Michael R. Barrick

When I set up my photo booth in nightclubs I frequently get asked if I can simply send an electronic copy rather than selling the print. This is a problem since I'm typically not making any kind of  wage, only earning from the sale of prints. It's difficult to afford new gear when I'm not making money, and hard to find time to do photography if I have to spend all my time working at other things to pay rent  and eat - and I have this irrational attraction to sleeping indoors and staying fed. Go figure.

I've read other photographers talking about giving access to the digital file in terms of a film paradigm, i.e. "Giving away the negative." In one sense that is true. Anyone with the digital source file has the means to make as many prints as they want. But unlike film, the digital negative is infinitely reproducible.

The record and DVD industries have a similar problem, but not an identical one, and they flail endlessly against it. In both cases the physical medium itself bears the digital file that can be copied with perfect fidelity. It's ironic that these digital media were obstensively introduced to "prevent" the easy copying that was possible with the antecedent analogue media, yet from the point of view of physical media sales analogue media had the advantage that copies were necessarily of a degraded quality. No audio cassette was ever going to sound quite as good as the record, and records eventually wore out and needed replacing. Likewise dubbed video tapes were never as good and all video tapes eventually wore out. For a time a similar argument could be made with MP3 sharing, where the compression of the MP3 required to make a file practically shareable over a modem connection caused a necessary loss in quality, but now with broadband and bittorrents entire CDs and DVDs can readily be copied bit-for-bit with no loss of quality. That's what happens when executives with no foresight and no technical knowledge get to make decisions. I can imagine a sales-monkey from a CD-duplication company with no real knowledge about the technology making the sales pitch to a record-company executive some time around 1984: "CDs cost less to produce than records, but you can sell them for twice as much based on the superior sound quality. Tapes will sound absolutely shitty compared to the CD so people won't want copies anymore. The audio files are so huge that no one will be able to copy them - you'd need thirty floppies to hold just one song. You can tell people that they are indestructible, you can even show how a scratch from the centre to the edge that would make a record go tick-tick-tick does nothing so they'll line up to replace their perfectly good records - but don't worry a horizontal scratch will screw them up worse than a skipping record so people will still be back again for replacements. You can't lose!"

And they fell for it because it worked once before. One of the intrinsic features of wax-cylinder gramophones was the ability to both play and record. Connecting two machines with a rubber hose and dubbing cylinders was common practice. Records were introduced largely because they required specialized equipment to record and were sold on the basis of better sound, increased durability and long run times - sound familiar?

However, notice that I said the record and DVD industries, not "music" and "movies." Of course with the industry giants production and distribution are tied together and organizations like the RIAA and MPAA conflate and exaggerate the connections between these in order to protect the material product sales. But musicians. composers, actors, producers, script-writers and the like all managed to make livings before mechanical reproduction and broadcast media through performance. Live music, live theatre and cinemas got on just fine before records and video and artists outside of the giant industry grind-wheels still manage to get by because there is nothing that can compete one-on-one with performance or the cinema experience. And therein lies the big difference between digital copies of music and movies and digital copies of photographs: there is no performance in photography, only the image.

Visual art has faced this before, and it was actually photography that created the crisis. Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is the article on this issue and pretty much mandatory reading for any visual artist. Photography made visual artwork reproducible, and mimesis (i.e. making something look "real" in a drawing or a painting) became a rather lame measure of quality since anyone could do that with a camera. Over the course of the 20th century you see increasing efforts to focus not on the mimetic qualities of the artwork, but the visceral experience of the original object, elements of pure design, and the ultimate underlying idea of the work. Abstract painting develops. Performance art develops. There's enough nuance in this progression that you can spend the rest of your life studying art history, but suffice to say that it's clear that fine art has survived and reinvented itself for the age of mechanical reproduction and is also doing just, well... fine.

The following 15-minute presentation on reproduction and copying in the fashion industry makes points that apply equally well to fine arts. The most salient of which is that the customers buying the "original" are not the same people who are buying the knock-offs. Likewise in the art world the people buying the souvenir books and the postcards are not the collectors buying the original work.

But now what happens where there is no original? Or the copies are indistinguishable from the original? The "negative" in conventional photography is made obsolete once an appropriately detailed scan is made of it, and with digital photography it never exists. The new digital originals have no inherent aura. Reproduction carries no aura. While, like other visual arts, it's the design, idea and execution that makes a photograph good, great, art or a snapshot. But none of that is lost in reproduction. That makes revenue models for photographers difficult.

One model I work with relies on good faith and the legal power of a monster corporation. This is what happens when I upload to iStock. The digital file you can buy from iStock is as good as it gets for that image and there is no practical way to stop someone who has paid for that file from sharing it, using it in excess of their licencing agreement, or otherwise ripping it off other than relying on iStock to chase down someone reposting my content on Flickr or whatnot and having it removed or doing the chasing myself. I make a pittance of each sale and iStock gets the lion's share, but since it takes very little work on my part and income continues to trickle in whether I'm creating new work of not, so it's worth it. In this regard it is no better or worse than a musician allowing a record company to do their distribution. In fact it is marginally better since iStock doesn't preclude me from selling my own prints and licences.

Then there is the closest there is in photography to a "performance" - being paid for my time up front. This is good work when I can get it, but it requires a lot of gear, studio space, and competing with the new and desperate that will work for peanuts and reinforce this kind of thing:

Another model is to keep absolute control over the master file and only put lesser-quality reproductions out there for unauthorizedly reproduction and be the exclusive source of quality reproductions, which is the model I've been using all along for my photo booth and where I have a problem. Not everyone wants a physical print. I essentially give away low quality, watermarked versions of the images on Gothic BC. The dilemma that has brought me to thinking this all though is that the low-quality images that I have been sharing on the website for the past ten years don't cut it for screen sharing anymore but I don't want give away files of enough quality that there is no reason to buy a 4" × 6" print anymore. But at the same time I've become convinced, largely due to the TED video above, that there are customers who would pay for a decent-resolution digital copy who will never buy a print.

In the end this is a very long argument to convince myself that it is OK to try selling medium-resolution (i.e. bigger files that will print O.K. at 4" × 6", but not as good as what I print on the spot) on Gothic BC. I've decided on selling at 1050 pixels on the long side -  263% larger than the free pictures and unwatermarked, but only 58% as clear as what I print on the spot - for the same price as at the higher-quality prints, balancing lower quality with infinite reproducibility against higher-quality with limited reproducibility. 

So, over two months since I ordered my free Tego skin, it finally arrived. It did, in fact, ship rather quickly since I only got the shipping notice three days ago, but that's pretty normal for Canada Post letter-mail from one major city (Winnipeg) to another (Vancouver.) What sucks is the envelope arrived completely open. There is not even a sign that it was ever sealed. It was only by pure fluke that the contents didn't fall out somewhere in transit.

So now I have some lovely die-cut vinyl applied to my Blackberry. It looks kind of neat, but I'm not optimistic about how long it will last, and remain stunned at how long it took to show up. Part of my job involves ordering die-cut printed vinyl like this. It really doesn't take this long to produce. Once again, if I had not gotten this as "free" loyalty reward (i.e. for having thrown buckets of money at Rogers every month for a year) I never would have ordered it, nor do I recommend anyone order from Tego.

Remember back in January when I left my phone in a taxi and it went where socks go in the dryer? Two days before that I had ordered a custom skin from an outfit called "Tego. I wouldn't waste money on such a thing, but I happened to "win" this as a Christmas present from Rogers. The offer was going to expire at the end of January so I decided to go a head an order it since it was "free" (as in, spend a gazillion dollars on your phone every month, get a prize worth less than the tax portion of the monthly bill - what a deal!)

That was on the 29th of January. Today, TODAY, thirty-eight days after placing my order, I got an e-mail with the subject line "Your TEGO order […] from mytego.com is now being made just for you."

Thirty eight days and they are starting on my order?! If this was something I had actually paid for and cared about I think I would be a little choked about this. It's like I ordered Sea-Monkeys out of a 25¢ comic book from 1976 - "Please allow 6 - 8 weeks for delivery." Or maybe 1946:

Dear Mr. Tego,

Would you be so kind as to send me a skin made from the attached drawing for my telephone, a Blackberry, which is about a year old and has a lot of buttons and a little silver around the edges…

At least Rogers finally did replace my phone with the same model, or this skin I had pretty much forgotten about would be pretty useless, whenever/if it finally does show up.

Continued from It's a Sad State of Affairs, part 2: Rogers was Predictably Useless:

Since Rogers' head office is in Toronto and in a time-zone three hours ahead  I got up an hour and a half earlier than usual today to call in at 9:00 a.m. their time in order to get a hold of a someone with some authority and have something done about my phone.

It took an hour and half.

I called up and initially spoke to "Anne." I started out by explaining that I had already spent a great deal of time with customer service yesterday and was calling back to speak to a manager. Anne did not simply put me through to a manager, presumably because she was trained not to in order to screen out people who ask for escalation before they have actually talked to the lower lever representatives at all (which, admittedly, I do routinely when getting tech support since, without fail, I know more than the tier-one monkeys.) Anne was very nice, though, and while it was a waste of time, it was not unpleasant talking to her.

Upon the revelation that my account was a business account and not a personal one, Anne passed me off to Sonya in the business department. Sonya was a bit more frustrating. She maintained the same line as Blair from yesterday. She told me about how it was "physically impossible" to send out a new phone until the one I had been sent was returned because the fields in the almighty "system" were "greyed out" until the other phone was received.

As I had with Blair, I explained that I wasn't at concerned with what limitations were programmed into the system, and that those simply represented an artificially imposed and flawed process that could be circumvented. She maintained that it could not. I proposed several hypothetical situations on how she could send me a "new" phone and credit me back for my mistaken "upgrade" and the difference in price between the "upgrade" and the "new phone."

Eventually I proposed that I would be sending back the Nokia 2660 I was sent, keeping the SIM card and buying third-party hardware to put it in, but nonetheless I would still like to speak to a manager to suggest changing "the system" to facilitate correcting problems like this one.

Sonya put me on hold to find a manager - this was somewhere over an hour into the call. After I had been on hold for a while she came back and asked if I could be called back on my cell number. I asked her to stop and think about what she just asked me. She did and put me on hold again.

In a few minutes I was connected to "Noreen." I was in fact ready to do as I had suggested and buy third party hardware and really only wanted to talk to Noreen about fixing "the system." But before I even got that far Noreen proved that what I had been proposing to Blair yesterday was, in fact, possible. Unprompted, Noreen offered to send me out a new Blackberry 8900 prior to receiving the return on the Nokia, and that for my trouble I would have the new phone for only $75 rather than the $449 replacement cost I was happy to pay last week. She further explained that I would actually only be paying $50 for the phone, and $35 for the processing fee, at which point I chose not to question what universe she lived in where 50+35=75, because, frankly, $85 is still a crapload better than $449!

So, in the end, having saved $364 on my replacement phone, that works out to "making" about $120/hr. for the time spent getting to that point. But doesn't it make you wonder what kind of profit margin a company like Rogers has where, in the end, they'd rather sell me a phone for such a tiny fraction of the "full" price (which is actually $599 without a plan) rather than not sell me a phone at all?

Continued in It's a Sad State of Affairs, part 4: I Have a Phone Again

I have pretty low expectations in the integrity and competence of others. I didn't always, but being repeatedly bludgeoned by scenarios like the one that is currently playing out have slowly inverted by approach to other people from one of "benefit of the doubt" to "respect must be earned."

Last week I dropped by cell-phone in a Blacktop taxi. I have no doubt of that because I had it in my hand to call the taxi in the first place and it was undoubtedly with me at the point of entering the cab. This was late Friday (technically early Saturday morning.) Being the weekend Blacktop's office was closed and I had to wait until Monday morning to talk to their lost-and-found. The phone had a password, backs up wirelessly to my server, and I sent a wipe-and-lock command from the server Saturday so I wasn't concerned about the contents of the phone, but I would have liked to avoid the expense of replacing the hardware. My expectations where not high, because a little research revealed that Blacktop Cabs has a history of keeping lost items. The woman answering the phone at Blacktop was rude and unhelpful, telling me to call back because things aren't always turned in right away (in perfect keeping with the aforelinked news story.) I tried back late Monday, and on Tuesday. Later Tuesday, having given four days for the cabbie to turn in the hardware, I called Rogers to report the phone lost/stolen.

At this point I talked to the rep about a replacement. I was given a price on an identical replacement and told to expect it in 2-3 business days. Sure enough, when I got home from work Friday I had a delivery notice for a parcel from Markham, ON (a city I envision as being made up entirely of warehouses, since everything comes from Markham, ON.)

"Grand," I thought, "I can pick it up tomorrow morning."

In the morning I blithely walked over to the local retail postal outlet where all packages that don't fit in the buildings post-boxes go. Unfortunately I hadn't bothered to actually look too closely at the pick-up notice and hadn't noticed that the package had been sent to the wrong postal outlet. The other postal outlet isn't that far away either so I walked over.

At the other postal outlet I had the bizarre and disturbing experience of being served by a couple who barely spoke English and clearly could not read it. I watched in patient, fascinated horror as the two people collaborated on comparing my name and address from my driver's licence to the name and address on the package, letter by letter, illiterately comparing the shapes.

I returned home with my package. After pausing to send a brief letter of complaint to Canada Post about having my mail handled by people who cannot read the Latin alphabet, I opened my package.

Inside was a cell-phone. That is all that what I received had in common with what I had ordered. It was not the same brand, form factor, and otherwise not even close to a replacement for my lost phone.

I called Rogers. After negotiating one of those unavoidable and universally annoying voice actuated automated call-direction systems to get to a human, I was informed that the system bearing my account information was down so there was nothing they could do to help me, and that I should call back in several hours when the system [w|sh]ould be up and running.

At this point I had to let it go since I had to set up for a shoot. By the time the shoot was over it was too late to call back.

Now it is Sunday. The customer service line is closed on Sundays. There is a Rogers outlet nearby that, according to the website, handles wireless and business services and is open today. I'm going to attempt to take my useless replacement in and get this resolved.

And why do I not expect this to go well?

Continued in It's a Sad State of Affairs, part 2: Rogers was Predictably Useless