Ever since the vast majority of users jumped from Flickr to Instagram, users have been complaining about Instagram’s lack of community, the tiny photo sizes, the lack of aspect ratios, and the dreaded algorithm; the latter especially became the target of their ire when many people didn’t see the amount of views they felt they deserved.

Several developers are now coming out with new photo apps that promise to fix the situation. And Flickr, it would seem, is their benchmark, with many promising an experience that rivals that of using Flickr back in the heady days when everyone was using it to find, show, and discuss photography online.

But they are addressing the wrong problem. First of all, Flickr is still around. You can still view good photography there at reasonable sizes. You can still join groups and talk about photography. People complain that the free version is insufficient and that you have to pay a small amount for all the usability, but then again, many of the newer apps coming out are also paid apps.

There is a salient reason why so many people abandoned a decidedly superior photo-viewing/community service in favor of a mobile app with tiny photos and very little community. The fact of the matter, despite all the engagement-farming claims in Threads posts like “I want to see everyone’s work, post it here!”, is this simple, unavoidable truth:

People seeking attention vastly outnumber people seeking photography.

This is not a recent phenomenon The number of people making and sharing photos skyrocketed when the technology made it cheap and easy to do, but their interest was mainly in using this state of affairs to garner attention. The number of people interested in making and finding compelling, authentic work, however, is a much flatter line. Instagram and the Like catered to the needs of attention-seeking users, and easily made images with strong geometric elements and colors that would stand out on a tiny screen soon dominated the genre, to the detriment of detail and subtlety. Once those users had decamped for Instagram, most everyone else followed because “everyone is on IG.” 

So what are some of the current contenders for “the next Flickr”? Not that it matters much as they’re all falling into the same trap, but we might as well talk about some of the attempts:

First up is Glass. Glass is “a paid, global community platform for photographers. With no ads or manipulative algorithms, Glass is your home for photography.” So first off, it is, like Flickr, a paid app. To its credit, photos are viewable on large screens. Though it stresses “community”, I couldn’t find any discussion groups, but then again, I didn’t purchase the paid service. The viewing experience was pleasant enough, perhaps on par with that of Flickr, so I began uploading images. Before long, however, one was deleted, and I got a warning message. It turned out to be a street photo whose frame included a small boy pissing into a street grate. I appealed and received an even sterner warning from Glass’s head honcho that no such images would be tolerated and that my account was being threatened with deletion. 

Ok, so that’s a no for me, and probably many others. What else?

There’s Foto, a much-talked-about app that is also subscription-based but promises a free version. It promises other things, too: “Reclaim your feed.” It exhorts. “Chronological, ad-free, and uncropped. Our goals are to let you see the posts of people you actually follow, to give you control of your experience within our app and reinforce that images are important and powerful.” Seems like a low bar. Also, Foto has been “coming soon” for some time now. Will it be desktop-based as well as mobile? Will there be groups? It’s difficult to see any actual improvements on Flickr at this theoretical juncture. 

I was also told to consider Lyrak, which is all about users being able to make bag from their images. But when I asked if a desktop version would be available or if it was simply replicated the tiny-image problem of Instagram, I got no reply. 

There are others, but it seems that, while most are concentrated on getting more viewers, more income, more Likes/Favs, and more attention, hardly anyone is talking about the work itself, i.e. finding and encouraging better photography, or actually discussing it. Unless that changes, it will be more of the same. That is, until AI reaches the point where personal photography isn’t taken over by phones as many have feared, but by instant, faultless keyword-driven image generators. No longer will anyone face the risk of a “bad” photo of themselves or anything else. Clients and customers will all be generally satisfied. Everything will look fine, every time, to an audience base trained to click Like on nicely arranged graphic elements. And nobody will have to do the work, go to places or take the risks of actually observing the world and making a photographic record of it. Indeed, Google is already vomiting up AI-generated travesties in searches for famous street photographers. At that point, we won’t be talking about which photo platform is best. We most likely won’t be talking at all.

So what can we do to improve the situation, assuming of course that enough people actually want to shift the focus from the attention economy to photography (which is a big-ass-umption)? We could of course sit on our laurels as Flickr has, confident that a sufficient number of people really love genuine photography and will do the Right Thing in the end. 

Or, we could prioritize discussion and instruction that considers and elevates compelling, meaningful, emotive work over simple attention-gathering. Too many street photography “workshops” consist of leading groups of independently wealthy Western travelers with nothing but time and the latest high-end gear to “image-rich” (i.e. third-world) countries, where they are told where to stand and what to photograph in order to get those Instagram-friendly compositions. In fact, “Instagram spots” should be avoided rather than sought out, and Like/Viewer numbers should be relegated to a place below one’s own unique vision. Conversations should be shifted from the endless gear talk and rage-inducing hot takes in which we are currently drowning to what our images say about us and our ever-more-precarious connection to the world around us.

The problem with shifting the conversation back to meaningful photography is that such an enormous space has been created within the text-based attention-driven social media sphere that it now feels woefully insufficient to just allow the work speak its wordless messages into being without wrapping everything up in our desperate pleas for validation at any cost. But if photography is to have any kind of future, any reason to exist going forward, that is what we must allow it to do, with or without the latest app.

I recently came across the photobook “In Guns We Trust” by Canadian “lens-based visual artist” Jean-Francois Bouchard, published in 2019 by the Magenta Foundation, “a trailblazing charitable arts-publishing house that consistently showcases the work of talented artists on a global scale, drawing attention to under-represented and emerging artists with powerful exhibitions and a roster of impressive international publications.” The book is mainly composed of photos of white Americans, men for the most part in heroic poses holding oversized guns in front of majestic desert landscapes, interspersed with the various bullet-ridden objects, mostly foreign cars and woman-shaped mannequins, that they target at a large shooting range in Arizona.

At first I thought it must be a parody rather than a serious attempt at photographic exploration, but when I read the text by Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland, it would seem that the people behind this project genuinely thought they were doing something other than simply glorifying ultraconservative white Americans’ gun fixation. There is not even the slightest mention of the dire situation and human cost created and constantly exacerbated by this obsession. Rather, Coupland bends over backward to insist, in this most ludicrous of terms, that the book’s one-sidedness is in fact a comprehensive view; those asking if this is “gonzo ethnography”, Coupland says, “incorrectly assume that Bouchard sees his subjects as being very different from himself, when in fact, he does not. It’s just that they possess a pesky 21st century one little thing that sets them apart. It seems everyone has at least one, if not more. Bouchard’s work asks the viewer, ‘What’s yours?'” This man then actually equates gun obsession with being gay, a woman, anti-vax, anti-abortion, or addicted to meth.

“The main goal of this body of work is to gain a better understanding of the impact of the military ethos in civil society,” Coupland goes on, oblivious to the fact that imagery of gun owners standing proudly in the desert next to bullet-riddled Hondas does exactly none of that. To those who see America’s gun obsession as a serious issue, Coupland suggest such people live in their own bubbles, adding “Why be so quick to dismiss something because it’s not your thing? Where is empathy? Where is nuance?” I’d actually like to know the answers to those questions, because they were nowhere to be found in this book.

Bouchard himself admits, “To be honest, I have more in common with these people than feels acceptable to acknowledge.” You think?

The shallowness of such projects echoes the disturbing trend in the media of, in an effort to court “both sides”, completely abandoning objectivity and embracing dangerously extremist views. It’s not just the New York Times, it seems to be encroaching upon many areas of discourse these days. It’s one reason I decided to make my visit to the U.S. sooner than later, as I have no idea where this road leads, but I’m afraid that light up ahead isn’t the end of the tunnel, but rather tracer bullets lighting up the remains of artistic introspection.

After a nice long sleep (a rarer thing than it should be), I awoke on Sunday morning to the sound of drums and traditional instruments coming from outside my window. For a while I deliberated whether I should go out and investigate or just continue to lie in bed. Taiqi practice was cancelled due to rain, and I’d grown bored with the VR comedy stuff.

So, investigate it was. I grabbed my bag, cameras and umbrella and went downstairs to see a procession of young women wearing flowery regalia underneath transparent rain gear striding down the hill in front of my building. I circled down past a trio of straw-hatted men struggling to move ancient rusty tricycles bearing temple banners, past some curious tourists by the bridge, cameras aimed and ready, and then back up the hill to the temple, which I guessed would be the center of the activities.

I got there just as groups of men in face paint and temple regalia were just finishing up rushing around the courtyard with palanquins carrying various gods. It was now time for lunch, and everyone retreated to the piles of bento boxes awaiting them. I was photographing a woman putting a raincoat on her child by the stage facing the temple when my attention was caught by another child running around the stage among the aforementioned men in face paint and regalia. Occasionally one of the men would give him a sip from a brown bottle of whatever they were drinking, Whisbih or something. “Come on up!” one of them called to me.

So I went up, and spent the next hour or so chatting with them as they relaxed, ate from bento boxes, and fixed each other’s regalia. They were all from Kaohsiung, at the other end of Taiwan, a long way to travel. I said I hadn’t known there was going to be an event today. “Oh, nobody knows,” a man with a single tooth told me. “We just show up. By the way, do you know what the main god worshipped here is?”

Usually at such religious events, I’ve found that the performers often don’t want their photos taken when they’re not completely made up and posing, i.e. no pictures of them eating, smoking, chewing betelnet (“The dentist said I shouldn’t stop, my teeth are only held in place by the betelnut by this point,” one told me as he chewed), etc. But nobody here expressed any such concerns. A couple of them had even apparently heard of me, though I have no idea how.

“You’re that famous photographer!” one of them said.

“You’ve heard of me?”

“No,” the man said and pointed at his friend. “But he has.”

“I’m not a professional or anything; I just enjoy it,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” said the friend.

Everyone seemed to good spirits, even though their grass sandals were soaked from the rain, their red-and-white regalia full of holes. “From all the firecrackers, I guess,” I said, and they were surprised that I knew that. One of them, a huge man who could have been a professional wrestler, wanted me to cuss in Taiwanese for him. “This might not the most suitable place for that kind of thing,” I said, gesturing at the temple, and he nodded at what was apparently the right answer.

“So you know what’s up…not bad.” The men had apparently brought their families with them on the trek, and some of the kids had joined in the procession. They told me boys as young as three could participate. Apparently the Whisbih-sipping kid wasn’t quite of age. I spent a very long time refusing one of the extra bentos (they also ordered KFC), but in the end I accepted it because they just weren’t backing down. And I was hungry.

The procession trucks started up, igniting a flurry of activity as everyone donned their crowns and headdresses and other bits of regalia they’d taken off to eat. A minute later they were off again. I had practice with the Ramblers later, but part of me would have liked to have followed them as they continued on their way after lunch, braving the gravel trucks and buses as they marched in the rain up Ankeng Road to the next temple.

“Look at this!” a friend of mine said the other day, shoving his phone at me. “I took it completely by accident!” 

It wasn’t a bad shot, a tilted, blurry image of some people on a sidewalk. But what had so impressed my friend was that it wasn’t what he usually took, i.e. shots of posed friends eating food, the food itself, sunsets, artsy posters, etc. My friend, in his mind, had just accomplished street photography. He had joined the club and was ready to don The Hat. I appreciated his confiding in me and loved to see him happy; friends are more important than photography after all. But it wasn’t the first time I’d encountered the perception of street photography as basically just accidents. 

It’s an easy assumption to make; the very nature of street photography is based on observations of candid, unplanned (by the photographer) scenes. And most people tend to extend that description of the subject matter to the practice itself. Street photography, in their minds, can only happen by accident. Practitioners of other types of photography note the lack of control they usually wield in terms of setting up shots, lighting, models, poses, etc., and conclude that, minus that level of control, one is left completely at the mercy of the universe (although in my experience the universe can and does provide better than I can, so I’m good with that). It also explains the acclaim for photos of actual accidents, mishaps, juxtapositions, etc. within the genre. People posting photos in online critique threads often also add long explanations to their submissions, saying this or that happened “by accident” to stave off any accusations or criticism. It wasn’t their fault, you see, because, well, street, you know…it just happened. By the same token, “Luck” is often used to describe more successful shots, but it boils down to the same thing.

One of the results of this view is a general sense that there can’t be much actual skill or technique involved in the practice of street photography; one is just naturally lucky or not. It’s a comforting thought for many people; no one can be to blame for poor results. In my experience teaching street photography, I’ve found that instructing students who see photos but need help refining how to express what they see through compelling work is a completely different endeavor than advising students who simply don’t see photos and complain that “there’s just nothing happening!” I try to meet students where they are, but this is difficult territory to traverse because I can’t tell others what should strike them as photographable beyond, well, just about anything and everything, depending on what you notice and how you perceive it. They assume that such work “just happens” and all they have to do is be at the “right” spot with the “right” camera and boom: ART. Presented with collected works of street photographs that were accumulated, crafted and edited over the course of several years or decades, their takeaway is somehow that all of these scenes must be just waiting for them, in perfect order and wrapped up with a bow, during a single fast-paced stride down the block, Right Camera held out in front of them to capture that inevitable decisive moment. When it seldom happens, or when they miss it when it does, the walk was disappointing and a waste of time. They conclude that they’re just not lucky and either give up or simply take bad photos of unhoused people they deem “interesting characters.”

Not long ago I responded to a post by a well-known photography blogger concerning street photography, including tips and tricks and other advice, some of which I found rather questionable, e.g.: “Have a friend with you…if you’re a larger male, being in the company of a female works wonders. Women in particular seem to think: Well, she trusts him, so he’s probably all right.”

The thing is, said blogger is not a street photographer, his experience largely deriving from equipment reviews, and has never shown much particular aptitude in that respect. Though I refrained from singling him out, I couldn’t help but observe that, unlike other genres, street photography seems to tempt those who don’t really do it very well to tell others how to do it. I never see people telling others how to do, say, fashion photography without at least having done it themselves with some amount of success, but with Street I see it all the time. When said blogger didn’t publish my comment, I thought: Perhaps he is rethinking the matter.

Well.

His very next post had my comment pegged in bold at the top, though without a link as if he were protecting me from myself, while he exhorted his followers to just look at the ridiculousness he had to put up with. His answer to my effrontery? “Well, of course! If someone is naturally good at something and has never experienced problems, how would they know what the problems are?” He then posted about how failure was a good thing, and then had some kind of existential crisis before boasting about one of his images making Flickr’s Explore page, with repeatedly updated Like and View numbers for our enlightenment followed by a print sale of said photo for several hundred dollars. This man went on a journey. 

It would seem that even most photographers see street photography to be by its very nature accidental. Anyone can do it, and everyone seemingly does; I’ve seen “Street” listed in the bios of photographers who do everything from salon to product photography. In their minds, there are no problems to be experienced with street photography; it simply is, and the good shots “just happen.”

I’ve listened to people attending exhibits featuring classic street photography works by great artists such as Erwitt, Cartier-bresson, Maier, Parks, Frank, Levitt, Winogrand and Eggleston, and many if not most of the comments centered on the photographer’s “incredible luck” to have been where they were when they were, as if all of these scenes were just occurring all around them all the time. You can hear the frustration in the responses of Winogrand and Eggleston in interviews, resorting to mystic, haiku-like responses, clearly at a loss to describe to others how they perceive the world around them, how they convey their vision and interpretation of culture and society through photography when what people really want to know is how to be lucky.

The only thing one can do, according to the truly astounding amount of “instructional” street photography videos on Youtube by people who for the most part demonstrably don’t know what they’re doing, is increase one’s odds by traveling to as many “interesting” places as possible. Indeed, there is a group of people, mostly older/independently wealthy white people from Western nations who more or less constantly attend modern-day photo safaris held year-round all around the world, mostly in what they call “image-rich” third-world cultures, entering the resulting photos in the slew of online contests that charge for each entry and often “winning” them. And I can’t blame them; it sounds like an incredible life for those who have the means, probably better than sitting around one’s mansion pool snorting coke and yelling at one’s trust fund accountants or whatever else it is rich people do. And if one indeed has entirely too much money, one can attend several Magnum workshops, use the best equipment, and, most importantly, rub shoulders with the people who can get one’s work out there, books published, with gallery exhibitions and articles in the New York Times and The Guardian. There’s a reason virtually all of the internationally published street photography compilations have been compiled by a group of straight white cis British men that could fit comfortably in a single taxi.  

But say as it happens you don’t have access to a shit-ton of moolah, and have to work at a job every day just to make ends meet. You’re not “known” by anyone of consequence, which is a Catch-22: If you’re not known, there’s not much you can do to change that situation. It’s no accident that people such as Cartier-bresson and Eggleston came from wealthy families, or that Magnum members in the early days could ask their friends at lunch at Le Dôme: “Hold on, you’re a photographer, how’d you like to join Magnum?” while Maier’s fame came about only after her unfortunate and sad demise, after she had labored to make the work she did while holding down difficult jobs her entire life, and after her work was “discovered” by a random white dude bidding on the detritus of her life at a public auction. 

Wasn’t social media supposed to change all of that, to spread the opportunity a bit wider? It certainly has changed a great deal, but access remains a problem. The Instagram account “Photographers Photographed” typically features well-known photographers caught in the act of photographing. But if you yourself are not well-known, it doesn’t matter whom you caught photographing; the account’s owner only communicates with “known” photographers; your message will not be read. You might have caught a wonderful moment of ol’ Henri himself taking a rare photo with his Leica in 2003 on the streets of Paris, but if you’re not on the list, it might as well not exist.

So in a way, accidents and luck do play a huge role in success in the street photography world, just not the kind of accidents most people have in mind. One can work for decades improving one’s craft, vision, observational and photographic skills to create a compelling, emotive body of work. That part isn’t luck; it’s work, effort and practice. What is luck is belonging to a class, demographic and culture where one’s privilege, means and connections allow for a relatively easy path to success. I personally have had access to opportunities other photographers did not through no fault of their own. Women street photographers have only recently made significant strides in this respect, and while it is not only amazing that it took so long to make even that amount of progress, such longstanding prejudices remain not only pervasive but are largely ignored by those in power. Why do African street photographers struggle to find representation in an international street photography sphere of influence essentially run by a handful of white British dudes? That, I’m sorry to say, is no accident.

Summer is making a grudging entrance, with sporadic heat and rain typical of spring here. I recently bit the bullet and bought a new air conditioning system, one that is not only far quieter and more efficient than my last unit (which, following some negotiation, came with the apartment when I bought it 18 years ago), but also includes a heating function so I don’t have to rely on a leaky oil heater in the winter. Looking forward to having a nice toasty warm apartment on those cold rainy days. The government also provides subsidies for upgrading to more efficient units, which takes some of the punch out of the (still substantial) price tag, which includes not only the units but the installation. The workmen who installed the unit were efficient and professional, and my place only smelled like betelnut for a few days afterward.

The article I recently wrote and photographed for Standart Magazine concerning Taiwan’s coffee culture has been published. They got in touch with me at kind of the last minute, so for a couple of weeks I spent every day going to various cafes, roasters, bean sellers, etc., talking to them and taking photos and generally learning a lot about the development of coffee in Taiwan and how it seems to parallel our democratic development, which makes sense if you consider the era of relative increase in democratic discourse that followed the advent of coffeehouses in other places. Chenbl and I traveled down to Taichung to visit a coffee expert, then renting a car to drive up into the mountains to visit a coffee farm, which was a nice change of pace. The staff at Standart, which is a European publication, were great to work with, and it was nice to have a “mission” so to speak. You can see some of the work I made during that time here.

In other news, Maciej Dakowicz recently held one of his photography workshops in Taipei. Maciej and I first met at a Burn My Eye exhibition opening at a festival in London back in 2012, and we’ve kept in touch over the years. He messaged me about shooting in Taipei as the last time he’d been here was way back in 2003; obviously a lot has changed, and I gave him a few suggestions. When the group arrived Chenbl and I took them over to Snake Alley for dinner at Wang’s Broth, and I met up with them on their subsequent excursions in Taipei and Keelung. As I observed their process, it occurred to me that how I go about engaging in my photography is quite different from most people. Then again, a workshop is not most people’s normal interaction with photography; it is deliberately more intense and action-packed, with set goals and the pressure of producing a certain amount of work. Still, they seemed surprised that I pretty much always have a camera on my shoulder and another in my bag, no matter what I’m doing. For me, unless I’m on assignment, I just go about my life and photos just kind of happen. Tagging along with their group, I felt a bit like a slacker, only taking photos I happened to see while they strode purposefully down the street, cameras held at the ready in front of them, their eager gaze hunting for targets with each step. The group certainly had talent; Maciej had showed me their Instagram feeds beforehand and they’d made some very nice work. Most, it seemed, were returning students, and after witnessing the ease and synergy in the group I could understand why.

After a week, though, the workshop was over, and they had to leave. It was nice getting to know them, and I always enjoy seeing my home through the fresh eyes of visitors. Some of the students said I should hold more international photography workshops here…it’s worth considering.

In other other news, the Ramblers played a gig last weekend at the Spring Wave music festival at a “glamping” complex in Taichung. Glamping is apparently short for glamorous camping, with luxury tents and food trucks and nice showers; the adjacent fields were covered with individual tents, and rows of food stalls lines the path between the four stages. The audience was mostly fairly affluent young people, and our show went pretty well. Little Scarlett collected quite a few interesting rocks. We’ve also been working on our latest album, recording at Cristina and Zach’s house before proceeding to an actual studio next week. Last weekend I recorded four different songs on four different instruments: trumpet, euphonium, tuba and bass; it was a very long weekend, needless to say. But the songs David’s chosen for this album are real top-tapping earworms; going back to our roots, so to speak. It should be a good one.

In the future, we might ask: “Is that a photograph? Like, a real photograph? Did that happen?”

In the past, suspicions sometimes arose that this or that photograph was staged or composited, or if elements might have been added or removed. But now that AI-generated imagery is on the cusp of being indistinguishable from actual photography, the seeds of doubt could very well grow into a general distrust of the medium itself. It will be a sad day when we look at an image and our imagination, dulled by doubt, no longer conjures up the stories, emotions and sense of wonder at a scene we assume never happened. 

It’s not mainly photographers who are adopting botography at the moment; it’s the corporations, the bosses who can increase their profits by cutting photographers from their payroll, media outlets that desire but aren’t willing to pay for timely topical images, and, of course, individuals who previously failed to garner any attention by using cameras. This includes the usual bloggers, influencers and videographers whose content centers around photography but whose work was relentlessly pedestrian until they began to use AI to generate images they could pass off as their own work. “Are AI-generated images photography?” they pose to their chatbots with no sense of irony, as if it’s a real question, while soliciting subscriptions for their AI-themed masterclasses.

But eventually the more-oft asked question will be “Are any images photography?” as AI-generated images become so ubiquitous that actual photographs not only will not stand a chance in comparison, but any sufficiently interesting composition will automatically be dismissed as the result of a few keystrokes in an AI program. What I fear most is not that question, but that question becoming so irrelevant that it isn’t even asked. For what will be the appeal of such imagery when it is as common as cups? Will future photographers who go out into the world to make images using actual cameras be seen as the kind of people who refuse mass-produced tableware and make their own, the reaction being ok, cool I guess, but why?

After all, AI will be able to make any individual look “better” than any photographer could, more or less instantly and at a fraction of the cost. If Instagram and Tiktok have taught us anything, it’s that most people prefer to be portrayed as they imagine they look rather than how they really appear. The focus of most street photography these days seems to be clever compositions with people placed Just So in the frame, arranged among attractive colors/lights/shadows, regardless of emotional impact; this is something that AI can do with its theoretical hands behind its virtual back, with none of the controversy involving personal image rights or privacy rights. Reportage, as we’ve seen, has become nearly as vilified as street photography, and was already being dismissed as “fake news” even before the advent of AI.

Think about who is going to be using these image-generation programs and for what purpose; these programs come from the same corporate entities that have been buying off politicians, exploiting workers, eradicating entire photojournalism departments and recording us and our online activities 24/7 while simultaneously demonizing the act of individuals witnessing each other. When we abandon the act of witnessing reality, we risk the erasure of stories these entities feel we should not see, realities that, if more widely known, would threaten their hegemony. In retreating to our overpriced apartments and keyboards dimly lit by entry forms, we are abandoning the actual world, and not only will its wonders fade from our collective memory, its myriad problems will go unnoticed, unconsidered, unsolved. While the pundits rail against virtual reality apps, the actual disappearing world is happening at a much more intimate level.

It is no coincidence that the camera market is disappearing just as AI image generation is coming to the fore, that photojournalism is disappearing, or that long-established photography sites like DPreview are being abandoned by huge corporations like Amazon. Photography has always been a dangerous pursuit; showing truth to a world based on deception is one of the most perilous things one can do. But to those threatened by aspirations to speak truth to power, botography is a godsend. 

It’s been just over five years since I wrote an article called Photography Never Died, by which I meant that true photography has never been all that popular; the couple of decades from the 1990’s to the 20-teens saw the confluence of online popularity contests with digital cameras, but photography itself continued on much unchanged. But now I can’t help but wonder what bearing witness will even mean in a world full of bots, and I can imagine our future selves asking: “Did that happen?”

Many photographers struggle with this question: How do you know if your photos are good or not? 

Perhaps you “just know” or claim not to care what other people think, but judging one’s own work can be problematic due to one’s closeness to the process and experiences involved in the production of the work. Sure, you were there and know how precious and magical that moment seemed, or how hard you worked to get it, but viewers have no clue about any of that unless it’s communicated through the photograph itself. I’ve found that not looking at photographs I’ve made for at least a month or so helps in obtaining some objectivity in assessing the work’s meaning and value, putting enough distance between the emotion and conditions of making the work that it doesn’t exert an undue influence on how I see it (also I’m lazy and do not relish the idea of spending every night downloading and transferring files). But especially in this era of cheap memory and fast frame rates, the question of which shots to pay attention to and which to ignore has become an even greater challenge.

Back in the days before social media (which if you can recall makes you old as hell), this was honestly a difficult question. Your friends and family couldn’t be expected to criticize your work honestly. Your mother would think your work was brilliant regardless, the exception being my mother, who thinks the people in my photos aren’t smiling nearly enough and wouldn’t it be nice if they were? Your friends would probably shrug and say yeah, it’s ok, uh-huh and then continue to talk about what they wanted to really talk about because damn. 

And that was usually that, unless you happened to know someone like John Szarkowski, with whom you could have lunch and chat about your upcoming exhibition at MOMA. Sadly, it just wasn’t physically possible for most photographers to be on lunch-having terms with Szarkowski, and they could only hope that, after they died, someone who knew a future version of Szarkowski would happen to attend the auction of all those shoeboxes full of your old prints and take a liking to them. They would then have lunch.

When the Internet began to be A Thing, huge amounts of photos began to become viewable by just about everyone, with no need to die and leave one’s shoeboxes to the vague possibility of a potential lunch date with a random MOMA director. The problem with this was that the ability of the general public to care about photography simply couldn’t match the amount of photos to be seen, as most photographers assumed it would. People love to post their own photos but often spend little time looking at those of others, and this began to breed a certain resentment. Phrases like “tsunami of photos” began being bantered about, as well as the now-tired “Everyone’s a photographer now.” Meaning that people, while blissfully uploading photos all day/every day, just couldn’t be bothered to look at all of these photos that somehow were just everywhere now, much less interact with them in any meaningful fashion. 

The social media companies, brilliantly, devised a way to take the onus of meaningful interaction off of viewers, with the now-ubiquitous Like/Fav/Heart/whatever button. Suddenly it was easy to scroll through a small section of the endless photos, press a button to send the photographer a simulacrum of your interest in their work, and get on with your busy day. Problem solved! Now we all knew if our photos were good or not, and we then started seeing exponential growth in the number of compelling, quality work from diverse communities in the form of series, books and exhibitions from all around the world.

Except no, that didn’t quite happen. Photographers began simply judging their work on the amount of Likes they got on social media, even though they had no idea who was pressing the button or why. Their own motivations, impulses, thoughts and ideas all went out the window in favor of the mighty red symbol. The question of “Is this a compelling image/series?” was replaced by “Will this get teh Likes?” Image feeds were mercilessly culled on this basis, and curators started demanding Like/Follower counts when considering exhibitions and publications. Can’t bring your mass of Like-smashing Followers to gofundme your project? Sucks to be you. One well-known San Francisco street photographer told me, “If a shot doesn’t immediately get at least 120 Likes on the gram, it’s gone.” And this was in 2016, so that’s like 200 Likes in today’s currency.

The system was ripe for gaming, and gamed it was, not just by gleefully cackling individuals but also their vast armies of flying monkeybots. The result was more or less a guarantee that any accounts with outrageous follower/Like counts could be reliably dismissed as pretentious claptrap, and the numbers eventually became meaningless in terms of judging the quality of the work. That didn’t matter, of course, as studies have shown that people who cheat or game systems almost invariably come to believe that they deserve their success merely because of the attention they’re getting, so with little or no consequences to deal with, they just continue doing the same thing. Quite a few books and exhibitions were produced, but a disappointingly large proportion of them were bafflingly mediocre until one realized that projects were being approved on a Like-based economy, as it were.

When you discount all the detritus left over from the damage the Like button has done to photography, not to mention other arts, we seem to have taken more steps back than forward since all this began. The value of Likes is fading as more people recoil at the rage-fueled money-making machine that social media has become, a fact exacerbated by those companies introducing pay-to-play policies such as paid “verification” schemes. 

In other words, after all of this, it’s still nearly impossible to know if your photos are any good or not. Yes, you can pay money to one of the 26 people who seem to be judging the various annual competitions to not select your work; you can also pay a “master photographer” to tell you that your work sucks, and if you pay even more, why it sucks. Otherwise, various critique groups have come and gone over the years, but most have died out as those offering critique were 1) often not very good at it, or 2) not willing to spend too much time engaged an effort with little or no reward, mainly due to 3) being raked over the coals for having the audacity to offer a critique to someone who said “C&C welcome” because that doesn’t mean you can just, like, say bad things about my photos, dude. Not cool.

So in the coming post-Like photoverse, to use a phrase I think we can all agree is every kind of awful, are there any ways to glean any information on how people (actual people, not bots) see your work? Not a lot, I’m afraid. One thing you can do is pay attention to the source of the Likes you do get, or, if you’re lucky, actual human-generated comments that don’t consist entirely of exclamation marks and/or heart emojis. If you’re still on Flickr (and if you’re truly interested in photography rather than clout, you should be), the number of Likes should be fairly manageable because so few people are still on Flickr, due to its clearly inferior Like-accumulating capabilities. Attention from photographers and other artists whom you respect should perhaps be given more weight, whereas Likes from bots and/or random people with questionable taste who happen to be in a charitable mood when they came across your photo…perhaps not so much.

It might even be a moot point as AI-generated content is being used to a greater extent, free of those pesky ethical concerns of authorship or intellectual property rights that cost companies actual money that they could be using to send their CEOs cute little gifts (“Another yacht? Well, thanks I guess”) in between buying political officials. Media sites and advertising have already taken to using such content, and AI-generated images are even winning photography contests. Eventually, human-generated content could only be notable for its relative “imperfections” that AI cannot or will not mimic. Beyond the question of whether our art is any good or not, what will art even mean in a world where you have to prove not only that you are human, but that being human has any value?

I genuinely have no idea what lies ahead; I just hope I see some neat stuff along the way.

So, want to get some lunch? 

I had an interesting conversation with a construction site manager yesterday. At least it went better than some of the previous interactions I’ve had with them.

It was a nice, warm, sunny day, and I was wandering along Zhongxiao West Road after a pleasant lunch near Camera Street and then hanging around the North Gate watching a wedding photographer chase the retreating light around the square. “Pretend like you’re running!” he called to the prospective groom, while his bride fiddled with makeup in a tiny tent.

“Like this?” the groom lifted a leg up hesitantly. Clearly he hadn’t been expecting this, especially after putting on a fancy white-and-purple suit.

“No, you look like a dog peeing!” the photographer said, but in a nice way. “Run like a bus is about to hit you!”  This was helpful advice, as buses were indeed zooming by inches behind him.

I walked east and got yelled at by a crazy Chinese monk for taking a photo of the Mitsukoshi Building. “Don’t fuck with me! I am long exiled from Foshan!” he shouted.

I kept walking, ending up on the famous pedestrian bridge at the intersection of Zhongxiao and Zhongshan. A busy construction site where the old round City Council building used to be caught my eye, and I took a few shots from the bridge before heading down to see if the light was nicer from street level.

“You can’t take photographs here,” a site manager walked over to tell me.

“Why’s that?”

“Company rules.” I sighed. This again.

“I don’t work for your company. Your site in is public view from the public road I’m standing on, and I’m not violating any safety rules here.” The manager considered this.

“All true, but we could get in trouble if you post these photos and our boss sees them, especially if he sees our company logo.”

“Why would your boss be unhappy at that? It seems like a well-run site. This project has even been shown in the media before.”

“He might yell at us for allowing someone to take photos.”

It was a pleasant, cordial exchange, and while I did not envy this man’s conundrum, I had to tell him: “You might not have noticed, but your site is bathed in reflected light from all these glass buildings next door in the afternoon. That’s going to attract photographers. Also, you’re not only right by a pedestrian bridge that is a famous photography spot, you’re also near hotels, the Executive Yuan and the train station. That means curious tourists walking by. Photography is going to happen. If you make a big deal about hiding the site from them, there’s a chance some of them will be IG influencers, journalists or even members of foreign diplomatic groups.” Someone might even blog about it, I added mentally.

He seemed amenable to this point of view, but he was still in manager mode. “Ok, I’ll let you keep the photos you’ve already taken, including the ones from the pedestrian bridge, but please don’t take any more.”

“There’s nothing you can do about the photos I’ve already taken,” I reminded him, noting that they’d tracked me all the way from the bridge. “But I appreciate your point of view and thanks for being courteous about it.”

As I walked on, I couldn’t help but wonder why people automatically go to some imagined worst-case scenario when they see they are being photographed. Is everyone afraid that their nefarious behavior will get them in trouble? But that can’t be the case, as being recorded by the government and corporations 24/7 has become a matter of course; nobody ever even thinks about it. Then again, government and corporate surveillance is expressly put in place to catch wrongdoing, so is it that far a stretch to imagine that, as such recording becomes more ubiquitous and ever present, the general population just assumes that any kind of photography is accusatory and predatory in nature? People crave attention, but just the safe kind of attention, I suppose. Whatever that is.

To wit: I recently got back in touch with a street photographer I used to chat with back in the early days of Flickr, Joe Wigfall. He no longer even takes photos; he says it had become too much of a hassle, so he paints and writes instead. It’s a shame; he made some very good work when he was active. He noted that when he was out shooting, Black people would give him more shit for photographing them than people from other groups would, and he noticed the same for white and Asian photographers he’d go shooting with. We can give them a pass, but you’re one of us; you should know better seems to be the message they were sending.

I took the subway over to Taipei 101 and walked across Wuxing Street towards the mountains, noticing the imprints of old military villages amid the empty fields as well as the occasional illegal villas with partially demolished balconies. Brightly colored election trucks, cars, motorcycles and bicycles crisscrossed the streets with their various candidates promising various things from mounted loudspeakers. But the sun was setting, so I walked back over to the Tonghua Night Market to meet up with Chenbl for a delicious meal of noodles at a wood-paneled restaurant where the competent young staff played old and pseudo-old jazz. They knew about the Ramblers, and put on some of our music.

So the student exhibition of work from the last semester is up and running at the Ren An Hospital Museum exhibition space on the second floor. I made a video about it, using just my iPhone and a little stabilizer unit which turned out to be surprisingly effective. It’s going until mid-September, so if you’re looking for some good street photography and are baffled at the confusing art pieces that crowd Taiwan’s photography galleries these days, go have a look.

One day before the one-year anniversary of getting my first covid vaccine, Chenbl and I went to a clinic on Sanmin Road to get our second booster shots. It was a rather casual experience, just a few people waiting around instead of the strictly organized lines and zones I’ve encountered elsewhere. When we were at the counter a woman came in with a form to show the nurse. “You don’t need to show me that,” the nurse said, rather brusquely. Chenbl gave me a look.

“What’s up?” I said. He glanced at the women, who was now heading upstairs.

“I think she’s a covid patient getting meds,” he muttered. “The nurse didn’t want anyone to see her diagnosis.”

“I’m just going to wait outside,” I said. He laughed.

We were getting the Novavax vaccine this time, though my first three were Moderna, and Chenbl got BNT. Just for a little variety, to keep covid guessing. And a little payback for it keeping us guessing, I guess. My shoulder was sore for a few minutes, and I felt a little drunk for the next couple of days.

This might have affected my views on the two plays we went to see on the following two days. The first was at the National Theater at CKS, a grand affair. We were sitting on the very side of the theater above the stage in a box with a single file of seats, oddly not facing the stage but forward, necessitating a certain amount of rubbernecking. The play, featuring the complicated life of a woman from the 70’s to the 90’s and featuring a great deal of jumping around in time, was by Wu Nian-jen and was entirely in Taiwanese, so I missed a good portion of it as my Taiwanese is rather basic. Still, it was quite moving. The second play was up at the big new traditional theater complex near Zhishan Station in Shilin, and featured the marriage-related travails of a family of women. It was also quite good, and it being in mostly Mandarin I didn’t have to guess at any of the meanings. Afterward Chenbl and I walked over to an old neighborhood for dinner, and then back to Shilin Station, where they have unfortunately cut down all the trees to widen the road. That’s a shame.

I’d thought I was done with the after-effects of the vaccine, but after a couple of days feeling drunk and posting ill-advised rants on DPreview, I started just feeling exhausted, like bone-tired on an existential level. This is the first non-mRNA shot I’ve had for covid, and it was not playing. Fortunately it only lasted a day or so, and I got by by watching the excellent new season of The Orville. The BA4 and 5 variants are making their way into the general population, and cases, which had been falling, seem to be on the rise again. More people are maskless outside, and I suppose I can understand why in this spectacular combination of heat and humidity that, if I hadn’t come up in Florida and south Texas, might be unbearable. I took a bike ride along the river the other day and took my mask off to do so, as that is now allowed when exercising outside, and it did feel good. I’m keeping my (color-coordinated) mask on in crowds, though.

In other news, I’m looking at making a photography page for this site…well, not poagao.org, but poagao.com. Squarespace is looking like the best option for a technically impaired person like myself. In a way it would be coming full circle; when I started this site in 2001 my aim was to just have a place online where I could put my photos, that being before the photo sites had started up. Then came this blog, and the photography kind of just did its own thing. But now people are abandoning flickr and sites like Instagram are focusing on becoming TikTok, so perhaps it’s time to make a page on here where I can showcase various projects and topics. Feel free to let me know which particular photograpic websites you like most; I’m looking to keep it simple, but I’m open to suggestions. In any case, I’ll let y’all know when I get something up.

I was planning to meet Chenbl later yesterday at Jiantan, so instead of getting my usual salmon bento to take back to the Water Curtain Cave for consumption, I had a pleasant sandwich/coffee/carrot cake combo at the Metro Cafe on Chongqing South Road. As it does just about every day in summer, the weather went from bright sun to threatening skies during the course of my meal, so I went back to my office to get an umbrella, planning to take the subway up to Jiantan to have a look around before meeting up with Chenbl after he got off work.

The sound of singing that was entirely too awful to be a recording, however, drew me to the square in front of Zhongshan Hall, where a large group of mostly elderly people huddled under tents as rain began to pelt down. Most of them were wearing vests sporting various military-themed logos, and they seemed to all know each other. The songs being sung were old-timey patriotic/nationalist songs (plus the first part of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” with the phrase “the final curtain” replaced by “the final battle”(!), and even more disturbing: Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Please Release Me”); the KMT was in heavy presence, as were various police officers, obviously armed, with one sporting a clump of white zip ties on her belt. I didn’t know what they were expecting; there were no counter protesters and hardly any media around.

They held a ceremony consisting of people lining up to lay yellow flowers on the “Monument to the Victory of the Anti-Japanese War and the Restoration of Taiwan” plaque opposite the hall. Several speeches were made conveying the disturbing message that the “real enemy” was the DPP, not the CCP. A Buddhist monk spoke, as well as various KMT officials. I walked around the edges of the crowd, taking a few photos but not daring to get too close as entirely too many of the old people were maskless and sitting clumped together under the tents. A few of them gave me some strange looks but mostly I was left alone as they probably assumed I was just some random tourist. It all felt a little sad and desperate, the last gasps of a disappearing world. But it would be dangerous to discount this demographic; although they are diminishing in numbers, especially due to covid, they still wield substantial financial and political power.

“Are you a photographer?” an unmasked Asian American man who looked to be in his 40’s asked me. As always, I didn’t know how to answer that question, but he wasn’t concerned with my lack of a definitive answer. He was, he said, a YouTuber, and a quite well known one at that, focusing on political analysis of both the U.S. and Taiwan. I didn’t contribute much to the conversation, mostly listening and nodding at his rather, uh…unconventional views. He stressed, with no prompting, that he wasn’t a fan of Trump, though I hadn’t asked or even mentioned Trump. That always strikes me as odd. But when he was talking about the “mystery” of Republicans gaining ground in Florida, I couldn’t help but ask if perhaps DeSantis’ agenda had been having an effect. “Who?” he asked, puzzled.

“Ron DeSantis?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“The governor of Florida,”

“Oh, I don’t know who any of those people are,” he said, dismissing such knowledge as unimportant. The real issue, he said, was the DPP stuffing ballot boxes. I asked if he had participated in the voting process here, but again, no, he wasn’t a citizen; his source was…and you might want to sit down for this…a mysterious friend with connections to U.S. intelligence. I only hope I haven’t said too much.

The sun had come out again at this point, and Chenbl said he was on his way, so I caught the subway up to Jiantan. While Chenbl got his hair cut, I walked over to the river and spotted a nice puddle that would surely, I judged from the top of the flood wall, reflect the sunset and skyline. As I approached, another man approached from the opposite direction, a large DSLR around his neck. Surely he will see that reflection, I thought, so I adjusted my path to let him approach it first, but he didn’t. When I crouched down to get my shot, however, I heard the clack of his shutter and looked up to see him photographing me. So if you see a photograph of me crouching by a puddle, 1) this is probably what I was doing, and 2) this is not a rare thing for me. My fellow BME member Don Hudson always points this out, and I am not ashamed of my inability to resist the attraction of a reflective surface. I’ve been doing this shit since the Mirror Project of yore and even before, and I don’t plan on stopping.