Is Photography Dead? - Newsweek

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

The comment by Jeff Curto (beneath the article) hits the nail on the head.

But the article also raises questions about art and its purpose. And to my mind, photography is not alone in seeming like an infant with attentional problems.

Visual art fails to transcend from showing to knowing compared with the literary arts. Painting and sculpture fail at this miserably. Photography rarely realizes in static form even the modest level of knowing that movie makers spend millions trying to make - a level that even mediocre story tellers usually succced at.

And yet, and yet ... The pages on this forum (and too often the contents of my mind) are filled with technical photographic trivia on a par with whether some steriod filled sprinter's bettering of the world record by 1/1000 sec. advances athletics or not. 'I can show therefore I know' doesn't follow.

At it's core, photography has not changed. The well educated and informed Peter Plagans is mistaken. Worse he is erudite. However, his fundamental misunderstanding of what photography has always been points us wonderful and rich photographic exhibitions that we should go out of our way to experience and enjoy.

Our erudite writer, has mistakenly conceived that somehow the camera made the great photographs. That was not true then or now. The mind and the hands make them. The camera merely captures some of the light, but the what, how and timing, the perspective, content and significance and then modification from time of light recording makes the image. No different then or now, just the technology to carry the light.

"Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens," is a misunderstanding of what photography has always been. Photography has always been a continuum from something real to something from the mind of the "light" (photo) "writer" (grapher), the photo! It's a process most often has some intention associated with it and serves that. So if it is mug-shot after being arrested or a sensuous love scene, the photograph writes what is intended.

Photography is a method of recording what is, what should not be, what happened and what could be. In an instant we are able to get it or not and then harness our knowledge, mythology, cultural values to get so much out of a great image. Photography is efficient and when done well, more so than writing, speech or film and transcends the ordinary contents of the image. It always competes well with and trounces lists of objects at a crime scene and at a glance evokes emotions, new ideas and plans for change. It's easy, and immediately satisfying. Photography is not dead. It's just started!

Our own education and the simplification of the process of light recording has made it possible for us all to write with light. That has not changed. Almost anyone can write, however, there are few Shakespeares!

Asher

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.

The novelty and wonder has worn off - "not another sunset" - in the same way as a few thousand years ago "not another cave daubing". I think Michael was getting near to it in his last para, certainly wrt art. Different for product photography, which is what most of this and other fora are about, which will be concerned with pixel peeping. Most of what we see is driven by "consumerism". We actually see little "art".

Those who can, do, those who can't .....

Best wishes,

Ray

Ray West said:

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.

Click to expand...

The novel point of photography is the writing with light, not the capturing of anything!

The chain was


The chemical process for recording is now replaced by resuable slicon chips and the print can be chemical or some ink. All this we could stomach being called photography, since we start with a real object and through a series of steps have a somewhat real looking picture.

An interim change occured with both light sensitive papers and film: doodle and imaginary scribbles and patterns which could be created with a light source or by creating shadows in a light beam. That and the work in the dark room of spotting prints, dodging and burning, gave legitamacy alteration and decoration of exposed film and paper.

Naturally, these alterations, edits and transformation became respectable for the digital picture. The ultimate step, the replacement of the real object with one imagined and made on the computer, has brought us to where we are today.

We no longer need light to write, except to plan the image. The LCD screen now replaces the camera and the mouse pointer is now the light beam of shadow we used on light sensitive paper.

The computer still needs a human to design the image although, that might be the next thing to go!
If a computer also is relied on to enjoy the new image, then we are in trouble!

Asher

The author of the Newsweek article hides considerable ignorance beneath intelligent-sounding sentences. Also, when he speaks of photography having lost its soul, he's probably externalizing his own general feelings onto his subject. And he probably does it with a lot of other subjects, too.

Spare us the critics.

Mike, is this guy always so dramatic?

Asher

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.

Best wishes,

Ray

Ray West said:

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.

Click to expand...

Hi Ray,

I had no intention to place my thoughts in anything but a side by side position to yours, not as any better way of looking at this. My idea of writing with light comes from, the early apparatus whereby the image of a subject or scene was focused with a lens or pinhole to a mirror and then to a drawing surface so the artist could trace over the image on paper. The film camera, just put light sensitive paper or glass. So that is where the drawing with light and not the charcoal or pencil comes from, AFAIK.

Snapshots are captured as when one points the camera and presses the button the camera owner has finished his/her effort. The photography I talk about is not that. It's where one has a purpose and an image in ones mind and a sense of how it could be presented.

After the button is pressed and light is recorded, the photographer has to do more work. At this point the final work can evolve from the original concept as the photographer is open to being influenced by the flow of time, mood and new ideas as the picture is available for "fiddling", altering, adding or subtracting to and from or whatever device one has to alter the final print.

I go away from "captured" since this coveys the idea that photography deals with reality, whereas photography is a conceit reproducing merely a derivative of a likeness.

Unless one is doing scientific or forensic photography we are usually creating what one cannot see in the mirror!

Asher

For those who have not, you should really read Jeff Curto's comments below the article as suggested by Michael above. It is a far more interesting (and enlightening) read than the main article.

No offense intended to Mr Plagens, however I keep my mouth shut regarding his style and type of art, mostly because I do not understand it. Unless he is a proficient photographer, I'd appreciate his doing the same about 'our' medium. That said, Curto's comments about what prompted this article, if correct, leads me to hold Plagens somewhat harmless as he was allegedly commissioned by the magazine to write what he may or may not actually believe. Emphasis on "somewhat".

Cheers, (and thanks for pointing that out Michael).....
-Greg

Hi Asher,

Thanks for your explanation. This is difficult, we seem to be in some sort of agreement on this, except your explanation is probably aligned with the delicate precision of a surgeon, whereas mine is with that of a power supply engineer, where the nearest field is good enough. ;-)

Best wishes,

Ray

The early photography was called "the pencil of nature". --Notice that it was not "the brush of nature" since there was no color emulsion yet.--

I would safely divide photography in two: 1)The optical 2) The other

Since I am not erudite I can't come up with the term for The Other Part, but it is the paper negative, daguerrotype, glass neg, film neg, digital part of the process, or "capturing the image"

The Optical part has existed since Vermeer times and will continue after the passing of the film base era, so it the less changing of the two.

So, photography started when? I think that the masters that used the Camara Obscura where early photographers but they could only place objects --in Rays box-- but not keep them there.

I could go on and on with this topic, but the world outside of my office calls me, so, don't go away ... to be continued...

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.



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.

Critics of Plagens's article, even the equally erudite Jeff Curto, fell into the trap by pointing out that photographic manipulation is nothing new:


Why does this put his leg in the trap? Given Plagen's premise that photography's distinctive status is because of a stronger foothold on reality, obvious retorts are that photography was never so distinctive and maybe not much of an art.

Another skin in Plagen's bag. It's getting to be like photographercide. Are we dead and don't know it?

No, we're alive because of a fallacy in Plagen's reasoning. It lies, of course, in the premise that photography and art should relate to reality.


Fine sounding words: art and truth, together forever; let no one split them asunder. But really as insightful as something warm, brown, and smelly from a bovine's behind. An appreciation of novels, movies, paintings, and still photos requires a suspension of beliefs about reality in order to get anything from them (or alternatively phased, a suspension of disbelief about the unreality of the artwork). Art was never tied to reality in the way that science tries to be.

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.

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, but only if you know the meaning behind those words. A photographers' modes of expression used to be through a quirky devise called a camera and a smelly place called a darkroom. 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.

Michael_Stones said:

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.

Click to expand...

A great metaphor!

Michael_Stones said:

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.

Click to expand...

I like your presentation in this way. I have said that photography presents a gradient of likenesses to what is observed, never reality. That we ever "captured" reality is, IMHO, delusional!

Michael_Stones said:

...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.

Click to expand...

The photograph might not use pigment for its final viewing, rather an LCD screen or some other medium. The main idea of photography that stands technical variations, is that The photographer's observations and view of things can be represented in some physical form be transmitted to others.

We accept that the initiator is "the photographer". That developing picture will not be static but will be influenced by how that idea evolves once the photographer (or editor) starts to process the image to some final form.

Photography, except scientific, military and other documentation work, is about leaving the real world of things to produce an image that one wants.

The art of photography is how to use and record light to lead the observing eye away from the truth to what is not (or to a new vision), without necessarily either appearing real, unreal or related to either. Out of this, where done well, the new image declares a life of its own and eludes fox hunters.

Asher

Asher, whether or not Plagens is always "so dramatic" who knows?

He does have that tiresome writing approach of setting up false premises/straw dummies, then proceeding to knock them down. What he wants basically is to have people talk about him, then perhaps about his criticism by being sensational. If that works, then Newsweek and its advertisters also have what they want. Reality doesn't have much to do with it. Parasitic existence does. As he is both a painter and a long-time art critic for Newsweek and others, his media of choice is different than photography to start with.

From his tone, too, he absolutely dislikes people in general, which seems to show in his writing. But then that's also part of being an art critic.

Mike

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.

Carsten,

"Art is what you can get away with"! Not always, sometimes its a rose and other times a free apple.

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

Carsten,

"Art is what you can get away with"! Not always, sometimes its a rose and other times a free apple.

Asher

Click to expand...

True, Asher, granted.
To me that line wasn't an exclusive statement either.

Carsten Wolff said:

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.

Click to expand...

I agree that we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously! Still we cannot ignore forces which devalue the worth of modern photography.

We do need to pay attention to what is being fed to the public's mind. That and the attempts to turn stock photography into a nickel and dime business, devalues men and women who have labored at their craft and are skilled and good artists.

I personally don't like anyone being 'dissed!

My wife was to test drive a new Vovlo and the guy was mad that I was not there 'cause he wasn't sure she had authority to write a check! People get off on putting peoplec down. I see it in relation to women requesting technical help for computers or broken appliances. It's as if women somehow can be 'dissed. When I come on the phone, immediately all problems can be solved! I see commerce just trying to commoditize everyone and everything around them. This has come to photography and if it is going to continue be a viable source of a rewarding livelhood for talented people, then that and articles which denigrate the photographer, should not go unchallenged.

Apart from that, yes let's not panic!

Asher

I wholeheartedly agree with Carsten that Plagen's article was most welcome: controversy is better than apathy; the article made some people think (including me); discourse, even if 'over-intellectualized', is fun if not taken too seriously; my guess is that whatever is meant by photography will gain rather than lose respect as a result.