I saw this in newsweek. "Is photography dead?"

[ibcrewin]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/73349?tid=relatedcl

Is Photography Dead?
The last art form to be tethered to realism, its factual validity has lately been manipulated and pixelated to the point of extinction.

How do you opine?

[BillP]

Leicasniper is right. This article starts from a false premise and loses it's way from there.

I applaud the author for getting paid for that bit of fluff. It must have been a slow news day.

Regards,

Bill

[dazedgonebye]

Well, we are talking about Newsweek here.

[dcsang]

Well, we are talking about Newsweek here.

heh... too true

Dave

[dexdog]

undecided between calling this article twaddle or claptrap...

[teo]

Factual validity? :D As soon as the first plates were made, photographers already started "doctoring" them...

[LOOP]

I posted this comment some months ago. Mobile phone for the vast majority of people with 5 millon pixels or more is enough to satisfy their need.:angel:

Another point is that photography can only be an art if printed on paper.:angel:

Having the pictures on PC is just like for music: never go to a concert and listen to music on MP3.

SLR digital prices will go dow ... within one year an EOS 5D will be around 2000 $...
Digital will follow the market rules.... Look at people buying a SLR or a compact, compare it to a customer buying an Ikonta in the 50's... The first know nothing about photography the second had much more pleasure......:bang::bang:

[RML]

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.

Here's where he starts to go off the road completely. The picture, at its core, a record of something in front of the camera. Sure. But how truthful is that something? Not to mention how truthful did the camera record it.

I stopped reading after that paragraph. If he tried to make some point in favour or against photography, he failed to relate it to me and failed to keep me interested to find out.

[Tuolumne]

It seems that great photographers and great thinkers have diverged on this from the start.

From the first sentence of John Szarkowski's "The Photographer's Eye":

"More convincingly than any other kind of picture, a photograph evokes the tangible presence of reality. Its most fundamental use and broadest acceptance has been as a substitute for the subject itself -- a simpler, more permanent, more clearly visible version of the plain fact."

From Robert Adams' "Beauty in Photography":

"If landscape art were only reportage, however, it would amount to an ingredient for science, which it is not. There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as what is in front of it. Pictures are never so clearly tautological as, say, Gertrude Stein's description of a rose...Making photographs has to be, then, a personal matter; when it is not, the results are not persuasive."

/T

[bmattock]

The first commercial uses of photographs were two.

1) It replaced, virtually supplanted and killed, lithography. In other words, technical drawing of existing outdoor objects was replaced by photographs of those objects. In this, it was objective.

2) It supplemented and cut into the trade for portraiture. This had already been done to some extent by the silhouette, which was a poor man's portrait. So it filled a niche between having one's portrait painted and having one's silhouette drawn. In this, it was subjective, as every good portraitist knew to flatter their customer according to the customer's wishes.

The battle then diverged to the group that insisted that to be accepted as an art form, photography must imitate painting (the Pictorialists) and those who claimed that photography must depict things as they are (f/64 or Straight Photography).

But photography has failed to do what it is told to do. It may be objective - or subjective. It may be technical, precise, emotional, evocative, literal, or abstract.

Photography continues to evolve because the tools are evolving. With more ways to speak come more things to say.

Is painting dead? Is music dead? Is writing dead?

Photography is not 'one thing' - therefore it will not be classified as one thing. Even if one form of photography falls out of favor or become technically obsolete (Polaroid manipulations, say).

I think photography's demise has been greatly exaggerated.

I note with some irony that Newsweek does not have a Lithograph on their front cover. Nothing but photographs, for as far back as I could click:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/128648

Perhaps photography could ask if Newsweek is dead?

[shadowfox]

Photography is not 'one thing' - therefore it will not be classified as one thing. Even if one form of photography falls out of favor or become technically obsolete (Polaroid manipulations, say).

Right there!

I agree, it must be slow day for the editors.

Bill, you should write for Newsweek :D

[dazedgonebye]

From magazine.org.

Newsweek avg circulation.
1997 - 3,225,961
2007 - 3,130,600

With flat circulation numbers for the last 10 years, I doubt Newsweek will be around long enough to write the obit on photography.

[kshapero]

The mag has less pages every year and less IQ to go with it. RIP Newsweek, now!

[BillP]

Is declaring photography dead, dead?

Regards,

Bill

[Haigh]

Great article. Thanks for posting it.

Regards,

Gary Haigh


Oz

[colyn]

undecided between calling this article twaddle or claptrap...

How about claptwaddletrap??

[MikeL]

I read Newsweek for the articles.........oh wait, no, I'm thinking of that other magazine.......

[mhv]

Bored journalist wonders about truth in photography. Hilarity ensues. Movie at ten.

[yanidel]

I really don't see the point in bashing Newsweek like on some posts above. Sure, we can disagree with the writer (I on some points), but the comments above really sounds like a cheap B series movie "If you are not with us, you are against us".
And I would add that the closing statement of the article is probably a challenge to all of us, and a very constructive one :

"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."

So at least it means there is still demand for photography as an art, so we should all be glad about that and not bitch on Newsweek.

[Thardy]

"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."



Maybe the writer has never seen any work by Jerry Uelsmann? ;)

[swoop]

Photography only captures a small fragment of a scene. So sometimes it can lose its context.

[LOOP]

I'd prefer that we discuss about : what could be the way if we do not want photography to dy within 10 years !:D

Newsweek paper is giving the floor to a very important question...:)

I am so sad that nobody want to discuss my point of view.
Is it true or not that the majority of the massa customers will need a mobile with more than 5 millions pixels and then will not buy a camera ?
What does it represent 60 % ?:rolleyes:

Shall we have 120 films dissapearing ? Or only the ones for 35 mm SLR ? When ?:rolleyes:

Shall we have a camera digital lasting more than one year on the market for non professionals ? Or Leica prices for professionals around 4000 $ ? And for the massa SLR around 400 $ but changing every six month ?:cool::p

[JoeV]

I note with some irony that Newsweek does not have a Lithograph on their front cover. Nothing but photographs, for as far back as I could click:


Actually, Bill, aren't these covers printed using some form of half-tone printing? So they're neither photographs nor lithographs, using strict terminology. I guess I'm showing my bias toward a photograph being, literally, written with light.

As photographers we often remember that, historically, photography supplanted painting in many roles. But I think we tend to ignore that mechanical reproduction of images has supplanted photography, although we tend to use those terms interchangeably, and in my opinion inaccurately (i.e. 'the photo on the cover of Newsweek'.) First, with photogravure, and later with the half-tone type technologies. Even our beloved Photoshop software is actually a mechanical reproduction editing software; there's nothing 'light sensitive' about its process.

If we are to say that photography 'killed' painting, then it is equally accurate to say that mechanical reproduction 'killed' photography.


"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."


This reminds me of the point made by Garry Winogrand, which implies that once a scene has been photographed, it ceases to be the scene itself, and instead becomes something totally new and different: a photograph of the scene. This is true regardless of how straight/literal/documentarian is the photographic attempt: the act of placing frame lines around a scene (including some things, excluding other things), and applying the laws of optical physics to project an image, is by nature an abstraction.

As photographers we are said to 'create images'. Images are not the thing imaged; they are mental associations, constructs, which serve as proxies for the real. In our use of photographic images as reality-proxies we often forget which is representing which.

As for the Newsweek writer, it's a pity that the educational path to journalism doesn't include a side route through some art literacy.

~Joe

[myoptic3]

Someone asked is painting, writing, music dead? For all practical purposes, yes. Everything goes in cycles, and this is certainly a down cycle for the arts. Painting has said everything it had to say many years ago. Which doesn't mean there aren't still good painters around. It just means there isn't anything new to say as far as movements. Music is probably the most dead of all. Has anyone listened to the radio lately? There must be a reason why people listen to rock and roll of 30-40 years ago, jazz from as much as 80, and classical from centuries ago. These were the high points, and nothing has come to challenge them. Writing is not so much dead as there aren't any good writers anymore, and people's literature sensibilities have been dumbed down so much I am not sure anyone can do any good writing.

All of the isms have gone away. Multimedia is replacing staticticity. A picture on the wall is fine, but I gotta get to Yahoo and see what is going on in Iraq, and ck my emails, and buy something online, and ck the photography forums, and on and on.

The world we live in now is so different from even 20 years ago. So very perishable. As our reality, day to day values and very existence are called into question, the time to reflect and create is diminished, as is it's importance. I think all people do these days is react.

[toyotadesigner]

I think all people do these days is react.

Well, maybe 99.999%. Not me, I've just published a book with lots of photographs, shot with my Contax G2 system (because of the luggage limit on the airline). And yes, people like the book because they like real photographs to enlighten their minds (which are bored by the gazillion mobile phone pixel smudge and digital quark mud).

For me film based photography is very vital, even more than a decade ago.