From the time when photography was invented, photographs of paths and roads have been popular for their ability to pull the viewer into the image, evoke emotions, tell stories, and capture the essence of moving through the world. Winding through natural and human-made landscapes, paths are the storytellers of forgotten tales, echoing the footsteps of those who came before us, and providing the courage to forge ahead.

MoMa, the Museum of Modern Art, released the metadata about their art collection in early 2020, right after the COVID lockdown. I have been looking at the data about their photo collection. Some insights from this data are shown here.

Barry Stone’s /CLOUD/ project is a series of 20 black and white images of clouds, inspired by Alfred Stieglitz's famous series from a hundred years ago featuring clouds, that Stieglitz called “Equivalents.” These images were Stone’s entry into creating data-driven photographs. They were taken with a digital camera and manipulated by rearranging their data with a hexadecimal editor.

It was a little after midnight in Old Delhi, and I was walking down an alley behind the Jama Masjid across from the Red Fort when I came across two stray dogs (image 1). The scene reminded me of my favorite photographs of stray dogs, vivid images that have stayed with me. These images each have qualities that repeatedly draw the viewer back to them — a hallmark of great photographs.

Art Price provides insights on the art market place. One of the things they do is collect data on auction prices of all arts auctioned in the West. The "indexes are calculated based on all fine art auction results (paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, prints) in USD." This graph shows who the indexes have done in the last 20 years.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides information about income distribution of different jobs. The latest data that was available for download is from May 2017. I put together a graph to understand who jobs lie where. In the graph, the horizontal axis is job density, which is the number of people who have this job for every 1,000 workers in the US - so further to the right means more people do this job.

At AIPAD recently I was having dinner with some friends - photographers and collectors. One of the collectors asked what "kind of photograph" a certain photographer makes. Her intent, as she explained in the conversation, was to understand how to find the photographers work and how to classify it in the collection. There was heated debate about what genres mean and what their origins are and so on.

I was in a discussion recently and we came around to the topic of the proportion of photographers by gender and region. While everyone gave their opinion, we all agreed that we had not seen any metrics on this. I thought it would be interesting to look into, so I started to explore. I was interested in relative size of these populations and also how that evolved over time. After looking around, I was not able to find anything that answered our questions.

The current migrant crisis is said to be one of the largest since World War II. With the Pangea project, we intend to add to the ongoing dialogue through personal narrative, journey, change, loss, globalization, economics, and the real and imagined concepts of the present Pangea. I collaborated on this project with my friends and theater artists Melissa Flower Gladney and Lisa Wartenberg.