Photo by Ray Potes
Happy New Year! Peace to you and all your peoples.
I have this battle in my head that makes me want to barf sometimes. Where one side is about doing more on social media and the other side is about doing more on the website. What happens is a stand still and everything is frozen for months or years at a time. (I have already written about this a bunch and have deleted and re-started multiple accts on multiple apps. I’m sorry.)
Today there is peace in this particular weird war. This pandemic and subsequent quarantine(s) have forced many realizations. The problem was never ig vs website. The problem was analog Hamburger Eyes vs digital Hamburger Eyes.
The digital side was originally built to service the sales of the zines and books, the analog side. What happens is the digital side does not sleep and is always hungry. And is always talking shit. It is a multi-headed monster of store, blog, site, ig, yt, etc.
The analog side tries its best to keep up by making zines and books and clothes and photography accessories as fast as financially possible, yet the digital side is never satiated. So the roles have now reversed and this makes both sides very sensitive.
The solution is to separate them. I have tried to kill the digital side on purpose multiple times, it won’t die. The economy has tried to kill the zines and books on accident multiple times, it won’t die.
We separate them by feeding them their own specific food and at their own specific feeding times. I am not sure exactly what this will look like yet. It could be as simple as more blog posts on the site (like this one, thanks to those who miss these writings) and more ig stories. Or it can be as complicated as submissions for site/ig (photo of the day, for example) and separate submissions for zines/books.
Obviously, as per usual, overthinking everything. Maybe the main point is that in these crazy isolated times, we need to connect and share more in as many ways as possible because we, you the photographers, are more important now than ever.
6 responses to “Peace”
Ray, I think it all seems to boil down to whether or not you want to be permanent or transient. Books and magazines have more permanence than digital and have a tactile benefit. If it were up to me, print would be where to focus your effort. Photography is all about the print. Digital should only promote printed product. IG and other digital media is cool and all that but once someone spends 20 seconds on a digital image it’s life is over. Nobody hangs a digital image on the wall. It’s gone forever in a click.
Your last paragraph is key though. Keep the conversation going however that happens. It’s too important to stop.
Keep it up, man.
Thanks Blayne! What I didn’t say is that when I’m not posting regularly on ig, people start dm-ing and emailing me, “what happened?”. I’m like uh a pandemic happened and publishing is slow right now lol. I noticed I post a lot when I’m publishing a lot. And I guess this post is about me thinking out loud of how to somehow separate the two.
I think the cool thing about HE is that when I saw it on ig for the first time I thought “oh wow something is happening, but somewhere else not here” and it lit this spark that got me searching for what I thought I’d found. so you are doing something right, i guess? i think it’s great that you have a website and there is things to be found here, and maybe we can start going to self-contained websites for the things specifically we are interested in again soon? and not everything on the internet is inside the same app
digital media is a potent spice. a pinch wakes you up, too much dulls your senses
Awesome, thank you Jorba! Glad you found us! This is excellent example of ig doing what it is supposed to be doing.
Haha, good one Cratwoo. Def dulls senses!