New Dylan Video Celebrates FSA Color Photography

To celebrate the re-issue of Bob Dylan’s “Another Self Portrait“,  Columbia Records released a video to help promote the previously un-released song “Pretty Saro.” The video, directed by Jennifer Lebeau features color photography from the famous Farm Security Administration archive. While many of us are familiar with the iconic images from FSA, we applaud Lebeau for focusing her curation efforts on the color stills and motion images from this remarkable archive.  The video features portraiture, industrial, agricultural, and ephemera from photographers Alfred T. Palmer, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott among others.

If you like what you see here, you can browse all of the color images from FSA on Flickr or search for specific images on the Library of Congress website.

What’s not to like?

We Are Lost For Words

Here’s an opinion. Something to throw into any discussion that seems in need of a little livening up.

We need some new words to describe photography. In particular, we need a heap of new words to describe that thing we tend to call a photo (formerly photograph).

If we don’t, the corporate thought-police are going to take over photography.

Those files we have lurking in the phones in our pockets right now…we call them photos, but it’s akin to describing everything we wear simply as ‘clothes’. Yes, they are clothes.  A useful catch-all word. But if that was the only word we had to describe a shirt, jacket, socks, etc., then making ourselves understood at times would get a whole lot harder.

© Ron Fehling/evolveimages.com

Same with photos. All those different image files sit under the photo apps but they’re not photography as we once knew it.

Most of my photos are notes, not carefully constructed images but reference shots.  Quite a few of the images are shared from others and they are communications of a different kind often – poised as some kind of illustrative element that is entirely connected with a related short text. In the same way that the words will no longer come as a grammatical sentence of old, so too has the image not come as a finely formed photo.

Various social media, of course, have taken possession of relabeling the image in their own brand form. Instagram, Twitpic, Snapchat… they frame and shape and deliver something that is a particular kind of image, a sub-set of photography.

The problem with that is that large corporations are taking over defining photography – and soon we will be speaking with their brands as the only tools we have for actually describing what we are doing.

It’s time to resist. I’d like to think we can do so. Here at Evolve we enjoy all those social media, we love the technologies, and we love the way they’ve helped create a culture that might see a trillion images being taken around the world next year. Yes, one trillion! But one trillion what?

We think it is time the photographer, the members of the thinking image-making community, started finding a way of talking about this incredible cultural explosion. It should be a language that comes from the heart rather than the corporate brand guidelines.

Any words you’d suggest to help curate the trillion?

Blog post by Lewis Blackwell, Chief Creative Officer, Evolve Images