#156: Photo-oons
Everyone now has a photo/video studio in their pocket. Was that really the best idea?
Say ‘Cheese!’ It’s me, Jason Chatfield (), your editor for this week’s photographic edition of
Photos are different from cartoons. While you can frame something the way you want it in a photo, and sometimes organize a composition, you really can’t invent stuff you want to be in the frame. Like a talking onion on stilts—You’re kind of stuck with the thing you’re taking a photo of. (Regular onion on stilts.)
Editing a photo ‘in post’ is less fun than just drawing the picture you wanted to see in the first place— and you get the added bonus of the artist’s editorialized version of the thing.
All that is to say, stop bringing your camera phones to concerts. Nobody’s watching your videos of Odezsa at Madison Square Garden. If you want to be obnoxious, just bring a sketchbook and some watercolors. Maybe an onion.
Hell is the photo session after the wedding before the party, while every guest stands around wondering where the f*cking bride is.
Where is she? She’s suffering from smiling so hard she’s giving herself an aneurism.
I sold this one shortly into the NYC lockdowns for Covid. This lucky woman is going to spend untold hours, spread over untold days, organizing decades of photos, finally reaching a feeling of immense satisfaction as her life is finally corralled into one coherent, attractive story of smiling moments, only to realize that the next decade will bring a wave of digital photos so immense that it will boggle the mind and swamp any attempt at organization and personal storytelling beyond whatever search tools a large company decides at that moment to provide.
Said Magritte of his 1964 painting: “Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”
Said Steve Jobs of his iPhone in 2007: “What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen. A giant screen.”
Said Amy, of her cartoon from 2017: “It’s a metaphor for um… how technology is, like, hiding the self … or I mean it represents how surrealism is like a virtual world? a world in which the self is obscured by the documentation of the self? or… OK it’s an APPLE, get it?”
This— a 1990s camcorder— is about where my understanding of technology clocks out.
Ellis J Rosen
A couple of summers ago I attempted a little photography as I walked around the city. I posted my work for all to see and quickly learned that I was not good at it. The comments were brutal. After I posted a picture, I would get a lot of comments saying stuff like, "Nice photo," and "Oh, cool!" which were all clearly very sarcastic. One person wrote "Oh, I love this photo!" which, for anyone who could read between the lines, meant "Wow, what a bad photo!"
But wait, there’s more!
Hilary releases
every Friday!- ’s graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story, was named a best book of 2023 by The New Yorker, NPR, and Kirkus!
Check out Navied’s critically acclaimed graphic memoir, This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America.
- has a new Substack about making art called Process Junkie! And Subscribe to Jason’s regular weekly Substack at NewYorkCartoons.com
- 's got an advice column! Read it here.
- has a hilarious new book of cartoons out! Grab it now from any good book retailer. (Except Amazon. They’re sold out.)
