 Here's looking at you, geek Ever been photographed for the trade press? By the publication's photographer? How did it turn out? I'm really interested to know, because, even though I've tarted around the 'multi media' business for a while, I've usually been 'behind' the publication, as writer or editor, and my choice to be anonymous is assured. For the rest of my 'appearances' there have been a few standard PR portraits that are trotted out when someone asks (or are sent off by employers when I change jobs/hats). Now, unless you've sent one out, you may not have realised that publicity stills, accompanying even interesting press releases, are uniformly bad. Jackie Cooper (ex-The Australian, SMH, and MM) made a clever attack on the sheer silliness of the PR shots we received. Her on-line article is long gone but I remember categories such as Why is He Holding My Hand? (the obligatory 'sealing the deal' handshake), My Building is Bigger than Your Building ( the new marketing someone or other in front of their office), and Are You Sure You Can See the Logo?. By themselves they were funny, enmasse hilarious. Because the pictures are bad, if the editors of the publications want to run the story, they're forced to take their own accompanying photographs. If it's for the weekly IT newspaper sections, the pressure is on to make an appointment, get the photo, process it and lay out the story, before deadline. In a matter of minutes into the appointment, the photographer has to grasp the gist of the story, find an appropriate place for the photo, and get as pleasing a result as they can. They don't know the layout of the page, can't tell if the shot will be on the growing number of colour pages or in black and white, or guess if the format should be vertical, horizontal or square. I sympathise and empathise. It's a tough call. When the result works it's great and is then almost immediately forgotten, when it doesn't it looks silly and only the subject really suffers. What ever happens, there's still the same number of pages to fill next week. This <thinktag> tries to slow down the cultural churn, and think about how those press pictures portray us as computer users and IT people. It also offers some flippant, and some serious, suggestions as to how you can have a say in how you are portrayed in the media. Because this is largely about images, I've tried to make the choice yours as to how
heavy you want to get into download time. The links in the text will load an image into
the frame to the right, click on an image in the strip below and it will do the same. The
photographs are much smaller than they appeared in print, a bit rough and have mostly been
scanned from two week's issues of the computer sections of The Australian, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald. Oh, so that's what it looks like. When computers were new and still evolving into their current dreary shapes, we really wanted to know what they looked like. Computer magazines then, as now, didn't have pictures of people using computers, just lots of shots of the hardware itself. The exception was if it was a novelty to have someone 'important' use one. One such story was of Isaac Asimov who gave up his electric typewriter for a Tandy Model III, (an event that was seized on, or planted, by the Radio Shack marketing department and turned into this, with Isaac as one of the most improbable computer ad presenters ever). From then to now, photographing the user at their computer you faced a common problem. You can show the person at their computer or with their computer, but if you wanted to show what was on the screen of their computer, you had one choice of view. You had to photograph them from a three-quarter angle so that you could see them and the screen. At best they just looked awkward, at worst, ridiculous as they squinted sideways, holding their heads to the camera and trying to look like they could really view the screen from that angle. If you wanted a shot of your work team and have them all looking at the computer, it required even more novel solutions. After many dreary years of variations on that three-quarter pose, (I'll spare you the chronicle) it was obvious that a change was due. After all a computer was TIME magazine's 1982 'Man of the Year'. In my archives is a special edition of National Geographic on the phenomenon of Silicon Valley. All the pictures are lit with primary coloured lights, pumping as much drama as they can from someone holding a chip. The coloured cross lighting is an industrial photography cliche that has mercifully passed. It was to take another ten years of indifferent coverage... and suddenly there was WIRED magazine. It was not as a direct result of how WIRED portrayed users and computers that brought the change, but the context they were placed in. Rossetto and Metcalfe were just smarter then most on picking up on the groundswell. WIRED followed failed attempts like the (recently reborn) glossy OMNI, and increasingly sophisticated treatment in magazines like New Scientist and Popular Science. But it was WIRED that gave us confidence that computers really were a serious and important agent of commercial and cultural change, and should be treated as such. Now we had media permission that it was ok. to be geeks, and for the business people involved to be treated as legitimate. For all its faults, it radically changed computer magazines, and with them, the weekly IT sections of the newspapers. Taking care of business This has lead to a conflict in the representation of IT in the press. Business people now get the same treatment as in the financial pages. Respectful photographs that point to their position as responsible money makers, now alternate with those of the actual users in our weekly doses of print. The inventiveness of the staff photographers sometimes flags when faced with another portrait of a CEO, as a quick listing of the following cliches show.(Remember, there's no malice here, just vicarious interest). The captain of industry leaning on the ships rail. Up the workers. But that's the guys from the pointy end of the ship, how are the workers in the engine
room portrayed? There's an occasional quirky shot that's fun but far too many of the
following... Is there a conclusion to all this ? Most of the awkward cliches each week result from the lack of any understanding by the subjects of how the camera will see them. That's in spite of our regular diet of Tuesday's IT sections. Then there is the subject's lack of communication with the photographer, and a dumb puppy desire to be helpful and do anything they're asked. The opportunity to have your ego stroked shouldn't overwhelm any thought of a personal or business message you might want the publicly available image to portray. What works best is when there's an idea in the photograph, and if you're pushing the
photographer for time, that has to come from you, the subject, or your PR company. (Most
of you won't have a PR firm to control how your image is presented and from the standard
of most of the PR shots the PR companies obviously don't have any idea themselves about
all this. At least if they make you look silly, then you can smack them. Telling
them what you want to convey is a good first step.) And if you're having your photograph taken in a group, don't be the geek with your jacket slung over your shoulder. F.H.
|
