墨西哥攝影家佩德羅•梅耶爾是現代攝影領域裡頗具代表性的先驅者之一。佩德羅•梅耶爾攝影作品的表達形態，遍及從社會紀實攝影到數碼藝術影像的廣闊範圍。在其獨特的與時俱進的漫長創作生涯中，他以眼光獨到和變化多端的精彩攝影藝術作品而享譽世界。
佩德羅•梅耶爾是墨西哥攝影委員會(Mexican Council of Photography)的奠基人兼主席，並且是拉丁美洲最初的三個攝影討論會的組織者。除此之外，他還在多間著名的學府和學術機構擔任教師，而且是舉世聞名的攝影專業網站“零域”（Zone Zero）的創建者、策劃者、主管和主任編輯。 由佩德羅•梅耶爾主持的“零域” 網，至今網羅了全世界上千名攝影家的作品，每個月達50余萬名訪客的流覽數量，使“零域” 網成為全球國際互聯網擁有最多訪客和最具滿意度的網站之一。
早在1991年，佩德羅•梅耶爾便以他的家族老照片和他拍攝的其父母親的生活照片為素材，製作出版了世界第一代的聲像多媒體作品光碟《紀念照片》（I Photograph to Remember）。他是《美國時代》(American Times)、《荊棘鏡》(Mirror of Thorns)和《終日的焰火》(The Fireworks Lasted All Day)這三部西班牙文圖書的作者。1995年美國光圈出版社出版發行了佩德羅•梅耶爾的作品集《真實與虛構：從紀實攝影到數碼之旅》（Truths and Fictions: A journey of documentary photography to digital），並于同年出版發行了此書的多媒體光碟版。他最近的著作是2005年出版的《真與實》（The Real and the True）。
佩德羅•梅耶爾在1985年獲得國家文化貢獻獎，1987年獲得世界攝影界著名的古根漢姆獎金，1993年獲得美國加州攝影博物館和喬納森•格林聯合頒發的國家藝術獎金，他還多次榮獲過墨西哥攝影雙年展獎和由洛克菲勒基金會最早授予的國際互聯網設計獎。
===============以上內容出自GOOGLE大神===================
【THE DEMOCRATIC IMAGE PHOTOGRAPHY AND GLOBALISATION】
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of
government except all the others that have been tried.
Winston Churchill ...
I have heard over and over, in many parts of the world.
How new digital technologies have an unfair
distribution as they follow a pattern of distribution
according to wealth. Well, how could we disagree with
such a fundamental reality as it applies, in our case, to
photography and new technologies? We can’t, can we?
Let us look at this with a bit more skepticism and
insight as this can actually lead us on to something
beyond simple truisms.
I would like to say that this lack of equality is not only
true with regard to photography and new technologies,
but also with regard to access to water, to health care,
to education, and so on.
So how on earth would someone come up with a
statement singling out photography and new
technologies from matters that are so much more
pressing for the survival of a human being.
As you might agree, it does not make a lot of sense to
make such an issue about this inequality of distribution
about photography and new technologies, when in fact
more important factors have not been even remotely
resolved for a democratic access to the well being of all
mankind.
With this in mind, I think we can move beyond such
rhetoric, as I am sure that in this symposium we shall
probably not be able to resolve outright any of these
basic inequalities, however we can contribute indirectly
in many new ways to make such a destiny less
inevitable.
Just this morning the major of Mexico City announced
that within three years all parks and schools in the city
Will be wired with wi-fi connections that are going to be
free for everyone to access. Just a few years ago, the
most impoverished areas of Mexico City, all would steal
their electricity as you can see in the image. So here in
this new digital era, we are going to be wired in very
different ways.
Talking about bench marks…. Look at this.
I found this bench made out of stone back in 1974 when
I made the image. And during a recent visit, to that
same area I discovered to my big surprise that I had
found that same bench only 34 years later, but before
we move to the next image, let me point out some things
within this image. Observe please, the roof is made from
compressed cardboard. Keep in mind the distance from
the front wall to the bench.
Now you look at that same bench, only the front wall of
the house had moved up to where the bench was. The
roof was now made out of concrete and they were in the
process of adding a second floor. There was indeed
progress.
One of the neighbors had added color to his front wall.
And indeed some of the neighbors had done very well
for themselves. They remained living in the same
neighborhood that they grew up in. Indeed some people
left the area, but then others remained and improved it,
Just remember how the area looked, not too long ago.
Well, I am here to report to you some news that give us
reasons to believe that there is room for some optimism.
We have Coca-Cola all over the planet. This of course
is an item to consider for those who are after the fact
that every one should have equal access across the
globe.
I am sure you get the point, that the notion that suggests
that for everyone to have access to something cannot be
construed as Democracy of any sort. Having as
ubiquitous a product as a Coca-Cola does not
necessarily equal Democracy, does it?
Of course I shall remain constrained in my observations
to the realm with which I am familiar with, and that is
photography in it’s various iterations.
So let us start with something as basic and that has to
do with the cost of film. I believe it is a pretty
democratic price, when the cost of film has come down
to zero. That sort of makes it quiet accessible if that
would be the only ingredient to consider. But you and I
know that cameras do cost something while the rest of
the equipment in the form of a required infrastructure,
also needs to be accounted for.
However, the continuous fall in prices for all the gear
needed to make pictures gives us a lot of hope to add to
the zero price for film.
The ongoing erosion in prices was last reported to be a
fall of 30% year to year, over the last few years, this
being true for cameras and ancillary digital tools. If the
decline in prices could be referenced, let us say, to the
price of a Rolls Royce automobile, such a car could
today be sold for the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes.
Such has been the scale of reduction, in the relationship
of prices to what you can get for your money.
I still recall purchasing one of the first hard drives, a
ten megabyte Jasmine hard drive in the mid eighties. I
thought that drive would last until my great grand
children would want to play with such stuff. It cost me $
2000 US dls. at the time. That would be $ 200 a
megabyte.
Well today, a megabyte of hard disc, bought at your
local Apple store looks like this: A Le Cie 250 Gigabyte
hard drive costs less than $100.00 US. That would be 4
cents a megabyte. Need I say more? And this price is
even going to be reduced by an order of magnitude
similar in proportions, over the coming twenty years.
Now this example is not unique, it can be crossreferenced
almost across the board with regard to
anything related to new technologies and photography.
As economics play such an important factor in the
distribution of anything with the intention of a more
democratic participation, one can safely say that digital
technologies play one of the key roles in making
information about the world more accessible to peoples
all over the world.
I would like to point out some noticeable examples of
some of these trends.
Raul Ortega, one of my colleagues in Mexico, a
photographer living in the state of Chiapas, produced a
body of work that I found to be outstanding. A
traditional book with his images was published in black
and white, printed in Spain. The edition was of 4,000
copies sponsored by the state of Chiapas. Four years
later half the edition was still unsold, basically due to
the poor distribution of books, with his not being an
exception.
In ZoneZero, however we undertook to publish that
same book in electronic PDF format, and to offer it for
free to our viewers for a period of thirty days. During
that time frame, 24,000 books were downloaded. I am
sure that there were a lot of people who got access from
countries that the printed book would have never
reached, let alone that their pocket books might not
have been open to pay for such a book. Four years to
distribute 2000 books, 30 days to distribute 24,000
books, I can imagine you get the drift of what I am
talking about.
I will offer you another example. Some ten years ago, I
was asked by an American Museum that had an
enormous collection of photographs, to write an essay
for their catalogue, precisely knowing that their
collection was so slanted to US and European
photography, with the rest of the world totally under
represented. What I wrote at that time, was an
acknowledgement to the fact that in today’s’ world such
omissions, do not carry the same weight that such
neglect might have produced in a previous era.
In those years in which we did not have the tools, such
as the Internet for instance, and you might want to add
real quickly, the search engines, which make all that
information available, the absence from such collections
in essence made it so that most of us did not exist for
practical purposes.
Look at the history of photography books, and you will
find that an entire sub-continent such as Latin America
was represented at best by the likes of Manuel Alvarez
Bravo from Mexico. Later on you would find other
token artists were added such as Martin Chambi from
Peru or in some instances even myself, in order to
maintain, some semblance that there was an interest in
Latin America.
Compare such a reality to our publishing project at
ZoneZero, which is being produced from Mexico City.
Already an unusual concept, were a project of world
wide consequence can be produced outside the
traditional centers of photographic cultural power such
as New York, Paris, London, Los Angeles. I would
venture to say that this is some sort of proof that the
process of democratization is taking hold somehow.
Consider that over the past three years the number of
page views, that is the number of pages actually seen in
ZoneZero, were 114 million pages, with our viewers
coming from one hundred and ten countries. Such
numbers are impressive in any way you wish to look at
them, but more so if you think that this is the result of
new technologies and their impact on a redistribution of
access to this information on a worldwide scale.
But then if you look at the work that we have shared,
and you will see that there are a lot of photographers
that are not that well known outside their local
communities, but never-the-less with impressive work,
and what you have is an opening of flood gates by
bringing the work of photographers across all sorts of
boarders, in numbers unheard off before.
One of the things I like the most, is that ZoneZero is
being used by hundreds of teachers of photography all
over the world, as their pupils get to see the work of not
only the traditional text books that were used in the
past, produced of course, you guessed right, in the
cultural metropolis, with the same names that existed
always being taught, which obviously perpetuated the
hegemony of ideas and concepts of those that control
the centers of power. That is no longer happening in the
same manner, and I find this to be an important process
towards a more democratic process of access of
information. Remember that cultural identities are
strongly linked to such opportunities to discover the
merits of your own cultural heritage vs, that of the
metropolis.
I will give you yet another example of these
technological transitions, and what they have in store
for photography. In the early nineties, I produced what
was the first CDROM with continuous sound, and
images. It was at the time a seminal work, in so far that
it brought to the computer screen content that was at
the time considered to be outside the realm of what one
could find on a computer screen. Something personal
and emotional, I am of course making reference to I
Photograph to Remember. I was incredibly happy with
the potential of the CD ROM that allowed one to
publish such work, and distribute it on something as
transportable as a disc. However, the problem became
distribution. Something as new as that object, had no
“place” were something like that could be found. Who
sold such things? At first a few record stores, then
books stores, and then increasingly other outlets. But it
was all quite new and therefore without any sort of
experience on the part of consumers. I think drugs were
better distributed than CD Roms.
Then the Internet appeared, and the few stores that did
sell CDs evaporated into thin air, I immediately sized
upon the opportunity to make myself present on the
internet assuming that the problems of distribution
would now take care of themselves, and they largely
did. I ported IPTR to the Internet, against the better
recommendations of a lot of friends. But in the long run
they were proven wrong, the internet allowed IPTR to
take on a new direction with distribution the world
over, something that was well nigh impossible in it’s
previous incarnation as a CDROM. IPTR today runs
off the Internet with the same sort of audio and video
integrity it had coming off the CDROM with one
important added advantage, it was no longer necessary
to program for different platforms such as windows and
Macs. Everyone could see it now.
A new platform has emerged , the iPod, and we have
now made a version that you can download to you iPod,
and of all the options I think this one is the most
intimate. As you can see, the same body of work, can
migrate from one technology onto the next. I think we
have yet to discover the potential that the iPod has for
photographers as a platform to plan for, to use it to
make their works available for such audiences.
If you project this possibility to all sorts of educational
projects, story telling, entertainment, museum guides,
etc. you can find that all of a sudden photographers will
be able to tell their stories using a multitude of
technologies to make their work known to ever new
small platform channels.
What am I telling you, with this idea? Is that the
computer is no longer the only hardware that can
deliver photographic images and multimedia, and in so
doing I am also telling you that the prices will
increasingly come down, expanding the base to which
you can make your work available. Cell phones will also
become a large market you will find important for your
photographs. They not only take pictures but of course
also display them, and if they do that, then they can also
display your stories. And with a few billion phones out
there, you just might have something to offer them that
could be of interest.
So if the audience expands, if the prices come down,
aren’t we in essence dealing with a process of
democratization?
In closing let me tell you about another project I have
been involved.
This is called the HERESIES project. This project is a
retrospective of my work that will open in October
2008, in about one hundred museums around the world
at the same time.
I believe that this project epitomizes many notions that
one can put under the umbrella of democratization of
photography.
It will not only be presented in those one hundred
institutions mentioned before, but it will also be
presented in web galleries over the Internet, all coexisting
at the same time. Their intention is not to
compete with each other but rather to complement one
another.
Probably no two museums will show the same work that
the others will, and that has largely to do with the
structure that I offered to the museums, were by they
can make a selection of what ever images they want to
chose from a given data bank, and these are the ones
that they will get prints off.
But all of this could not be accomplished with out the
presence of new printing technologies, were we can get
the outmost quality, better than any analog prints ever
made by me, and with greater longevity than these,
imagine 200 years guaranteed, while printing on
demand becomes a standard.
But add to this the fact that we have built a database
with all the images that I have ever produced, all of this
will be accessible to all those people who have a
legitimate reason to have such access to an open
database with nearly 500,000 images and documents.
No longer is this one of those closed databases which are
so dear to those who want to protect a body of work for
personal power.
The disruptive nature of an open database will long be
felt, at least in the academic world, as the word
democratization also comes creeping in to this world as
well. The academic world is long on ideas about
democracy and quite short on living up to them.
All those institutions that keep their cards too close to
their vests and don’t want to open their archives, will be
held to a new level of accountability of what could be
possible. Much as those monks of yesteryear, who saw
their power erode with the advent of the movable
printing press. We shall now see certain librarians,
academics, photographers or curators having to defend
the way they go about in dealing with their archives.
Access will be the magic word.
The notion that you would make an exhibition, and then
travel the show where one size fits all, never worked,
has now found a new tailor to order format, which to
boot, will only cost the venue showing, one thousand
dollars per participant, where as in the past such a
project would cost at least twenty times more. Thus we
have been able to reduce the price considerably while
making the show made to order. Going in precisely the
opposite direction of what traditional shows have been
up to now.
We expect many people will get a chance to see this
work, over the duration of this exhibition of, at least,
eight weeks, and do so in any one of it’s multiple forms
of being viewed. I think that this is adding a new
dimension to what is a democratization process in the
area of photography. Now, none of this would have
been even remotely possible without access to all the
new tools that the digital age has to offer.
I can remember when in the seventies, there wasn’t a
single space to exhibit photography in Mexico. We led a
revolt against the status quo in an art world that would
dismiss photography entirely. We also made serious
efforts to discover ourselves and to gain some visibility
in the world of photography at large. All those efforts,
as seen now forty years later seem quite basic and
romantic, yet they became the cornerstone for many of
the things we were able to achieve as time went on.
However, it is mainly due to the presence of new
technologies that our evolving dreams even had a
fighting chance of becoming a reality.
As I stand before you, all I can say with the greatest of
humbleness, is that the process of democratization is an
ever present reality, at least so in our experience, and in
paraphrasing Winston Churchill, It has been said that
using digital technologies is the worst form of working
except all the others that have been tried before.
===============以上內容出自Pedro Meyer & Nadia Baram===================
現在輪到我來廢話，首先如果你能把這一篇落落長電子報看到這裡先恭喜你現賺了九十磅（相當於六千塊新台幣），這場演講網路訂票是七十磅，學生票五十磅，當場買則是九十磅，貴到嚇死人，要不是REDEYE（主辦單位）跟Pedro邀請我去聽我還沒辦法參加咧！
至於為什麼我會跟Pedro認識呢？首先就要說到四月十九號的那一場master class的活動，內容介紹是這樣寫的：
4-7pm：Masterclass. Unique chance to have your work discussed with one of the world's most influential figures in photography.
Tickets 20/15 pounds from www.redeye.org.uk. Booking essential.
在得知有這項活動後我才知道這世界上原來有一位這麼有代表性的攝影師，很意外的，在那天的作品討論會當中我的STRANGERS跟電子報受到全場攝影師跟Pedro還有他老婆Nadia的喜愛，尤其Nadia很喜歡我的那一句" TO ME , PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE MOST HONEST LIE IN THE WORLD . "，就這樣，當Pedro親口說了「在他（小弟我）的作品我們看到一項沒被討論到的一項要素「幽默」，希望他在英國能繼續保有他的特色並且能夠進而影響到英國的攝影師。」，並且走過來問我可不可以買我的書，想要把我的作品出版在zonezero上還答應我可以去當他的助理時，我想我這輩子都不會忘記那時候的驚喜跟開心，回家還一直想說「這是不是真的呀？」
所有的努力跟辛苦還有寂寞有了一點點回報，終於。
註：Nadia跟我說我會變成世界知名攝影師會有超過五萬還是五十萬人呀忘記了看到我的作品並且會從世界各地寫信給我問我問題或邀請我去演講或幹嘛的，雖然我覺得畫唬爛的成分居多但是心裡還是有暗爽到..........XD，請問我可以用中文回信嗎？？？我還可以順便拍「中國話」的MV給他們看喔～～～～這時候我的新戰友850IS的錄影品質就得要好好讚賞一番了！！哇哈哈哈哈....昨天給他買了個原廠皮套，呴呴...加分加分！！
報長的話：這邊有一位好聰明的台灣人！謝謝！！
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