James Popsys' Human Nature Photographs

James Popsys is a You Tube photographer - at least I can't remember him referring to wedding, portrait or product shoots, nor using the phrases "my gallery" or "my agent". I don't have half his camera technique, have no idea how to use Lightroom on RAW (he's a wizard), and I don't have a successful YT channel. I bought his book (Human Nature) recently, and am unlikely to publish one of my own so he can return the compliment. Just so we're establishing who the actual talent is here.

It took me a few passes through the book, and a comparison with Edgar Martins' Topologies (which I happened to have on my shelves because Foyles many years ago) to realise what my eye was baulking at.

There are often too many subjects in the photographs.

By the conventions of art photography and my dumb eyes.

Let me explain.

Ever noticed how dogs are really, really interested in other dogs to the exclusion of all other animals? People are the same. Put a person anywhere in a picture and they will become the centre of our attention. People are interested in people to the exclusion of everything except "cute" - people love "cute". Put one person in a picture, and we want to know who they are and what they are doing there. Put in two, three or four and we want to know what their relationship is - even if we decide they are strangers sitting on a wall. Five or more starts to be a crowd, which is a subject in itself. What is it a crowd of? Going where? To do what? It's for this reason one has to be careful about putting people in the shot. I do not want to remember how long I have stood waiting for the people to finish walking past so I can get a people-free shot of whatever it is I was looking at.

The single person in an otherwise people-free image, especially against buildings, is a feature of a certain kind of Internet photography. Here's my take on it, just to prove I can do it...

There's a classic of the genre on page 108 (of Human Nature) of a scene in Blackpool. A woman in an orange hooded coat walks from left to right, and since she's a person, my instincts assume she's the focus of attention. I missed the weird curved, multi-pronged streetlights at first glance. Now my attention oscillates between the streetlights and the person. Then I put my finger over the person, and instantly the image became an "art photo" about the streetlights. Who designed them? Who approved them? What do the locals think? Would I want streetlights like that where I live? Do I like them?

On page 126 is a photograph of a bridge at Kylesku in Scotland. It's over a narrow inlet and is tightly curved. Not your average bridge at all. And then there's a damn boat in the water, closer to the centre of the image and because it's a human thing, it draws my attention, and once again I'm oscillating between subjects. Put my finger over that damn boat, and it becomes a satisfying "art photo" of a bridge.

When James does have a picture without a person, as of the pylons at Ghabat al Ghuzlan on page 63, it's a well-composed art photograph. That abandoned car hidden behind the shed (also on the website home page), or the container trailer in the car park (also on the home page), are neat little classics that would grace any art portfolio. He knows what he's doing - it's the You Tube genre rules that lead him astray.

The idea behind the Human Nature book is the presence of people, literally or figuratively, in nature. Bridges and weird lamp-posts are exactly such presences on their own. We don't need a warm body to represent "human".

But like I said: "by the conventions of art photography and my dumb eyes". They are his photographs and his choices, and he's making a living out of them, which is more than you or I are doing. A lot of people share his judgements.

In the light of all this, I looked again at my own favourites that I printed a few years ago now. Yep, one subject, usually in the middle-ish of the frame, or spread all the way across the frame. Keep-it-simple art photography rules. Maybe I'm too old and slow multiple-subject images?

James Popsys' website is here The home page has some images from the book. I enjoy his YT channel, of which the latest episode is here

 

 

and features him talking about his photography in an honest and non-babble-y way (he never once refers to "my practice as a photographer").

Everything Feels Fake

“Fake” means “not what it is being presented as”, and a faker is a person or institution knowingly making the false representation.

A fake tenant is someone who is living in a flat, but at the request of the landlord and at a low rent, to make it look as though people who pay market rents live there. A fake political policy is one that cannot achieve what is being claimed for it. BBC period dramas with historically-inaccurate multi-ethnic casts are fake, because the BBC knows they are doing it for political reasons. AI images passed off as a photograph in a newspaper article are fake. A programme announced as a “documentary” that pushes a political or social agenda is a fake documentary, though it may be a really powerful polemic. (There is a place for polemics, as long as everyone knows that is what they are getting.)

We have fake borders in the UK, because we allow anyone from anywhere to enter the country as long as they do so illegally. But we will ban Dutch journalists whose opinions someone on X / Twitter didn’t like.

We have fake policing, which turns up mob-handed for a rude Tweet, but can’t be bothered to deal with shop-lifters. Policing involves more compromises than the public wishes it did, but even then there are limits.

String Theory was fake physics because for a couple of decades its publicists said it was the “only game in town”. MOND, Quantum Loop Gravity and others are just as speculative and untestable, but they don’t claim to be the only path to the truth.

Fusion power, quantum computing and General AI go through periods of fake-ness, whenever there’s a sudden outburst of “It’s five years away and will solve all our problems”. It’s been five years away all my long life, and it will be five years away during yours as well.

Heard of the ”Replication Crisis” in the social sciences? It has not passed. Most research in sociology, psychology and the variations thereof cannot be reproduced. And yet it is passed off as “peer-reviewed research”. Fake. And peer review doesn’t do what we think it should either.

Surgery is almost as good as they say it is, but the rest of medicine is nowhere near as effective as surgery. The list of incurable conditions is long, and the list of curable conditions is short. Usually, the doctors say so, so there's no faking. As for psychiatry and psychotherapy… almost as bad as the cold porridge of class-prejudice and old maids’ remedies that masquerades as “health advice”. The drugs (psychiatry) and the kale (health advice) are prescribed as if they are effective, when they mostly aren't. That's fakery.

The ONS functions as the authoritative source of statistical data on the economy and population, but its staff make mistakes like anyone else does. One example: it occurred to no-one at the ONS there that Eastern Europeans would enter the country by low-cost airlines via airports where the ONS had no coverage, and for years it understated migration by hundreds of thousands. The result is sometimes fake statistics: held out as authoritative, actually wrong.

The “fake-ness” of the news is the skewed choice of what is reported, and how it is interpreted. The editorial claim is that these are the important stories of the moment, but the mainstream media has long been taken over by PR companies leaking forthcoming speeches, policy proposals, and inside gossip. None of which are news. Most of the news is fake - real news is something someone does not want you to know. Media attacks on political figures are not news, but polemics.

The biggest fake of all was the farrago of ever-changing policies in the 2020-2022 Lockdown. The overall strategy, and many of the specific communications and measures, were dreamed up by “behavioural scientists” for the express purpose of scaring the public. They told us they were lying. Masks, social distancing, business closures, school closures, Track ‘N Trace, and the rest was could not achieve what the public were told it could. And by the end of 2022, even the most fervent curtain-twitcher knew they had been fooled by fakery, and in many cases, knew they had wanted to be fooled.

Remember Russia Russia Russia - the multi-year attempt by the Democrats and mainstream media to slur and depose Donald Trump with the false charge that he was in cahoots with Vladimir Putin? Nothing genuine about those claims either.

A certain level of error and omission is allowable in any complicated process, but only as long as it is admitted, its extent estimated, and steps taken to reduce it. If that cannot be done, the organisation should say they cannot afford to put the process right and stop doing it. The fakery begins when the organisation carries on with the process, denies that the errors and omissions are significant, says it does not have the budget to put the faults right, and asks everyone to sign a waiver, but then represents the process and its results as fit-for-purpose. That is where the NHS, the BBC, the ONS and all government policy-making are now.

A more subtle source comes from the fact that we expect our culture - fiction, history, philosophy, science, drama, movies, songs and so on - broadly to represent our values and the emotional realities of our lives. Shakespeare is about kings and princes and wealthy families, but as people they resonated with their audiences (perhaps less so now - the “modern audience” doesn’t match up to the Bard). Overly-fast social and economic change can create a dissonance between the world portrayed by recent cultural products and the contemporary reality. I find that films and TV series set even as late as 2010 seem to be set in a different world. Both the media and the world feel a little askew as a result.

Cost inflation unmatched by salary inflation creates fake money. In the 1970’s, trades unions in the UK were strong enough to keep pay rises in line, if lagging by a year, with the often double-figure inflation throughout the decade. During the 2010-2020 period in the UK the unions lacked the strength to win inflation-matching pay rises, with the result that many people were being paid up to a third less in real terms in 2020 than they were in 2010. Professionals that had been reasonably well-paid were now barely able to pay the rent on a shared flat. The perceptions of the economic status of those professions no longer matched the reality.

The more expensive it is to do something in the real world, the more time we spend in front of the television or scrolling social media. “Escapism” used to mean going to the cinema, the theatre, perhaps a fun park, or for some, reading a lurid novel. All of those now cost a serious chunk of change: streaming something at home, or playing a computer game, is way cheaper. Rising costs drive us away from the outside world, which starts to seem strange or irrelevant, unless it is where we work. Work is always real. So are the people who claim that “everything feels fake these days” just click-baiting or are they on to something? I think they are on to something. Too many of our institutions, that we pay for with our taxes, claim to be doing something we want doing, but actually are not. We look out at our culture and reporting, and do not see the world we experience. It’s not so much rotten, as distorted and askew.