mike_lee.jpg

The light bulb went on, the ground shifted, hell froze over - I got it.

A few days ago I finally made good on an invite I received a couple of weeks ago from a netizen named Mike Lee. We came to each other's attention through a website called hiptop Nation where we both started posting photos from our Sidekicks way back in 2003. I soon left for the greener pastures of better voice communication and bigger phonecam pics, but we kept reading each other's blogs and soon met up again on the uber-photo site Flickr.

We had lunch near The Post and chatted about life on and off line for almost 2 hours. A main topic of conversation was our admiration for the work of John Maeda at MIT. Turns out that Mike, through his gig at AARP has spent a good deal of time in the Maeda-sphere and clearly saw my eyes light up every time he recounted some of the things he saw and did while there.

Mike, who looks innocent enough, has hacked my reality - I got an email from the good Dr.'s office yesterday and I will enter the sphere in a couple of days. Life hack, via hiptop, Flickr and the web, courtesy Mike Lee.

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I had an interesting time on Christopher Lydon's Open Source Radio show last week. It was wonderful to share the mic with Heather Champ, one of the pioneers of Photography 2.0 with the Mirror Project, who now is Community Manager for Flickr. It was a bit strange, however, to hear the comments of Fred Ritchin, who seemed to want to cling to the 'top down' media hierarchy of we tell you what you should be interested in.

I was also surprised at his reluctance to give the amateur photo community its due by insisting that they shouldn't be spoken of in the same context as photo great Henri Cartier-Bresson. What was Cartier-Bresson before the fame? An amateur named Henri who liked taking photos with that new, small camera called a Leica.

And why don't we like the self-portraits? Why is it art when Lee Friedlander does it and not when the photographer is Solea?

I thought most of us in the main stream media had come to realize that it is better to embrace, understand and get on board, rather than to try and stand in front of the 21st century media train. Technology and the internet are changing photography just as they have changed society; how we choose to use our new tools is the only question worth asking.

To hear the show, follow the Open Source link above, or click here for the mp3.

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Open_source

I will be on Christopher Lydon's Open Source radio show talking about Photography 2.0 - photography, photojournalism and the photoblogging community on the web. The show airs Thursday night from 7-8 pm and streams live from their web site. His show producers found me through my flickr site!

http://www.radioopensource.org/photography-20/

There is a list of stations that carry the show on their blog; it should be an interesting discussion since the future of photography is a subject near and dear to my heart!

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