GreggYour.com

As far as I can tell this is the future of image making. It may not be the only future. I say — not so much to my students but to my colleagues — ignore this at your own peril. It’s not interesting because it’s a new technology, it’s interesting because it is really changing the way the world consumes and considers, lives and swims in imagery.

One of the things I love about teaching is to put things in front of students they might not necessarily have thought of yet. I’m doing a digital photography class but I’m making it as much about digital culture.

I had them pull the last five digits of their student IDs (which are random) and had them look up where the zip code was in the U.S. They had to investigate that place purely through online imagery. Google Street View, Flickr, poking around Facebook, looking at the websites of businesses in the area. They were really puzzled, like, “What does this have to do with photography?”

[Regarding others’ photos] it seems to me like a sea change has begun. Maybe Sultan and Mandel fired the first shots 40 years ago. And they weren’t even the first people to say, “Aren’t other people’s pictures interesting?” Think of Andy Warhol and John Baldessari.