By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: April 27, 2008 in The New York Time

Let’s face facts: the Web, after nearly 20 years, has failed to uncover new masters of noble art forms like poetry, sculpture and the airport thriller. But it has engendered — for good or ill — new forms of creative expression. Blogs and viral videos are only the most obvious. Fan fiction, wikis, Flash animation and Second Life avatars are a few more. People don’t upload to the Web words and images they had fashioned apart from the Web; they fashion their stuff specifically for online platforms and audiences.

Consider photography. As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. Flickr, the wildly popular photo-sharing site, was founded by the Canadian company Ludicorp in 2004. Four years later, amid the more than two billion images that currently circulate on the site, the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site’s members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that “pop” with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.

While pretty and even cute, these images are also often surreal and prurient, evoking the unsettling paintings of de Chirico and Balthus, in which individual parts are beautiful and formally rendered, but something is not quite right over all. Flickr’s creamy fantasy pictures, many of them “erotic” (rather than sexy) portraits that have been forcibly manipulated with digital tricks, stand in contrast to the rawer and grainier 35-millimeter photography that’s still canonized by august institutions like the International Center of Photography.

Rebekka Guoleifsdottir, one of Flickr’s most popular photographers, is the leading exponent of the site’s style. An art student from Iceland who turned to social networking to acquire commissions for her drawings, she came to photography relatively late. Tellingly, she learned to work Flickr before she became proficient with a camera. She discovered how to create the minicollections called “photostreams”; how to create images that would look good shrunk, in “thumbnail” form; and how to flirt with the site’s visitors in the comments area to keep them coming back. As perhaps is always the case with artists, Guoleifsdottir’s evolution as a photographer was bound up in the evolution of her modus operandi, a way of navigating the institutions and social systems that might gain her a following and a living.

Guoleifsdottir’s Flickr opus, and her notes on the site about it, supply a portrait of the artist. In 2005, she uploaded simple snapshots of some of her drawings to the site, mostly portraits of children. Some are cool with a storybook quaintness; others look like vanity speed portraits done at a street fair. The most striking is a pastel of Guoleifsdottir’s nephew, apparently a rendering of a single-source flash snapshot, in which the boy’s wholesome face appears stung with bright light and his tightly-constricted pupils are tinted with the red that some camera flashes impart.

Because Flickr is a site for photography, commenters tend to go easy on photos of paintings or drawings, which they don’t pretend to have expertise in. As a result, the minimal commentary on Guoleifsdottir’s early drawings was very forgiving — and even naïve. About the image of a young boy, one commenter gushed, “This is fabulous work, how long does it take you to do one of these?”

On the heels of this encouragement, Guoleifsdottir turned to photography in earnest. The first photos Guoleifsdottir posted to Flickr were shot with an analog camera: snapshots of her school-age sons and a portrait or two of herself. Commenters loved the way Guoleifsdottir looked — she’s a weight-trained, protean-looking woman with movie-star eyes — but Flickr members often deem analog photos unfocused. (“A mixture of melancholy and curiosity,” wrote a commenter on one image. “It’s a shame about the focus.”)

Guoleifsdottir shifted to a digital camera, first using a Canon Digital Ixus, and then a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT, one of the most popular cameras on Flickr. (Discussions of cameras, lenses and film pervade the site.) When she started uploading digital pictures, like her stony self-portrait “torso,” her photos starting breaking Flickr records for numbers of views, and comments turned to catcalls (“gosh . . . huge breasts,” someone noted astutely).

Guoleifsdottir learned how to title and tag photos so that they might readily come up in searches; how to police copyright transgressions (as when some of her photos were sold illegally on eBay); and how to push, push contrasts by processing her pictures with Photoshop software. These skills might not have advanced her with New York galleries, but they made for a charmed ride on Flickr. A photography blogger who posts under the name Thomas Hawk is a Flickr regular, and he told me in an e-mail conversation that there is not a single Flickr style. But he conceded that intense postproduction processing is necessary for popularity on the site.

Guoleifsdottir’s next step was to abandon realism. A few experiments in 10-second exposures led her to juvenile representations of specters and phantoms, which nonetheless drew praise. Playing with shutter speed, she caught an image of liquor splashing out of a glass; Flickr named it the most-interesting photo of the day on July 29, 2005. She started intensely manipulating and coloring her photos in postproduction, creating haunted interiors, doubled images, filtered landscapes and contrived composites. Comments shot up; her page-views hit the millions.

In June 2006, having followed Guoleifsdottir’s Flickr ascendancy, an advertising executive for Toyota came calling and assigned her a print campaign for the Prius in Iceland. She was to illustrate the car’s hybrid quality, applying her wintry formalism and production mischief and producing many doubled self-portraits. A star was born, along with the legend of her rise to prominence on Flickr.


In the meantime, another popular Flickr photographer who goes by the name Merkley was building up his own opus. He has even written a treatise extolling digital manipulation called “I’m Not a Photographer,” deriding mainstream art photographers who “show you shoes hanging on wires, pink boxes in the green weeds, little black girls with blue eyes and nuns sitting under billboards of naked men.” On his Flickr profile, he calls the classic film camera “The Robot Camera Machine” and proposes digital processing as the antidote to film’s inhumanity.

Merkley’s style is more R-rated and carnivalesque than Guoleifsdottir’s, but together the two Flickr stars have mounted a case against vérité rawness, in favor of posing, cropping and special effects. Guoleifsdottir and Merkley might have amounted to nothing in analog times, when elaborate deference to institutions, hard-won group shows and expensive years spent in unnoticed toil were the only way to success. But just as certain ne’er-do-well writers have found themselves in blogging, and failed filmmakers have taken to online video, these seemingly out-of-step artists have both invented and mastered the Flickr photograph. Other photographers have added still more levels of processing — including the otherworldly contrasts achieved with high-dynamic-range photography — to the quintessential Flickr image, and it’s becoming only more eye-popping and stylized.

And none of it looks like Diane Arbus or Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer many critics still consider the greatest of all time. On Flickr, Cartier-Bresson is no Guoleifsdottir. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that when a prankster posted a Cartier-Bresson photo of a cyclist passing a spiral staircase, passing the photo off as his own, a mob of commenters shouted it down, crying for it to be deleted. “When everything is blurred you cannot convey the motion of the bicyclist,” one commenter carped. “Why is the staircase so ‘soft’? Camera shake?” wrote another. “Gray, blurry, small, odd crop,” someone concluded. That seemed to be the final word.

Really delicate to decide on the photographer to use for our wedding, previously without knowing the person, experience and the empathies levels  to obtain between the couple and the photographer. There is no doubt that hotel photographers have a major location handling, but they always doesn't have the time to catch the photo dynamic of each couple in particular. The  hotel based photographers can work to much better prices than these come from outside, but their services are limited by the their work nature: fast delivery and the weddings volume  to be cover.
Put distance between you and the marriage emotion. Finally, when you find the photographer give to him or her you support explaining what do you wish.
Do not forget: if the couple need the photographers confidence, they needs smiles from you.
Juan Guzman - Dominican Photographic Art

 Juan Guzman - dfotoart

To work wedding photography in open and closed places, open day and dark night, with bad weather , sea colors, dimmed sky, getting late. Furthermore, allow the brides to live their experience, allow the guests to make its photos, to keep the respect by the venue order, its limitations and possibilities, requires of certain abilities and the main one is: to be prepared for the unexpected things. Retardation, the change of plans from beach to garden, day to night, sun shine to hard rain. And the really excellent thing: that the even benefit of its moment, instead of being a problem You like main photographer are the one ready for find out the solution touch in the right moment. Inventive, creativity, graceful improvisations and within the frame of the professionalism.
For that reason, many pairs choose a relative for their photos or deal with a very high level of tension until the moment for being sure that selected person works so well or at least takes suitable unfolding in front of them and the guests.
We are no simple photographer shooting wedding, also it has value of being a partner of the pair that hire us for its special moment.
Choice come to another country to make its marriage is a long project and involve many, many details to take care, photography is not less important. Pictures are the moment memories, the history illustration, the happy moment veracity and the union visual documentation.
Our correct unfolding is a support for how hire us.
Having sufficient and suitable equipment for each necessity is a responsibility, to be prepared in experience, cultural knowledge and own confidence are an element of high value for the stranger who only has reference about us from another one opinion or an image that you did and they saw by the Internet.
Shoot weddings in hotels and resort requires of art and little something more.

Keeping His Eye on the Horizon (Line)

Mr. Leong photographed Dubai because “it is a new city created out of oil wealth,” and he shot his skyline panorama several miles away, from the surrounding desert. “I was afraid the film might get damaged,” he said, since the outdoor temperature was 110 to 120 degrees in the noonday sun. “The camera was hot to the touch.”

By contrast he went to Venice in January, when the winter sky was most likely to be overcast and the light would yield the finest detail. His picture “Canale della Giudecca, 2007” was taken at dusk from the mainland. The densely packed, sharply articulated buildings hover in a narrow line between water and sky.

“For this image the exposure time was about a minute,” he said. “So anything that’s moving becomes a blur or disappears. The water that is moving becomes a blank sheet. People sometimes ask if this picture is Photoshopped because of the blankness.”

Mr. Leong still uses negative film and makes all of his prints in the darkroom. He believes that light projected through a negative onto paper provides more continuous tone than is possible with the digital process. “If you blow up a digital scan, you’ll see it is made up of different squares, each one a different color, which corresponds in the computer’s mind to a numerical value,” he said. “In analog it will be a continuous curve.”

Mr. Leong acknowledges the influence of 19th-century photographers like Felice Beato and John Thomson, who photographed in China and India using a view camera. But he also cited the contemporary photographer Thomas Struth, whose technical precision Mr. Leong admires, as well as his images documenting cities. “You’re not only looking at what is depicted on the picture plane, but a kind of emotional context he is trying to describe,” he said. Citing Mr. Struth’s photograph of the Pantheon in Rome, he added: “There’s a heaviness, the weight of history and the weight of the light. A certain sense of sadness about it.”

It’s a sentiment that may come to mind when viewing an earlier series by Mr. Leong, “History Images,” which documents the vast rows of modern towers in China that are rapidly engulfing the country’s cultural past. The photographs were shown in 2006 at the High Museum in Atlanta, and Julian Cox, its curator of photography, called the work prescient in capturing what Mr. Leong has labeled the “erasure of history.”

Last year the Yale University Art Gallery acquired 15 of Mr. Leong’s panoramic images, and he worked with Joshua Chuang, assistant curator of photographs, on their installation at Betts House, the university’s center for international studies. Placed side by side, Mr. Chuang said, the images juxtapose modern industrial landscapes with those that are slower to change, like mountain ranges and bodies of water. “We’re left to contemplate, along with the photographer, how much longer these landscapes will look this way, and why,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Another example of Mr. Leong’s interest in contrasting natural terrain with the constructed environment is “Victorville, California, 2006,” which depicts suburban sprawl between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

“I wanted to include an image of the new cities in the U.S., cities that lie outside of the recognizable cities,” he said, adding that he was seeking an image to “communicate this sort of flatness and impending urbanization,” one providing a “counterpoint to the other images I had of natural landscapes and dense cities.”

The cul-de-sac in “Victorville” at first glance could be a pond. Only some of the newly built houses are occupied, and the picture was shot before any landscape planting had begun. As in so many of Mr. Leong’s photographs, the natural terrain is visible and vast, even as the architectural imprint of humanity begins to encroach.

Until June 22nd 2008

Photographs, paintings and drawings by Patti Smith, a veteran rock performer, have gone on display at the Fondation Cartier, one of Paris’s most prestigious contemporary art galleries. Small black-and-white Polaroid pictures dominate the display, which hangs in a basement gallery furnished with armchairs and carpets to resemble a living room. Gravestones are a favourite subject, as is Ms Smith's connection with other artists and poets (Arthur Rimbaud and Robert Mapplethorpe are important influences). Reading and performances by Ms Smith complement the exhibition.

Fondation Cartier, 261 boulevard Raspail, Paris 75014. See the gallery's website.

Until June 30th 2008

Visitors to Paris this spring should not miss a splendid new exhibition on Marie Antoinette at the Grand Palais. The first large show in more than 50 years about the ill-fated queen, it traces her extraordinary life in displays that are both theatrical and evocative. The highlight is the section about the Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s private court at Versaille, where she entertained friends away from the formal palace. Its atmosphere is conjured through musical scores and original furniture. The queen's final journey to the guillotine in 1793 is evoked in a dimly lit corridor, lined with brutal cartoons, poignant quotes from her letters and the chemise she wore in prison. “We wanted to give as complete a picture of her as possible,” the artistic director told Economist.com. Judging from the crowds at this show, it is a picture the French are keen to see.

Grand Palais, 1 Avenue Gén Eisenhower, 75008 Paris. Tel: +33 (0)1 44 13 17 30. Open: daily (except Tues), 10am-8pm (Wed until 10pm). See also the museum’s website.

Jean Crawford Adams, View from Auditorium, c. 1945

Until August 3rd 2008

Chicago has a thriving arts scene, but painting has often played second fiddle to music, dance and theatre. This thoughtful exhibition sets out to redress the balance, offering a century's worth of Chicago-based painters and work that ranges from figurative to abstract. Look out for Ed Paschke's eerie portrait of Leopold and Loeb, the famous Chicagoan murderers, and the artful 19th-century cartoons of Theodore L. Wust. Images of the city play a huge role in Richard Chance's forays into realism in the late 20th century, as well as in Jean Crawford Adams's abstract view of the skyline.

Juan Guzman
If you are planning a spring wedding and you like to include nice flowers with vibrant petals in outdoor location, candles to give it a soft romantic look, get married a bit later in the day, in this way you have light day and candles working out in the continuing natural light transformation from blue/yellow sunset color dominance to candles light into night. Really romantic in all!.
Photographers like vibrant color. Try greens mixed wit deep red or strong pink and gold in companion dress or table and centerpieces decor.
Every season change the photo work scheme. Spring is not different. April-May-June, coming with particular and unpredictable weather. If you setup everything indoor, don´t worry, but for outdoor will be nice think in plan B working out in case of rain.
Wedding in spring can be great for every aspect in special for photography (elegant, romantic, vivid), life coming with natural colored world, clear sky, brilliant sunset and candles light. Couple with a good wedding photographic staff (experience and ready for switch too fast in unpredictable changes), finally go to get successful spring wedding day

The author is Dominican wedding photographer

 
Juan Guzman
To work wedding photography in open and closed places, open day and dark night, with bad weather , sea colors, dimmed sky, getting late. Furthermore, allow the bride to live their experience, allow the guests to make its photos, to keep the respect by the venue order, its limitations and possibilities, requires of certain abilities and the main one is: to be prepared for the unexpected things. Retardation, the change of plans from beach to garden, day to night, sun shine to hard rain. And the really excellent thing: that the even benefit of its moment, instead of being a problem You like main photographer are the one ready for find out the solution touch in the right moment. Inventive, creativity, graceful improvisations and within the frame of the professionalism.
For that reason, many pairs choose a relative for their photos or deal with a very high level of tension until the moment for being sure that selected person works so well or at least takes suitable unfolding in front of them and the guests.
We are no simple photographer shooting wedding, also it has value of being a partner of the pair that hire us for its special moment.
Choice come to another country to make its marriage is a long project and involve many, many details to take care, photography is not less important. Pictures are the moment memories, the history illustration, the happy moment veracity and the union visual documentation.
Our correct unfolding is a support for how hire us.
Having sufficient and suitable equipment for each necessity is a responsibility, to be prepared in experience, cultural knowledge and own confidence are an element of high value for the stranger who only has reference about us from another one opinion or an image that you did and they saw by the Internet.
Shoot weddings in hotels and resort requires of art and little something more.

Juan Guzman
As a Wedding Photographer we are expected to be both an artist, technician, business person and a sensitive human being. If you like something more: Master of Ceremonies, arbitrator and that confidence one so close so far in the same time. After have purchased or rented suitable backup gear and be all knowing of photographic equipment, their idiosyncrasies and purpose. Strong in studio portraiture so we need to know about lighting and facial size, proportion, angles and layouts. To know lighting, ceremony places paths, its rules, the Officiate....keeping main in the reception beforehand. Preparation - Training - Business Sense - and most important of all sense of humor is a good start. BRIDES: Your wedding photographs may have to reflect a diversification of interests and taste. The entire wedding market has no totally embraced PJ efforts and there are still many out there who are traditionalists and classics. Photographer experience, guides, inspiration, equipment, everything help keep things on track. As long as you stay on track things go well. That will be PRO-Photographer goal.

 

 Google is not easing up in terms of search market share and acquisitions. I need not say it but Google is a formidable force that Yahoo and Microsoft are not going to overcome easily. Consider the following:

Recent search engine market share figures (May 2007) show Google with 57.4%, Yahoo! with 22.9%, MSN with 8.8% and Ask.com with approximately 3.6% of the search market. These are average figures for data collected by Hitwise, NNR and comScore.

Google’s last few steps, notably the purchase of YouTube.com and DoubleClick, will also prove to be scary for the #2 and #3 players in the industry. Google has taken some bold steps trying to extend its market lead to areas outside of search. Google’s purchases show the company is interested in a bigger piece of the branded advertising pie including banners, videos and other online graphical ads. Currently, Yahoo! is considered the leader in branded advertising and they’ve recently increased their stake in Right Media (a competitor of DoubleClick) to 80% (a $680 million dollar deal). MSN recently purchased aQuantive—also a DoubleClick competitor.

Given the above information, what can Yahoo and Microsoft do to compete? Will they stay their existing courses or implement completely different courses of action? In this article, I suggest a few scenarios that could roll out as the search engine wars get hotter.

Microsoft and Yahoo joint venture

For now, merger talks between Microsoft and Yahoo are off. In the words of a Yahoo! official: “A merger between Microsoft & Yahoo! would be like two large ships colliding." Merger talks may be off but there could be a strategic partnership in the works between Microsoft and Yahoo!. The two companies could combat the Google threat by launching a joint portal that would allow the companies to effectively pool their resources and stop wasting money competing against each other.

A joint venture could lead to other larger initiatives down the road. Smaller steps are probably a wise place to start given the size and ingrained culture of each company. This won’t be an easy feat but may prove to be a winning combination if they can successfully work out the details. Microsoft could provide technological know-how and Yahoo! could contribute media expertise.

The joint venture could also give the two companies a significant head-start in terms of branded advertising. Unlike Google, both companies are currently fairly well positioned to capitalize here. From 2005 to 2006, display and rich media ads grew 39% to 4.9 billion dollars (for more information, take a look at this IAB & PricewaterhouseCoopers report). Also, targeted online display advertising (behavioral targeting) will soar from $575 million this year to $1 billion in 2008, and the market will almost quadruple by the end of 2011, reaching $3.8 billion.

Yahoo & Google joint venture

Another option is for Yahoo! to get out of the direct search game and have Google provide results for Yahoo! search. In terms of dollars and cents, with the right distribution deal from Google, Yahoo! could make a huge amount money from search with virtually no headaches. The fact that they’re #2 in the game could come in very handy in this particular scenario. Depending on the partner, distribution deals can be very lucrative (sometimes 80% of revenues for the distributing partner).

Yahoo! could then capitalize on other areas of online advertising—notably branded advertising and/or social media. In terms of social media, Yahoo! owns both Flickr and del.icio.us and has recently tried to acquire Facebook. If this area is played well, Yahoo! could make a significant mark in social media.

This is obviously a scary scenario. With this, Google could potentially control over 80% of the market. For the industry to thrive and innovate, we need more than one significant player in the search arena. With huge growth expected in both search and display advertising, and the new Panama system barely out of the gate, it would be a shame to see Yahoo resort to this option so early in the search game.

Microsoft & aQuantive

Microsoft believes there’s plenty opportunity outside of search. And they’re placing bets on it—six billion dollars worth, to be exact. They believe the assets they’ll acquire through the aQuantive deal including the company’s ad placement service (Atlas) and the ad network (DrivePM) will allow them to take a leadership position in display advertising. “This really is a game changer for us in terms of what happens with advertising, as the display market explodes,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief advertising strategist in a CNNMoney.com article.

There are also opportunities in search for Microsoft. They could roll search into many of their products to increase market share. Although, Microsoft is losing software share to Mac users and additional competing products, I think there’s significant opportunity for Microsoft. In my experience, conversion rates on Microsoft web properties are excellent. Their obvious issue is search volume. If they’re able to capture a larger share of the market, they’ll be able to more widely demonstrate their quality and Microsoft may grow from there. This may be a far-fetched scenario to some but things have been know to change very quickly in the online world.

There are obviously numerous more possibilities and scenarios. I welcome your input on what you think may happen in the search arena—please comment below.

Mona Elesseily is director of marketing strategy at Page Zero Media, focusing on paid search campaigns and conversion improvement. She's also author of Page Zero's Unauthorized Yahoo! Search Marketing Handbook. She is currently working on the Panama version of the Y!SM Handbook (forthcoming May 2007). The Paid Search column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

John L. Simson

John L. Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange®, has been involved in the music industry since his 1971 signing with Perception Records as a singer/songwriter. His career has included a ten-year partnership in Studio One Artists, managing country superstar Mary Chapin Carpenter (1988-1995), Steve Forbert (Geffen), Jonell Mosser (MCA), Mike Henderson (RCA) and others. Simson has practiced entertainment law since 1980, and most recently was of counsel to the firm of Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe from 1990 through 1999. Simson joined SoundExchange in March of 2000 and was named its Executive Director in June of 2001.

Simson served as Executive Producer of the PBS television special, "Mary Chapin Carpenter Live At Wolftrap," received an Emmy nomination for his music supervision of the PBS "American Roots Music" special, and also worked on Harry Belafonte's "An Evening With Harry Belafonte and Friends." His other television credits include: Sesame Street 30th Anniversary Special and a network special of the April '97 Presidential Summit, "Keeping America's Promise."

Simson has been very active in the Washington, D.C. Arts community and received the "Outstanding Volunteer Attorney Award" from Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts during its 10th Anniversary celebration. He was one of the founders of the Washington Area Music Association and served as its first President (1985-1990). Simson has also served as Vice President of the Steering Committee of the D.C. Bar's Arts, Entertainment and Sports Law Section and as a Board member and Legal Counsel to the Songwriters Association of Washington.

Simson was elected President of the Washington, D.C. chapter of NARAS (Recording Academy) in April of 2004. He was elected to the Recording Academy Board of Governors in 1997 for the Washington, D.C. chapter, and served three years as a National Trustee of the Academy (1997-2000). Simson has also served on the Board of the Alliance of Artists and Record Companies (AARC), the Washington Area Music Association, Institute For the Arts In Science Education, Inc., Video Culture, Inc., the Takoma/Silver Spring Thunderbolts and the 20th Century Consort. He is a member of the Folk Alliance, the Country Music Association and an alumnus of Nashville's "Leadership Music."

Simson is currently an adjunct professor of Entertainment Law at American University's Washington College of Law, and taught Entertainment Law for two semesters at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law. He has also taught Criminal Procedure at Temple University's School of Criminal Justice, Free Press/Fair Trial at the American University School of Criminal Justice and has lectured frequently on entertainment law and business.

 

By Daryl Lang

As Magnum Photos marks its 60th anniversary with a month-long festival, one reason for the celebration is that such an agency even exists today. Magnum's values can seem at odds with today's instant, digital, full-color nuggets of bite-sized news served by mass media companies.

At a talk Saturday night at the New York Public Library, four Magnum members – Philip Jones Griffiths, Susan Meiselas, Gilles Peress and Larry Towell – discussed the agency's place in the digital world. They were joined by Keith Beauchamp, a filmmaker who made use of the Internet and digital video technology to create his influential documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.

Under prodding from moderator Fred Ritchin, associate chair of photography at New York University, the panel kicked around some ideas about how digital photography and user-generated media are changing photography.

Several times, members of the panel lamented the decline of film.

"Film had a certain value in the delay it created," said Peress, explaining that the digital photography changes the emotional and intellectual properties of the work.

Likewise, Griffiths made arguments in favor of film, including the importance of recording images for posterity.

"My objection to digital photography is there's no recording medium that is stable enough to guarantee it will last, that it will become valuable historically," he said. He praised the negative as a record of what actually happened. "If you're accused of faking a picture, with film you have the record of what was in the camera when you pressed the shutter there forever to prove that was the truth."

Yet even Griffiths gave a nod to digital for some of its advantages: "It's cheap, it's quick, it's effective, you can get stuff out in minutes when it would have taken days in the past."

Beauchamp, the filmmaker who solicited input on his Emitt Till documentary through the Web, was less interested in debating the merits of analog film. "This is not a huge dilemma. I don't see it," he said. "I think having new technology is a huge plus."

He also praised the new digital editing tools that are cheaply available. "It gives the regular layman an opportunity to tell a story," Beauchamp said, adding, "We all start out as amateurs first."

Indeed, no one on the panel seemed bothered by the vast amounts of amateur photography available online through sites like Flickr. "Am I glad those images exist? Of course I am," said Griffiths. "Who could possibly be against amateurs taking pictures?"

Meiselas said digital technology can give more exposure to photography, noting the dialogue around Spencer Platt's World Press Photo of the Year from Lebanon, which led the subjects of the photograph to speak out as a result of all the attention to the image.

Towell noted that he now carries a video camera and an audio recorder into the field to gather multimedia information. "It's given me the opportunity to do completely different things," he said. Towell is among the photographers who have essays posted on Magnum In Motion, Magnum's multimedia site.

Griffins concluded his remarks with a rather pessimistic observation that drew approving laughs from the audience.

"I believe that we can't ignore a simple, simple fact, and that is that the world is being dumbed down," he said.