Joe Hardesty
New member
Just saw this article in the Dec 10 2007 issue of Newsweek (US) and thought it might be of interest:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/73349
Joe
http://www.newsweek.com/id/73349
Joe
The problem is that 'photography' is too broad a term, imho. The camera is a tool to capture colours or shapes. You can, as an artist, arrange those in whatever way you want, by whatever means you want. Its the difference between painting by numbers, Turner, or Warhol- it's just a tool.
Hi Ray,Hi Asher,
It is very difficult to teach some old dogs new tricks ;-)
I do not understand this 'writing with light' thing in your line under my quote - seems like you want to pick an argument, unless you mean the lighting technique called 'writing with light'.
At the instant of taking the photograph, you are framing whatever you consider is the subject, as if you are capturing it in a box. Later, maybe a few seconds only, or maybe days, you open the box, see what you have caught. Hopefully you got what you wanted. Afterwards, you do your fiddling, move things around, replace the bits that escaped, or go back and try to catch it again. You may make something different than you originally intended, for many, many reasons. You can, and do do with it whatever you like, which includes doing nothing at all.
We see it, we capture it, we hammer it into shape.
A great metaphor!Plagens is not just erudite, as Asher wrote, but cunning. He is like a trapper; more cunning than the foxes he preys on. Because the only way to escape the trap is to bite off a leg. His trap is an assertion that photography's special claim to distinction within the visual arts is it's direct connection with reality.
'Film photography's artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality.'
'The next great photographers ... will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality.'
Some prey caught in the trap happily agreed to be skinned by Plagens: old-style photography is an art, they wrote; exponents of the digitalized stuff are not really photographers. (See such comments at http://theonlinephotographer.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html)
Even the owner of that site capitulated by asking (humerously, I hope) for ideas about a new name for the digitalized art (http://theonlinephotographer.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html).
Oh my! Plagens has a lot of fox skins in his bag.
Any linkage that does exist between a) art (including photography) and b) reality (as a synonym for truth) is from a → b, not from b → a, as often supposed. Reality and truth are just mental constructs, ideas, metaphors; fictions we invent to account for consistencies in our perceptions and to guide our actions. As top-down creatures, with cognitions dominating our perceptions, we induce reality rather than receive it. The ability to suspend such cognitions temporarily is as much part of our everyday experience as needed to experience art. Inability to do so is a reason why a dog fails to respond to its image in a mirror.
...Some photographers now spend more time in front of a computer than behind a camera, worry about pixel counts, and whether prints from Epson's latest will really last a couple of centuries. My advice is not to add Plagens' false premise about reality to the list of worries. It's the use of a machine that transforms light into durable pigment that makes photography distinctive, simply that and nothing more. If the product induces in a viewer knowledge worth one thousand words, then it might be art. If it doesn't, buy a book instead.
Carsten,
"Art is what you can get away with"! Not always, sometimes its a rose and other times a free apple.
Asher
I agree that we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously! Still we cannot ignore forces which devalue the worth of modern photography.Oh my. It was to be expected that a post on a photo-forum like this would generate a stir, with photographing (? ) members instantly going on the defensive. I think that articles such as the Newsweek one a) don't represent a threat to anything, b) on the contrary, are welcome, as all they do is provoke some thought and help re-establish one's own view. c) In all "art forms" (if you want to restrict yourself to the expression), issues get way over-intellectualised....
I've just visited the Andy Warhol Retrospective (funny, this is the 2nd time Warhol is getting mentioned in this thread) and a famous line sticks in one's mind: "Art is what you can get away with".
Get out there. Do your thing. DON'T PANIC.