide-spread. At least more widespread than portrait painters. So getting a portrait done became more common. Photographers could replicate the actions of portrait painters without necessarily having the same skill sets. They could also work faster and crank out a greater volume of output over increasingly shorter periods of time. Then about 100 years ago, innovators like Kodak, Polaroid, etc created consumer cameras that put this capability in the hands of almost everyone. I know my history is wrong and even a small amount of research could rectify this. Bear with me. I'll patch and paint as I go.
By the 60's instamatic cameras took much of the guesswork out of photography and greater automation in controls meant that point and shoot became the norm rather than the exception. No one had to read manuals or take courses or read books anymore.
Fast forward to the 1990's and the beginning of the digital camera revolution. Crappy in the beginning. Just suitable for the web or viewing on the computer. Then improvements in technology leading to megapixel this and that and before you know it massive increases in storage. So my point is? We are now at that turning point in technological history where it is now so cheap to take photographs that we are no longer one step removed from replacing portrait painters. We have now reached the point where photography is almost as free as water or air. Which means we have entered the era of Junk Photography. We can waste shots like water. Time to start photographing EVERYTHING. All the junk and detritus that define life. All the moments good, bad and indifferent. Grey skies, poor light, lens flares, sidewalks, dead flowers, all the decay of society is now within easy and costless reach.
I remember laughing when I first saw photos taken with the Lomo. A junk camera if ever there was one. Now what is called "lomography" is nothing short of junk photography for the trendy. They make you pay for effects that take 15 seconds to replicate in photoshop...or my favourite, iPhoto. Come on people! This is a historical turning point in history. The era of Junk Photography and the junk photographer. We have moved beyond subject/object to subject/subject object/object. Just shoot the damn camera at anything. Waste the shots. Abandon composition. Deconstruct. Blur. Saturate.
It's only art if we say it is.
