Is Photography Dead?

"The next great photographers???if there are to be any???will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way."

nahhhh... simply continue to shoot film.

joebuissink.com

"But her pictures represented something new in the way that photography was considered as art". Well, Alfred Stieglitz (1864 - 1946) fought for the recognition of photography as an art form all his life. HIS photos represented something new in the way that photography was considered as art.

Plagens must know that his title recalls the reaction of Paul Delaroche, a French painter, who around 1839 saw a daguerreotype -- the first photographic image --- and famously said, "From this day forth, painting is dead." Was he right? of course not. Though Delaroche's speciality --- the smooth, highly detailed, canvases devoted to historical subjects --- was eventually superceded by technicolor spectaculars -- though it took at least half a century to tkae place. Most painters took up new challenges, and kept their medium alive. Only a person who belives in the good old days will also believe that new technology ruins everything forever after. Dear Mr. Plagens: There weren't any good old days, and new technology may create new ways to make pictures, and make others look obsolete, but you still need an author/artist to make the picture happen. Otherwise I guess all painters would certainly be out of a job by now.

"Savvy museum-goers know to bypass photography exhibits " What an asanine thing to say. De gustibus non est disputandum.

I disagree with the author's notion that "art and truth used to be fast friends". I think that there should be a distinction made between images that render realism and images that render the artist's view of reality. Few people will say that impressionism looked "real", or that Cubism was "real". Back in the days when these two schools of art emerged, people were also in an uproar over their qualification as art. But today they are considered art, and I think it is wonderful. I believe that by taking an image and using digital media to change it makes the photograph a new form of canvas and the digital media the new kind of paint. I don't believe these artists are necessarily looking for realism when they use photoshop, I believe they look to enhance or change - whether the final product is art in its own right is up for discussion, certainly, but the very thing they are doing shouldn't be criticized. I look forward to seeing photography that can break up space like cubism did and can make a photograph look like expressionism. Art, music, and every other expressive form evolves. To say photography is dead isn't true - but to say that a branch of art based on photography has emerged is right on the money. In conclusion, I say "Don't knock it til you try it." Not everyone who wields a digital camera or cell phone camera photoshops all of their photos - just ask a friend to send you a photo album of their most recent vacation. Photography lives on, and thrives.

Savvy museum-goers know to bypass photography exhibits and proceed to paintings and sculptures. Photographs are simply documents and better viewed in coffee table books.

So much for the digital world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

truth and beauty. if that's the real goal, the work of art is not the answer. we are the answer. it's not that photography or any other media has lots it's ability to represent truth and beauty. we have. louisleray.com

I fully agree with the questions Mr. Plagens brings to the fore here. As a photographer (and as a viewer), what has always fascinated me with the medium was the sense that it can record a moment of reality that takes us beyond that reality to another level of things. Digital computer games can't do that. Yet regardless of media, there will always be people working in photography who seek a truth beyond mere visual play.

Mr Plagens has a point I think. However, digital cameras are ever more capable of spontaneously recording images (surely a good thing?) and the mountain is getting bigger - but the transcription to printing is a more clinical process - sort of the reverse of analogue wet process photography. But if we pop off a few pics and auto print them digitally - how does that have less soul than a old polaroid snap? I know they look different and I like the polaroids. But I am not sure if I can accept the "no-soul" argument.

Sure if you play around in Photoshop and "work up the image" it's made-over qualities can easily look buffed up like they are on steroids - or it can mime wet silver process - or a polaroid. Is photoshop as pleasing and satisfying as the old wet silver process to do - well not for me, there's no magic feeling in it. Traditional photography is the baseline. Photoshop type composite imaging is a new graphic art-form that can also mimic traditional photography to perfection, for a price in very technical effort.

On the one hand, the author, Peter Plagens (who is a painter as well as Newsweek's Art Crtiic, something I think is important to note) seems to be pining for the "good old days" of photography, when men were men and pixels were scared. He waxes rhapsodically about the era of the Pictorialists, who, in the early 20th century "used soft focus, toothy paper, sepia tones, multiple negatives and even scratching back into the image as ways of getting photographs to look more like paintings" and also talks about how "great photographers have never merely recorded visual facts indiscriminately, like a court stenographer taking down testimony. They've selected their subjects carefully and framed their views of them precisely, in order to give their pictures the look of 'art.'"

On the other hand, he says that "...the medium seems to have lost its soul. 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." He claims that "truth" is the essential quality of a photograph, and that early photographers only wanted to be "truthful" whereas contemporary photographers want to take "flight into fable."

So... wait... the "old" photography, where photographers carefully selected subjects and, if the mood struck them, manipulated their results to get the effect they wanted is better than the "new" photography where photographers do the same thing, but using different (read: better and faster) technology?

This supposition is, to me, ludicrous. Photographers have subverted the camera's grasp of the real since the start of the medium. Moreover, the camera has always lied.

Plagens' piece is confounding and, I think, misguided.

The more I think about it, I think that what transpired is this:

*Metropolitan Museum opens newly-renovated photo galleries
*Newsweek feels compelled to report on news story
*Assignment falls to Newsweek art critic
*Art critic can't just "report on new photo galleries" but mustaa also express his opinion on *what* he sees in the new galleries
*Art critic is a-skeert of photographs 'cause they're getting bigger and tackling bigger ideas ("just like painting.... look out ma!")
*If you can't say something new, you might as well be controversial, and nothing says "controversial" more than a headline that trumpets the question, "Is Photography Dead?"

Plagens doesn't say anything wrong... he just doesn't say anything new or particularly interesting, either.

He ends with this: "The next great photographers--if there are to be any--will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way."Sounds like a challenge to me.

Now where did I put that Photoshop license?

Jeff Curto
http://www.jeffcurto.com
http://www.cameraposition.com
http://photohistory.jeffcurto.com

I know nothing about the techniques of photography. However I can make a comment on the tone and tenor of the article. It is similar to ones which have been written for years about the death of the novel, or the death of tragedy or the death of countless other creative forms. This might lead one to be tempted to therefore dismiss the article out of hand. The novel for one at least still thrives despite all the predictions of Doom?
But the fact is that 'forms' do 'die' or lose their creative life. Consider 'epic' which continued to be attempted long after it seems any real epic was viable.
What is the conclusion of this in regard to this particular article on 'Photography'?
I think the answer lies at least in part in understanding what no one really understands yet- how value and status heirarchies are going to emerge in the 'culture of endlessly more' which is the 'Internet'.
And in fact whether such heirarchies will be ' general' or merely small communal niches in which groups of 'fans and performers' celebrate together their teensy- weensy bit of cosmic space.

I believe that what the author is lamented is the loss of photography's *indexical* relationship to the truth. Photographs have always been manipulated, created, framed, they are representations, not fact, yet they have, until recently, been invested with the belief that they bear an indexical relationship to something that is 'out there' in the world, however mediated and modified by the camera (and in the darkroom).
As for the lament about the mechanization of photography, there has, since its origins, been a debate over photography's seemingly 'mechanized' aspects, its supposedly 'objective' nature (in this regard, interesting that the french word for lens is "objective.') This debate has never really disappeared, it's just taking new forms.

What is striking to me about the shift to digital is not a loss of 'truth' or increasing mechanization, but rather that there will be a radical shift in the material culture of photographs--particularly of the everyday 'snapshot' kind, as people often erase or do not print out their pictures, esp, those that are deemed, at the moment of their making, 'failures.' Als, given the rapid obsolescence of new technologies, unless someone is willing to invest in archiving their digital files, much will be lost. I'm not sure that's a bad thing, perhaps the archival impulse is a regressive one at times, but I do think it will quickly make the 'snapshots' of our parents and our own childhoods objects of nostalgia, rather than of everyday life.

Find the origin of the darkroom and with it you fill find the origin of photo manipulation. As previous comments have mentioned, Ansel Adams used a variety of manipulation techniques in the darkroom, including dodging and burning, both of which are tools whose namesakes still exist in a similar form in Adobe Photoshop. Only in photojournalism is the directive in photography to capture exactly what is seen by the naked eye. Cameras have adjustable shutter speeds and exposure settings, ultra-saturated (Velvia) film, color filters -- flashbulbs even! -- to allow the photographer to create art out of something inherently non-artistic. I fail to see how the digital manipulation of photographs -- while not without its limits -- is any different.

Find the origin of the darkroom and with it you fill find the origin of photo manipulation. As previous comments have mentioned, Ansel Adams used a variety of manipulation techniques in the darkroom, including dodging and burning, both of which are tools whose namesakes still exist in a similar form in Adobe Photoshop. Only in photojournalism is the directive in photography to capture exactly what is seen by the naked eye. Cameras have adjustable shutter speeds and exposure settings, ultra-saturated (Velvia film), color filters -- flashbulbs even! -- to allow the photographer to create art out of something inherently non-artistic. I fail to see how the digital manipulation of photographs -- while not without its limits -- is any different.

The thing I'm worried about, and I do feel this article has an interesting point of what you call art, is that photography is more drifting away from the artist- or "the creator" of the piece. The thing evident in most art, and what I feel attracts people to it, is the fact the artwork was created by some human, with thoughts, concepts and ideas. When you call a computer, printers and other peices of equipment a "tool" for an artist the same way we call a paintbrush, you're losing the soul of the artist's intentions. When photography was new, the artist had a lot of tools chemicals and processes that made the creation an artform in itself. Plus there was an element of the unexpected, which adds to the mystique of creating artwork. Now with things so mechanized, and manufactured, I wonder if the soul of the peice (if it has any) was created by a machine rather than a person.

I don't think the author of this article knows *** about photography. Photography is not about the tool you use, it is not about the technique. No it is about what you have in your brain. About your creativity. Somehow the author is missing something up there.. Photography has never been about the truth, never. Photography is for instance 2D, it has a frame. How does that represent reality? In no way it does. It just copies certain elements, and recreates them in a 2D frame..

If you write crap like this for a serious magazine you are not much of an expert on this subject. It's disappointing. The true power of photography is that it can go beyond registration, it can convey emotions, it can convey a view. Because it does not put the viewing person into the situation, it is like a proxy.

It is a total pity crap like this gets posted... seriously.

I don't think the author of this article knows *** about photography. Photography is not about the tool you use, it is not about the technique. No it is about what you have in your brain. About your creativity. Somehow the author is missing something up there.. Photography has never been about the truth, never. Photography is for instance 2D, it has a frame. How does that represent reality? In no way it does. It just copies certain elements, and recreates them in a 2D frame..

If you write crap like this for a serious magazine you are not much of an expert on this subject. It's disappointing. The true power of photography is that it can go beyond registration, it can convey emotions, it can convey a view. Because it does not put the viewing person into the situation, it is like a proxy.

It is a total pity crap like this gets posted... seriously.