We recently hosted an informal holiday get-together of neighbors at our home, scheduled to begin at 10:00 am. While straightening up the house that morning I decided on something of a whim to incorporate a slide show into the proceedings. I selected a show that was already prepared and on line, a group of pictures made in our neighborhood over the past eight years.
Before our guests arrived, I started the slide show running on my laptop, and then broadcast it via wifi to our flat-screen television located between the pellet stove and the piano in our living room.
The slideshow was running when the first guests arrived. I made no announcement or reference to the show and there was no sound from the tv receiver -- just the fifty or so pictures being displayed with about a five second delay for each shot. I don't think anyone gave much thought to the changing photo display initially; it just seemed a part of the decor. Eventually, someone asked if those were my pictures (yes). Later, I was asked about the location of a shot showing some empty planters in a garden (the courtyard behind the art museum). Additional comments were made about the photography over the next three hours the gathering lasted, but the display did not interfere in any significant way with the group's ongoing conversation. Some people looked at the changing pictures often and other only occasionally, but I think most people saw most of the pictures as they were displayed in a continuous loop.
One of the salient features of my experiment was the contrast it provided to countless slideshows I sat through in my youth. Most people whose personal history extends back into the era of film photography will have similar memories of sitting in the dark with a wheezing slide projector throwing images on a white screen, often accompanied by some narration about a recent vacation trip. Sometimes the shows were entertaining; more often they were stoically endured. If the audience was composed of family members or close friends, there might be some talk and banter about the pictures, but there were not many opportunities for deviations from the script.
The things that most distinguished the old-style slide shows was that they had a very linear character, and they demanded the undivided attention of the participants. The same can be said, in fact, about most other ways in which still images are offered up for observation. It takes some willful preparation, some time commitment, and possibly some money to go to a photography exhibit, to read a book or to watch a program about a photographer's work. The informal exhibit I mounted in our living room required none of those things. Rather, it allowed for multi-tasking and gave the choice for participation to each individual member of the assembled group. In other words, it was a photography exhibit that was consistent with behavioral norms and expectations of the digital age, a Twenty-First Century slide show.
Although the slide show I presented was informal, it nevertheless required some preparation. The subject or theme in this case was easy to relate to for the guests -- they all lived in the area and had at least some familiarity with the places depicted. That contributed to the viability of the continuous, non-linear presentation; it really did not matter much if their attention strayed at times away from the flow of images. I could have chosen other subjects for such an exhibit from among my collection of photos which includes thousands of images. It would have been fairly easy to assemble forty or fifty portraits; pictures of cats, cars, color shots, black and white images, what-have-you. I think the thing to keep in mind is that you are a photographer, but you can also choose in this streaming digital age to be an archivist, a curator, and an exhibitor.
I have used several photo sharing services over the years and some of them provided a way to assemble and display slide-show presentations on line. I use Flickr.com as a place to display what I consider my best photos, but I don't like it as a general purpose image management tool. For that reason, I chose in this instance to use Google Photos for assembling and presenting my on line exhibit.
I accessed my Google Photos slide-show with my laptop running the Chrome browser which can "cast" anything displayed in the browser via my home wifi network to my television receiver to which I have attached the little Google chromecast device. The chromecast gadget plugs into one of the HDMI ports on the back of the receiver. On mine, there is a button on the back of the set with allows changing the tv output to HDMI from the cable or antenna. Some other sets will allow that change to be made through the setup menu. At the moment, you can pick up one of these digital streaming devices for about $25. All of this can be accomplished quite quickly and easily these days. Large flat-screen tv receivers and home wifi networks are everywhere, and you can even do it all on the fly with a tablet, or even just a cell phone and a portable wifi hotspot.
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