Should you go to photo school?

Laely I have had some dealings with 2 young photographers who have attended, at great expense, institutions of higher learning and received a degree in photography. While one was still reeling from realizing that shooting gritty black and white images of hazardous waste wasn't going to make enough money to repay the huge student loan he had, the other was coming to a different realization.

She hadn't learned much about photography. No classes on marketing, business management, or creating a portfolio that would bring in a job. And, perhaps they were offered, and she didn't take advantage of them, so that is one thing. However, she also did not learn lighting, fill cards, strobes, working with an art director, posing a model, making a product the hero... just so much that a photographer needs to make a living... as a photographer.

This morning I read about this from a photography school graduate.

Buttons takes on this notion of the camera as a networked object. It is a camera that will capture a moment at the press of a button. However, unlike a conventional analog or digital camera, this one doesn't have any optical parts. It allows you to capture your moment but in doing so, it effectively seperates it from the subject. Instead, as you will memorize the moment, the camera memorizes only the time and starts to continuously search on the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment.

So this young person thinks that a camera that doesn't take your picture, but looks for something that someone else took is, like, way cool. Really.

Ok.

Is it a neat little tech idea. Yeah, sure, I guess. But too clever by half is sometimes. well, too clever. From We Make Money Not Art:

Sascha Pohflepp is a new media artist based in Berlin. He also writes on this blog and rumours had it that his graduation project at the University of the Art in Berlin was kind of awesome.

His Buttons (aka the "Blind Camera") captures a moment at the press of a button. However, the device doesn't have any optical part. The camera memorizes only the time of the picture and immediately searches the net for other photos that have been taken in the same moment.

Essentially, it is a camera that only takes photos that were created by someone who pressed a button somewhere else at that very time as its own button was pressed.

Yeah, that's cool... What I bristle at is this is now being called 'new media'. Aaahhh. I just call it, well, lame, inappropriate appropriation, and just, well, stupid. It is far different to have a widget on your site that looks for an image that would match a date or instant - sounds like kinda fun. But to make a box that resembles a camera, remove the lens and then do what a Flickr badge does is, well...

Look, maybe I don't get it. Could be that I am too jaded and judgemental, but creating a button that loads someone elses image? What is that?