Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
The Met Gala is an annual fundraiser for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York City. It marks the grand opening of their annual fashion exhbit, and each event celebrates the theme of that year’s exhibition.
As happens at such events, a few famous faces show up to have a mingle. This year, Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York also went along to photograph some of them.
Here are some interesting statistics. This survey checks for the reach of photographers on the web. It does so, by looking at each photographer’s Web Popularity Index (WPI). This index mixes the three key factors of the social web: reach, interaction with users, and external references. To do so WPI analyzes “fans, followers and subscribers on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, Tumblr, 500px and other social networks, ratios for interaction with subscribers, fans and followers, as well as references for the photographers’ publications”. The site does not share how much each of those components contribute to WPI or even how some of the indexes were concluded. Yet, being who we are, there are now metrics on the table and we can not ignore them.
Is this a good way to see who is a good photographer? I think not. In fact I am not even sure that this is a good way to check who is the most influential photographer, as influence works not just by reach by also by who you are reaching. But, this does measure who has the most presence online and this by itself is an interesting index. (on a side note, 20 years ago, everybody on that index would rate 0).
Many of you may remember Arne Svenson, the New York artist who photographed his neighbors in their homes using a telephoto lens and used them in an exhibition.
Svenson began the project after watching Alfred Hitchcocks’ “Rear Window” and being advised by a lawyer that the presumption of privacy is minimal in such a jam-packed city.
The “Neighbors” exhibition was obviously very controversial and led to some of the subjects suing Svenson, though the NY Country Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2013.
A Manhattan appeals court agreed with the previous court ruling, citing the photographer was in the clear due to a law from 1902, and urged legislators to consider a reform to the privacy laws.
By now, we’ve everyone is pretty much familiar with Humans of New York. The wildly popular project has nearly 12,000,000 followers on Facebook alone. And this month, Brandon Stanton, the man behind it all, is using his project’s widespread popularity for a good cause. After taking a portrait of a Vidal Chastanet, and eight grader living in a notoriously rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, Stanton asked the student who his biggest influence in life has been. The boy explained to the photographer how his school’s principal Nadia Lopez, is not only a positive influence to himself, but to all the students of Mott Hall Bridges Academy.[Read More…]
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