Photography’s Third Act

http://dcurt.is/photos-for-communication

by jordanbrown • 14 years ago

66 48 14 years ago

justhw• 14 years ago

A bit out of context but, Who is Dustin Curtis? None of his sites mention anything beyond him being a villain and a superhero. Please, don't get me wrong, I'm not questioning his authenticity or relevance. But his posts usually end up high here on HN and generally the authors whose posts reach high have a bio page reachable. He is relevant and he created svbtle, but that's all I know. And I do respect his privacy, if he chose.

untog2• 14 years ago

TechCrunch credits him as a "widely read designer".

So I have no idea either.

hnriot2• 14 years ago

He created svbtle - a private blogging platform

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/24/forget-todays-drama-dustin-...

hnriot2• 14 years ago

why downvoted? This is factually correct, unbiased and, I thought, a little helpful.

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

He's a talented designer and a couple of his blog posts were relatively well talked about a few years back (eg: http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html) and he capitalised on that. From what I understand of him he's not had any individual achievement that people care about but it's his ability to write with confidence that gives the impression he has a rich history of experience in all these many fields and so people choose to listen to him.

The site that he originally published articles through (http://www.dustincurtis.com) is worth a look just for the quality of the design. Probably his most effective post (the one that most people will have experienced the effects of) is this: http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter....

FireBeyond5• 14 years ago

The site that you reference is nothing but a placeholder that says "I now write at dcurt.is".

iamwil• 14 years ago

He did a couple of things. Svbtle aside, he was the first guy I know of to tell people to follow him on twitter at the end of every blog post. The practice has subsequently spread to the rest of the web. http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter....

You can see his submissions over time on HN to get an idea of how he's known in this community. http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=dus...

seiji• 14 years ago

It is odd. A quick (naïve) google search returns no relevant pictures for the name either. I remember a long time ago his twitter description was something to the effect of: "I'm 23 and advise startups." What great wisdom would an (unverifiable) unemployed 23 year old have for startups? He's no Irish marathoner. Everybody is an "idea person" but it's not worth squat until you do something (more than wireframes or simulations) with your life.

Have we considered it's a joke? A simple joke a first, but over time grown sentient. Maybe there are multiple people in the cabal of Dustin Curtis: designer, over-generalizing pontificator, and website engineer. Elite trolling for people who already think they are better than everybody else. A Fox News commentator of startups, except most people are in so deep they can't see the deranged minds behind the narrative.

Does Dustin Curtis interact on any platforms beside twitter and his own website? nickb taken to a whole other level?

damian2000• 14 years ago

For some reason I get him and Dalton Caldwell mixed up. Its not the same person is it? http://daltoncaldwell.com/ They are both from SF far as I can tell.

zainny2• 14 years ago

Heh, I just realized I do as well :-) I think it's primarily a consequence of using svbtle -- all the blogs look the same.

And this is the high point of design apparently...

peteforde• 14 years ago

The first rule of Dustin Curtis is you don't ask about Dustin Curtis.

dzuc• 14 years ago

Thinking about an expanded definition of photography: I've been experiencing this often with the combination of instant screenshot uploading apps (CloudApp, Scrup, et al.) in combination with realtime chat.

aeturnum• 14 years ago

Photographs have been used for communication for a long time. Most artistic criticism is focused around the efficacy with which a photograph transmits an idea or message. Look no further than 2/4chan for an implementation of a "picture as message" service. I think someone could create a more structured service than the 'chans, but I don't know that I'd call it photography's "third act."

msutherl• 14 years ago

I use iMessage for this. It works great. It could be better. It works better than having a separate app I have to switch to. It works better than having to ask my friends to install an app that they have to switch to.

Still, I love that feeling of playing with a truly novel technology for the first time with a few friends, especially when it's presented in the raw with few extraneous features. There's a feeling of excitement and exploration that seems to decay in a year's time at best.

saurik• 14 years ago

Exactly: what he is describing is almost identical to "group MMS". The one thing he seems to have different is that he is against having words at all, but once you are taking pictures of words you really should just support it as a feature: the essential property he is against is really just that the words need to be equal to the pictures (as in, a chat where you can post either a picture or words, as opposed to a place where you post pictures and then "comment on them" using words), not below/about the pictures. If the only problem with MMS is then that it is expensive, well: iMessage solves that.

jberryman2• 14 years ago

> When photography was first becoming popular, it was mostly used as a form of artistic expression.

No, it was mostly used for portraiture and things you could generalize as journalism. Photography as an accepted fine art is a pretty recent thing.

jacobolus• 14 years ago

The sentence you’re responding to is silly, but your comment is also completely off the mark.

Photography was used, among other things, for demonstrating medical conditions, for mugshots (and compositing many photos to capture a “scientific” “type” of different sorts of criminals or members of particular social classes), for scientific imagery, for understanding movement (Muybridge & al.), for propaganda (well beyond “journalism”), for faddish semi-scams (like the famous “spirit” photographs), for documentation of people and places (with types of photos it would be quite a stretch to call either “journalism” or “portraiture”), for making reproductions of other types of art, and yes, for fine art in itself (there were huge debates about whether photography counted as “art” going right back to the beginning, with the pictorialists e.g. famously making their images out of focus or otherwise blurry, scratched, etc. so that it could be “art” instead of a purely mechanical process). Indeed, nearly all of the uses of photography date back to the 19th century, they just weren’t as widespread as today.

jberryman2• 14 years ago

Most of what you've named are what I meant by "generalized as journalism", i.e. as objective documentation of one form or another. I was just trying to point out that art as self-expression wasn't and has never been photography's primary "use". Good point though.

antiterra4• 14 years ago

I had a difficult time reading this article, because it provided no source or argument for: "When photography was first becoming popular, it was mostly used as a form of artistic expression." Which completely ignores how photography displaced painting in the genre of portraiture, and made it more accessible. Then Mr. Curtis explains haughtily that communication is the new use for photography and that of course is an entirely different thing from artistic expression. In fact, artistic expression is bad because it inhibits us! I highly doubt the majority of people using Instagram are engaging in a visual language of symbol and metaphor (oops, that sounds like communication!)

So we have it that communication is better when it's easier and we are no longer shackled by the editorial desire to not produce a bunch of junk. Now, Mr. Curtis says, we can communicate that we like the hit television show Breaking Bad by taking a photo of our screen with a thumbs up! What a glorious age we live in.

FireBeyond5• 14 years ago

Yeah, I have to agree. Photography can be used as a communication tool now, thanks to Treehouse and Snapchat? Thanks, Mr Curtis, for the insightful wizardly pronouncement to the masses. I'm sure photojournalists of the last 100+ years will be pleased to know that there now is a reason or platform for their efforts.

Seriously? Curtis lauds people writing a comment on a scrap of paper, taking a photo of it as a means to circumvent the lack of a commenting system on a website and hails it as "Photography's Third Act"? Wow, just... wow.

_feda_3• 14 years ago

You're glossing over the author's solid point on the nature of design, that over-engineering can stifle creative input. In the example he provides, the users became distracted from the purely photographic form of communication by a text-based one.

readymade• 14 years ago

Agreed, I nearly laughed out loud when I read that line. Ironically, this is a situation where one of those useless college degrees everyone here loves to hate (Art History, for example) would come in rather handy.

dcurtis• 14 years ago

I updated to post to reflect what I really meant.

The first non-commercial uses of photography were for experimentation and artistic portraiture. I don't understand why you disagree with me.

I'm not saying there's no future for artistic photography; I'm saying that there are new use cases that haven't yet been fully developed.

antiterra4• 14 years ago

Where did non-commercial come from? You think artistic portraiture was non-commercial? Heyy.. what's going on in this drawing by Bruegel http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bruegel/buyer.jpg ???

kaliblack• 14 years ago

I found it hard to agree or disagree with you, because I couldn't imagine how images would be a more convenient than text to communicate. I would have loved more detail around the new use cases you see being part of this 3rd wave.

_feda_3• 14 years ago

take a gander at some art history. when photography was first introduced in France in the first half of the 1800s it sparked a longrunning debate concerning the medium's place amongst other art forms, or even whether it should be considered an art form at all. Part of the debate was centered around public figures such as Nadar (who made photographic portraits of people such as Jules Verne and Charles Baudelaire). Nadar was so reviled by some for his insistence on photography as a high art that he was the subject of ridicule in the popular press, for example in this caricature [1]. It seems odd that something so banal to us as a photo should provoke such a debate, but photography had a highly disruptive effect on the rigid, academic art world of the day, in a way reminiscent of the anger caused by the introduction of the railroad not long before, or the way some individuals have predicted 3D printing technology could disrupt manafacturing and the power structures associated with it.

[1]"nadar raising photography to the height of art" by Honoré Daumier http://bit.ly/12qOL4Z

antiterra4• 14 years ago

> take a gander at some art history.

I have. Hence my reaction to the article's unqualified introductory move "when photography was first popular it was used for x." We don't know how the author measures 'popular' or exactly what time frame he's referring to by 'when.' It's the sort of statement that needs to be framed, explained and supported, not one that can easily be taken for granted.

_feda_3• 14 years ago

Keep in mind that art is most properly classified as a subset of communication, so in certain cases a very similar vocabulary will be used regarding them.

You say the author is incorrect in implying that artistic expression may inhibit us, yet in his context, artistic expressions or attempts thereof do inhibit the users, because they're attempting to communicate artistically, rather than directly and immediately as the author wishes.

antiterra4• 14 years ago

> You say the author is incorrect in implying that artistic expression may inhibit us

No. I didn't say any such thing. Please don't misquote me. It's not that I don't think that trying to make better content is inhibitive, it's that it's worth it. Quantity, populist or not, does not automatically usurp quality.

FireBeyond5• 14 years ago

"Snapchat... . It’s an amazing app, and its insane popularity is just a hint of how I think we’ll use photos in the future."

Myself, and a quick survey in the room, of a bunch of various tech, and for that matter photography types - not one had heard of, let alone used Snapchat...

jmduke• 14 years ago

To add a counterpoint; everyone in college uses SnapChat.

zainny2• 14 years ago

To add another counterpoint; not everyone in college uses SnapChat.

duck• 14 years ago

Same here (I thought it was something he made up, but I was wrong - http://www.snapchat.com/) and weirder... since he didn't link to it, and just kind of mentioned it out of the blue, I thought I missed the part where he told me more about it. I read it again and found I was wrong once again.

ebf• 14 years ago

Well considering Snapchat isn't necessarily aimed at photography types and assuming you are older than the demographic that it is blowing up in (12-20 year olds), it makes sense that you haven't heard of it.

FireBeyond5• 14 years ago

Certainly possible, plausible, and I'm more than willing to be corrected!

brown9-2• 14 years ago

Photographs have been used in newspapers as a form of communication for over a century.

davecap1• 14 years ago

Seems like the cargo culting of a successful social media startup.

akaru• 14 years ago

This app is pretty clearly about dick pics and has nothing to do with photography. This article is just the author patting himself on the back for running a sexting social network for preteens. Yeah, great job, buddy.

Photography’s Third Act

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