Departures

I came across a very interesting article this evening in Newsweek titled “Is Photography Dead?” It’s very much worth the read.

…you can’t help but wonder if the entire medium hasn’t fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now “sculpture” can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography’s vast variety possible. But it’s also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, 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. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we’ve witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It’s hard to say “gee whiz” anymore.

Even sculpture has adopted digital “rapid prototyping” technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn’t it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?

Read the whole Article here, and after that, read the comment on the article left by Jeff Curto.

Do I think Photography’s dead? If I do, I’d better find a new job, and quit thinking about and making plans to go to graduate school, to teach that very subject (though working at Best Buy isn’t exactly so photography centered that photography’s death would cause me to find a new job).

Questions like this have been raised through out the entire history of art. Painters were asking the same thing when William Henry Fox Talbot and Daguerre made the first photographs in 1839. People have been questioning many methods in photography since it’s inception, though there are many excellent photographers doing many historical processes, Sandy King is perhaps today’s master Carbon printer, and Chuck Close, today’s master in Daguerreotypes.

Just like the other mediums in art, photography will evolve and adapt, just like it already has done, many times.