Is Photography Dead?
“We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corpor-eal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such “performance animation” films as “Beowulf,” overwhelmed by them. Some big pop-music hits are so cyberized the singer might as well be telling you to press 1 if you know your party’s exten-sion. 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?”
I don’t know about all that, but I’ve just purchased three Istoica prints last night, to compliment a Rannie canvas print and a Davin Risk photo (“Disco Ball” and “New Grass” respectively). I should really set aside a budget for regularly purchasing pieces from local photographers.
You can check out the “the too-explicit injustice of kind population!” show featuring some prominent Toronto photo-bloggers right now at the Whippersnapper Gallery.
Labels: photography
posted by Slava @ 12:09 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
I think the rise of widespread digital manipulation performs a public service by making it better understood that a photograph is not necessarily a depiction of reality.
I wonder also whether it has facilitated interest in staged photography such as that of Maleonn.
I'm actually interested more in how digitally manipulating photos can bring them closer to the actual experience of seeing the world.
Vincent Laforet's (to use a tired example) photographs of sporting events being a good illustration: See the NYT slide-show
Well, just so you know, I'm about 100% sure Vincent Laforet's photographs are NOT digitaly manipulated.
He, and the large number of other photographers and cinematographers who use this technique, use a "Tilt/Shift" lens that allows you by tilting (up and down) and swinging (left and right) your lens on it's axis, while keeping the film plane in the same position to alter your plane of focus.
This is exactly the same as on a large format camera.
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As far as this whole "Is Photography is Dead" thing is concerned the title of the article should be, Is Realism in Photography Dead?. And to that I answer no.
I am of the opinion that there was just as much manipulation in photography in the 19th and 20th century as there is today.
It seems like the pull away from realism seems to occur, whenever a process is invented that allows it.
As the wet collodion became available in the 1850's photographers such as Rejlander,created composite images, such as "The Two Ways of Life" (a composite of around 30 individual images). Because this process allowed them to remove parts from the glass negative (scratch away) and expose multiple parts onto a sheet of photo paper.
The Gum Bichromate print allowed people to manipulate the colors and texture of a print after it was developed, and thus Pictorialism peaked in the early 1900's.
Now digital allows photographers to manipulate images on a whole new level, and they are doing it.
The key for me is that through out all of this there are those who practice more or less "Straight" photography, not altering the "reality" factor. Back then it was, Strand, Evans, Cartier-Bresson, now it's Alec Soth, Burtynsky, Andrew Moore, to name some of my favorites.
So no photography is not dead, it's just reacting to a relatively new photographic process.
Digital/analog, whatever. By twisting the lens or futzing around in Photoshop someone can succesfully alter the image into artificially simulating the limited field-of-view of our eyes. That's what the point was.
As for the article, it seems that the guy is a decade too late in writing it. To me at least, his concerns would be more applicable to the 80s & 90s when all these grungy, melodramatic, posed photos were in vogue -- with all their fake scraches, desolate landscape, dramatic over-exposures, (not to mention the first wave of tragic experiments with Photoshop) -- but maybe it's just what I remember. I wasn't really looking too closely at photography back then.
These days there seems to be a swing back toward photo-realism, specifically due to revival of documentary photography among the older generation of photographers (no small thanks to 9/11, Iraq war, various climate-change-related disasters) and the popularity of dead-pan among the new generation (probably in an effort to escape the drama of 9/11, Iraq war, various climate-change-related disaters).
That's interesting, it seems, that in the early 20th century realism in photography coincided with the great depression.
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