It looks like Nikon has sunk a lot of money into their latest marketing campaign, “Picture Town.” If you haven’t seen the ads, here’s the basic idea: Nikon hands out 200 of its new D40 digital SLR cameras to the people of a small, “All American” town a few miles outside of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The goal? To prove that, in Nikon’s words, “Anyone can take a great picture with a Nikon D40.”
For the most part, the results are unsurprising: a glut of photos of children, dogs, and the beach. All are sharp and well-exposed–which may be what Nikon is trying to impress upon the average cell-phone-camera user, whose standards seem to drop by the second–but few rise above the commonplace. (And this is presumably AFTER substantial editing by the folks at Nikon.) Less interesting than the results of the campaign are the issues surrounding it: What does it take to make a great picture? Who makes great pictures–cameras, or photographers? If anyone can take a great picture, can photography be an art form?
It’s hard to imagine a similar campaign by other companies that sell art-related products. Imagine Montblanc launching a “Story Town” campaign: “We at Montblanc distributed 200 of our Meisterstück fountain pens to the people of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania to prove that anyone can write a great novel with a Montblanc Meisterstück. Go to our website and read the amazing results!” Or how about Winsor & Newton launching a “Painting Town” campaign, where they simply distribute their brushes and wait for the great paintings to come pouring in? Ridiculous.
For some reason, people really believe that great pictures are camera-dependent. Part of that belief is as old as the camera itself. William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography on the British side of the channel, famously referred to photography as the “pencil of nature.” The early experiments with the camera by gentlemen-scientists helped establish a tradition that asserts that the photographer is an empiral recorder, a humble servant of the camera and the reality it explores. That explains a good deal of the impression that photographs are made as much by cameras as by people.
But I think that the complexity of the technology being incorporated into cameras also has something to do with it. The simplest cameras have three main controls–a shutter, an aperture, and a focusing mechanism–and within an hour a beginner can be well-versed in the basics of their operation. Now, through some combination of digitization and market capitalism, most cameras house endless “perks” and gadgets that make them hopelessly confusing. Image stabilization; digital vs. optical zoom; spot, center-weight, and matrix metering; exposure and flash modes; etc. make it very difficult to know exactly what’s going on inside a camera. (For better or for worse, the average point-and-shoot customer has no idea how to handle the three underlying controls that form the foundation for all the rest.)
This increasing ignorance necessitates a greater trust in the inner workings of the product, which shifts power and responsibility over to the camera itself. This shift also eliminates many of photography’s more artistic aspects. The argument for photography as an art form was predicated on exposing the number of authorial decisions made by the photographer in every supposedly “effortless” photographic “recording.” Now those decisions are obscured or eliminated by increasingly advanced cameras, which can make them on their own. (Digital camera technology serves as the exact opposite of digital editing technology–like Photoshop–which has helped to highlight and facilitate the extensive manipulation that occurs in the developing process.)
Whether this shift is a good or a bad thing is a moot point. It’s certainly good for camera companies, which can use blind trust in mysterious technology to sell their products. Camera marketing becomes less and less about the actual features of the cameras (was marketing ever about that?) and more about perception, which is far less costly to manipulate.
[Post-script: Maybe the most interesting thing about “Picture Town” is the fact that it’s being used to sell SLRs, which tend to be purchased by the more knowledgeable, more professional camera users out there–the kind of people who don’t want to be told that cameras do all the work to make great pictures. It looks like Nikon is trying to cater to that market by also emphasizing the brevity of the shutter delay on the D40. Shutter delay is one of the few technological issues that’s relatively easy to understand and makes a dramatic difference in performance; it’s nice to see camera companies focusing on it and making sure that consumers take note. It looks like Nikon is trying to sell the D40 as a crossover hit–using a campaign designed to appeal to point-and-shoot consumers, but pointing out specs (lightweight SLR, instant shutter response) that make it an attractive model for more serious enthusiasts. We’ll see if it works.]
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