Blog About Photography

© Greg Wasserstrom

© Greg Wasserstrom

GWB Oper­a­tive Josh just sent me this dis­patch from London:

For­mer Vice Mag­a­zine Photo Edi­tor and Tiny Vices pro­pri­etor Tim Bar­ber opened a new exhi­bi­tion at the Gallery Soho in Lon­don tonight. Because I love my friend Greg a great deal, I flew out to see it (don’t worry, he promised he’d pay me back for the ticket). The exhi­bi­tion is set over two floors in London’s Covent Gar­den neigh­bor­hood, not in Soho as the name of the Gallery sug­gests. Despite this seman­tic dis­tur­bance, the show is pretty inter­est­ing. The first floor is about what you’d expect at some­thing curated by Tim Bar­ber: lots of bright, punchy shots of young peo­ple in vary­ing lev­els of naked­ness, plus a few draw­ings and a badass pic­ture of a van on fire.

The sec­ond floor, though, is where the action is. The uncred­ited photo series appears to have been taken almost entirely in Ger­many onboard sub­ways or on their plat­forms. The pho­tos are arranged either alone or in groups of two or three, in neat rows con­trast­ing the scrap­book feel of the first floor. This ordered style gives the impres­sion that the entire scene is vis­i­ble from within one train car, and what a scene it is. A few large, cen­tral fig­ures — mostly locked in embrace with a loved one — cap­ture the atten­tion of the peo­ple in the images around them. A cov­etous feel­ing exists within the exhi­bi­tion, as though every­one in the smaller images wants to be the peo­ple in the big­ger ones. Or maybe I just wanted another one of the free canapes.

There you have it, sounds like a great time. Thanks, Josh; I feel like I was there. And your check is in the mail.

© Greg Wasserstrom

© Greg Wasserstrom

I saw this arti­cle this morn­ing on CNN​.com which is the first thing I’ve come across so far to pro­file the char­ac­ter­is­tics of “Gen Y,” appar­ently the des­ig­na­tion given to the group of peo­ple born between the late 1970s and the mid-​​1990s. When I’m not mak­ing pho­tographs I’m a stu­dent of the social sci­ences at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity in Wash­ing­ton, DC and so this arti­cle fas­ci­nates me as it tries to exam­ine this par­tic­u­lar nexus of cul­ture and soci­ol­ogy. Since it’s com­ing from CNN, it’s a lit­tle bit bull­shit but sadly I can’t say that it is completely.

The focus of the arti­cle is on “Attract­ing the twen­tysome­thing worker,” but defines what the twen­tysome­thing worker “is” in the process. This kind of look at such a broad swath of the pop­u­la­tion seems sort of silly and it doesn’t help that the arti­cle is writ­ten in the most abra­sively sim­plis­tic and un-​​hip voice CNN and For­tune could pos­si­bly muster. It also reminds me of all the talk in the media 15 years ago or so as Gen X was enter­ing the work force, grunge, “Real­ity Bites,” Beck, etc. I’ve been reminded of this quite a bit in the past cou­ple of years as the New York Time style sec­tion has been report­ing more and more on “hip­ster cul­ture,” (I’m sure you guys remem­ber that infa­mous ‘blip­ster’ arti­cle — it echoes the 1992 “grunge speak” hoax).

So all the signs have indi­cated that some­thing like today’s piece was on its way, and now here it is. A look at the items listed in the side­bar (‘Spot the Gen Y’) is absurd and at the same time describes me per­fectly if you elim­i­nate the yoga mat (Really? Who does yoga? More like kick­ball or foursquare or skee­ball or dodge­ball or some­thing that can be played while drink­ing beer). I have an ipod, i have a lap­top from which I do just about every­thing, I have a cam­era I use to doc­u­ment every­thing and, yes, my life is posted all over the inter­net. And I guess I wear “hip­ster clothes,” which embar­rasses me just to read let alone repeat. Once you get passed though, the arti­cle gets a lit­tle more substantive.

Lap­top:
It’s how Gen Y does work. Who needs the office when you’ve got cafes, parks and your own liv­ing room?

I have two jobs. I work for a photo agency and gos­sip blog. I do both from my liv­ing room using my lap­top, and I gen­er­ally don’t get dressed or take a shower until the work day has ended and I’m ready to go out. Aside from mak­ing all kinds of lame aes­thetic asser­tions (gen­er­ally accu­rate), the arti­cle is full of nuggets like this the one I quoted, equally lame but also accu­rate if all the other kids are doing the things the way I am. And here I thought I was spe­cial. Here’s another good one:

When it comes to Gen Y’s intan­gi­ble char­ac­ter­is­tics, the lex­i­con is less than flat­ter­ing. Try “needy,” “enti­tled.” Despite a con­sen­sus that they’re not slack­ers, there is a sus­pi­cion that they’ve avoided that moniker only by cre­at­ing enough com­mo­tion to dis­tract from the fact that they’re really not that into “work.”

I felt like that was my dirty lit­tle secret! I’m sup­posed to be work­ing right now. Instead I’ve writ­ten this exten­sive blog post, this blog, of course, cre­at­ing the illu­sion that I’m not a slacker. Alas! What a prod­uct of my gen­er­a­tion I am! A poster­boy, one might even say! And if all the other kids, all 78 mil­lion of them, if we’re all the same then, well, I guess I’m pretty screwed unless I can man­age to out-​​charm them all.

My father, who is crit­i­cal of pretty much every­thing, dis­misses the entire field soci­ol­ogy with the quip, “Some do, some don’t.” I try to ignore his lit­tle nuggets for the most part, but I think there is unde­ni­able sim­plic­ity and gen­er­al­iza­tion in this arti­cle (not to men­tion heinous pho­tog­ra­phy) . It cor­rectly describes us, I guess, but it raises one ques­tion that it fails to answer:

“So?”