Is Photography Dead?

Hmmmm......

Does anybody recognize any parallel to questions about "Art" in general of the past few decades? Art, as everything that we interface, evolves. Photography as an art form, a system of documentation, or as any other description, evolves, too.

"Art" is self-defining. It is also defined by acclamation. Everybody's got an opinion, and, as it applies to art (NOT counting technical achievement), each is valid. Just my opinion, of course...

Regards!
Don
 
40oz said:
dumbest article ever. Or in at least a week.
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Geez, I thought it was interesting and well-written. I know this topic always turns into flame wars on internet forums, and I'm not trying to incite that or participate in it, but ... I have come across more than a few artists and academics asking whether an image digitally created and manipulated is "photography," or something else. I think it's thought-provoking.
 
40oz said:
dumbest article ever. Or in at least a week.
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Why? it's an accurate description of where we are heading. Look at your local "Photography" club, if yours is anything like mine, their concept of beautiful-contest-winning-photos are heavily photoshop-ed, rendering me quite speechless.

I agree with the article, where's the gee-whiz factor if the image content is something that was made up? that's akin to saying "Wow" at an HDR image.
 
I don't see how digital manipulation is all that different from photomontage or solarization. It's trying out the boundaries of the medium. After people tire of spending all their time in Photoshop, they'll go back to straight photography ala f64 group.
 
It can be dead for the so-called knowitalls at the newspapers who think they can write
(they should look at their own job - creative journalism died over 30 years ago)

Photography for me personally is`nt over until they pry the Leica from my cold dead rigor mortis filled hands 😱

Happy Shooting!

Tom

PS: I think "film" is going to have an amazing comeback......wait and see 😀
 
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When Photography was developed pundits said Painting was obsolete, and when Movies were new critics said live theatre was dead, and when TV was new they said Cinema was dead, and now someone says Photography is dead. And I believe all those other genres are alive and well. Digital is just another tool, another technology. It has its own signature, and parameters. The works created by any process are constrained, or circumscribed, by the capabilities or limitations of the technology. But art is not created in a vacuum, and new technology can cause a paradigm shift in the way other art forms are practiced and perceived. That doesn't mean the other arts die, or become irrelevant. That's closer to the reality of the situation. But it's not as sexy as screaming "Photography is Dead!"
 
I agree with Fred...photoshop to me is best used as a parallel to the traditional darkroom but others like the digital look, I suppose.

My new work is involving black and white film, totally, with only the traditional darkroom techniques to clean up dust, fix contrast, etc. Photoshop cannot really help me in my current project: Emotion...as in the "blues"...

My fate is in my own hands as I travel down that road and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Photography is only as dead as you allow it to be.
 
Nothing has changed. Digital is the modern equivalent to film. I still love film, but I also like digital for numerous reasons.

With film, you burn it onto a film plane, develop it in a darkroom, dodge/burn/change the negative or the print using darkroom methods and then print it.

With digital, you burn it onto a sensor, develop it in a "lightroom" (computer), dodge/burn/change the file to how you want using image manipulation methods and then print it.

The above is the process with RAW files - with RAW being the equivalent of a negative. If talking about JPEG files, it's more like this:

Burn it onto a sensor, take out your memory card and hand it to a lab, they print, you pick up.

The film version:
Burn it onto film, take out the film and hand it to a lab, they print, you pick up.

Photography isn't dead, it evolves like everything else on the planet. The things that don't evolve die (think do-dos and dinosaurs). Film is still a current media for usage in photography and will be for a very long time. The basic workflow of shooting the picture to the final print is more or less equivalent with film and digital.
 
well I say whatever helps the artist put their ideas out. I am only 25 so I am yungin but just like sitemystic said it is merely adapting. I am not worried. I will still shoot B&W film alongside my digital camera. there is a feeling from film you can't get from digital. it is all about how the artist wants to use the medium.
 
This article seems to have an undercurrent of questioning if photography was ever an art. His quote, "Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens.." alludes to his belief that photography up to this point hasn't had merit as an art form. Finally escaping? Yeah, we've been held down by "reality" for 168 years and are just now getting to the cusp of breaking free 🙄

Oh wait, here he starts to admit that we haven't been out there merely documenting the earth.. "Of course, great photographers have never merely recorded visual facts indiscriminately, like a court stenographer taking down testimony."

But of course then he goes on to suggest that early photography up til thr 1920's when the Brownie appeared were just reaching to be art. "They've selected their subjects carefully and framed their views of them precisely, in order to give their pictures the look of "art.""

While the jist of the article has plenty of truth, I have trouble believing that photography is an art form that is striving to break out of its shell of reality. I don't believe the natural evolution of photography is ever pulling us closer to imagined/created/composite type images. There will always be examples of this throughout our medium, but presuming this art wants to be closer to another art is severly misunderstanding the heart of the photographic medium.

Just my $.02 🙂
 
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Music is Dead Also. R.I.P. Music!

Music is Dead Also. R.I.P. Music!

BTW, Music as an art form has been completely exhausted also. All possibilities have been exploited. The creative well has been drained. New compositions or performances will be derivative, fraudulent and ultimately pointless. It's all been done.
 
"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."

For me this is the cornerstone mistake of all the following in the article.

Fred, as a New Yorker yourself, could you enligthen us where the lunatic comes from, and the athmosphere in which such a decadent article can be published, sustaining itself just by associating itself to current and past stones of photography ?

Just an insult to the common sense of the average reader.

Cheers,
Ruben
 
Interesting figures from the camera industry:

138 million cameras sold in 2007, 10% more than 2006
126 million are digital
12 million are film cameras

The world wide market for digital SLRs will surpass 7 million this year

The german market is at 8.6 million cameras in 2007, this means every 10th german bought a new camera this year.

So I think someone will find a new and creative way to take a photo 🙂

http://www.photoindustrie-verband.de/amateurphotomarkt/Wachstumsmarkt-Photo-und-Imaging-photokina-2008.htm
 
(A slightly incoherent philippic follows)

This question really has been done to death. And hardly restricted to photography: some writers I know have freeted about certain clever bits of software that can "create" a novel seemingly without human intervention. That one's pretty old too.

There are, to me, two schools of thought about this.

The first school: The less skill required for something, the lower that thing is valued. If anybody can can run outside with their digiflex and create a "masterpiece", what value is there in creating a masterpiece (however a significant portion of us might define it)? If somebody's album won a Grammy next year, and the artist, while accepting the award, mentioned that s/he spun the thing from whole cloth on a MacBook with Garageband, would you smash your Strat against the wall and jump off the nearest (sufficiently tall) precipice? If some joker started a sci-fi oriented "novel-generating" script on his computer on Friday, printed out a manuscript of the results on Saturday, shopped it to a pulisher on Monday, got a major advance for publishing rights the following Tuesday, and the following month generated industry buzz as being "The next Michael Crighton", should Crighton hang himself?

(I have the answer to that, but most Crighton fans out there won't like it)

The Photography is Dead and It's All Been Done and Does Art Even Matter Anymore? smacks of hand-wringing, nihilistic BS. Photography, like many another creative medium, has always been malleable in substance. No film? No camera? Been done, a long time ago. Didn't kill "straight" photography at all; in fact, I'd argue that it informed and strengthened straight photography. Is Photoshop killing photography? Why not ask if Illustrator (with a Wacom tablet) killing painting or drawing? Also, these two powerful tools won't make a silk purse from a sow's ear; you still need creative chops.

As far as the "art" thing goes, in relation to technology, I think there's a question about raising the bar when it seems it's being lowered all around us. That's not a matter of the technology at hand, but everyone's approach to it. Most of the "masses" clamoring for much of this digital hardware will come nowhere near scratching the surface of what's possible. It still takes a bit of time and more-than-casual interest to do something above the passably-interesting (but more people will be doing it). Lots more people will acheive well-focused, well-exposed photographs. For the vast majority of people, that's the beginning and end of what "photography" means. This is prpetty much how it's always been; creatively ambitious photography has always been a pursuit of a minority of people packing a camera. Lots of people like to wax "creative" when they break out that digiflex (or any SLR for that matter; the idea of "moving up" to an SLR to "improve" one's photography goes straight back to the 1960s, and I have the ad copy to prove it 🙂), but where the light hits the sensor, other stuff seems to get in the way. So, a few halfway-interesting snaps get made, thrown into the computer, tarted up a bit, then uploaded somewhere. And that's where it stops.


The second (abbreviated) school, which I guardedly adhere to more, is: That Which Doesn't Kill Me, Makes Me Stronger. Film is my primary medium, and will likely remain that way unless I can't get the stuff anymore. However, I was an early adopter of the digital "lightroom" and Photoshop, and I regard these as some of the best things to happen to photography. Putting together any kind of darkroon has long been daunting for most people who were more than mildly interested in having one; Creating a great darkroom has been impossible for all but a relative few who had the time, funds, and, most important (and usually even more scarce than the first two), space. The ability to take one's film, make high-quality scans, digitally retouch and manipulate ("manipulate" has become a dirty word of late, but I use it in the strictest wet-darkroom sense as far as my work is concerned) with a higher degree of precision than before, then print the resulting file at home or via pro lab, still amazes me. There are no minuses here, nor is this a dis against the wet darkroom: the lightroom can go where no darkroom is possible, 'tis all.

There'll always be people doing with Photoshop what Jeff Koons does with sculpture (namely, spectacularly silly, but that's my taste intruding here again). Silliness and bad art abound, but that's long been the case, and just because there are cameras built into damn near everything now doesn't mean tossing your Leica away and saying "---- it, I'm outta here." The world feels smaller than it is these days, but it's still bigger than we imagine. That's the thought that keeps me getting up in the morning.


- Barrett
 
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If someone does a "photography" exhibit, but produced it entirely in front of his computer, photoshopping stock images into wonderful surreal art (but never actually tripping a shutter), is he still the "photographer"?
 
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.
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I say it's another triumph for the "Who Cares?" Morovulgatti, who compensating for their lack of talent and technique say "if I say so, it is so"
 
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