Two Ways Out - Fort Worden, Port Townsend, WA
What type of photographer are you? Brooks Jensen and I were discussing photographic topics one weekend and in passing, we wound up looking at some photographs on a computer screen. We had seen prints of these photographs last year. So we had a chance to compare the presentation of the images as physical artifacts as well as virtual images on a computer screen. As you might expect, the presentation of the same images in two different media was different. In this case, we thought the on screen images were a little bit better looking than the physical prints.
As a photographer, is it possible that your work more suited to one medium than another? Can you be considered an “internet photographer” if your work looks great when viewed on a computer? The Life Magazine photographers such as Gene Smith gained recognition through publication in the weekly news magazine. There are other people, like Howard Schatz and Joyce Tennyson that thrive in the book publishing world. There are many Fine Art Photographers strive to have their work displayed in galleries and museums.
My folio projects can be viewed on my website as well be seen as physical artifacts. My blog is another outlet for images that may or may not be part of my folio projects. The blog and website make it easy for my photographs to be seen by a larger and more widely dispersed audience than any gallery exhibition my images have been in. This is the reason I rarely make any photographs for on the wall exhibition. The amount of work I have to do to get a specific number of eyeballs on my work favors virtual over physical by a factor of ten in a typical year. Exhibition attendance at recent public exhibitions average about 300 people during the month of the exhibit. My annual average web site traffic is about 3600 individuals per year. The advantage to a virtual presentation is they are available as long as the internet is available.
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