I’m traveling today, and that gives me an opportunity to catch up on this blog. I’ve been doing a lot of work for a contractor client. You can see new work here and here.
I’ve been thinking about visual communication for the last few days. I wrote about photography as a language back at the beginning of this blog. Images have been important to communication since someone painted on the walls of Lascaux. Since it used to be difficult to make images you only saw them in Churches and castles for much of history. Oil paintings have never been cheap. When I was young photographs were common, but people put value on them. So my mother didn’t send pictures of my brother and me to her mother. As prints became relatively cheaper people exchanged prints more often. I remember the first time I received a picture of the bride and groom from their wedding. I didn’t know what to do with it, am I supposed to keep this, or what?
I wrote about the difference between taking and making pictures, but I haven’t really figured out what the ubiquity of visual communication will do. The Jetsons had a picture phone, but all it did was show a picture of the person talking. I was at an event the other day where they sang happy birthday to a person who wasn’t there. This performance was recorded on a phone and sent to the person celebrating the birthday. Not only wouldn’t this have been possible in 1980, but personally I would never have thought of doing such a thing.
So I am interested in how you are incorporating tools like the phone, Facebook and other media into your day-to-day communication. Do you send pictures frequently? What sort of pictures? Do you send much video? The idea is that you take photographs to make a personal visual diary of your life. Do you make that public? How public? How do you share this with others. I am really curious about how people are working with these tools, and how they are sharing the images of their lives.
Thanks, John Siskin
Ps. I don’t have a lot of images on this laptop, so I’m just adding some that I have. Better than pictures of the Burbank Airport. John
Please check out my classes:
An Introduction to Photographic Lighting