What is the "next movement" in Photogrpahy?

Oh, you are so in the woods. The Helsinki school is in right now. I hope not for long, but I´m usually wrong.
 
manfromh said:
It grows and grows until its sinks back to the basics.

Digital picture frames will be used a lot in some period, but I doubt that period is very long.

I read somewhere that photography set painting free. With the advent of photography, painters were less concerned about showing realism, and started to distort reality for an emotional effect (expressionism). Maybe its the same with film and digital. Film will be the artists medium, and digi will be used for realistic images.
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Given that, by nature and design film is more descriptive and limited outside of capturing what is there, your argument is backwards; however, I agree with you on the freedom aspect of things: it may be video or another similar format that will set free the still image. The world will be using motion pictures to communicate.
 
One thing I'm seeing, especially with digital, is the "daily diary" style of photography -- a kind of "personal journalism". Some of us have been doing his with film for years, but with digital I see a lot of folks new to photography who try to post something from their lives every day. Naturally some of it is pretty bad, but some of it is also very good. I'm glad to see how democratic photography has become since the advent of digital cams, and how many female photographers are now posting shots. It seems wholesome to me. And some of them are beginning to experiment with film.

Gene
 
manfromh said:
I read somewhere that photography set painting free. With the advent of photography, painters were less concerned about showing realism, and started to distort reality for an emotional effect (expressionism). Maybe its the same with film and digital. Film will be the artists medium, and digi will be used for realistic images.
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I think things are evolving to the opposite. Many people who take digital images radically modify them until the result can only be described as digital art (not photography). Very few film images are manipulated to this extent.
 
Nh3 said:
Yes it is, because what frank did was focused on the subject and what Bresson did was focused on the form.

The subject is ever changing and always the main narrative drive of a picture.
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I'd argue that both were focused on subject and form. Sure, the early cartier-bresson work (1930s) maybe wasn't, but anyone who saw the MOMA show knows what you are saying about Bresson is simply not true.
 
Chris101 said:
Manipulated realism has been around for a long time and finds a lot of use in advertising. Except for enhancers like Dave Hill and Jill Greenberg, I haven't seen altered reality catch on in art much.

I'm hoping some post-post-post modern grunge will catch fire, cause that is what I do.
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Now, joking aside, I'd have had you down as a post-punk dadaist ... if dadaist is a word that is ... hard to put put into words but pretty vacant is the soundtrack

I have a folio with maybe 20 prints in the same genre, but I find the difficult to take on purpose
 
Photography, in the masses, is at a very personal, probably selfish phase. If you look at Flickr, lots of self portraits, lots of 365 me me me. Documenting the Self. Perhaps in the future we'll be more interested in others looking at our photographs of others.

I do see a lot of retro going on - there are countless photoshop plugins to emulate older films, washed out colors, desaturated, yellow-casts, etc.

Film use is growing because of the inherent outcry of the soul for something with feeling.

There is also growing evidence (based on auction sales) that photography is coming onto par and for some the preferred artistic medium. Perhaps the future will see further experimentation with art videos, multimedia stills and the like.
Whatever the future brings, I see the current market as being hugely important. The more people that are involved in photography - at the snapshot level - will bring more people into knowledge, passion and interest. Which in turn works well for us!
 
Who knows? And really, who cares? Trends come and go, and those who try to make their art according to the trends vanish with them. Make the photographs that mean something to you. If they don't come from your heart, they will never reach anyone else's heart. Who is going to look at our photographs a hundred years from now anyway?
 
What's the next movement in photography?

I've not decided, but when I do, I'll let y'all know first, so you can get crackin'.

~Joe
 
The idea of "found photographs" seems like a popular fad these days. Such as, found in your parent's attic, found at a flea market, etc. (Or even "found on the internet.")
 
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The future?

You will probably see a backlash from the buying public against the current trend of "professional snapshots" and back to more "professional" looking portraits. As P&S and DSLRs become more affordable, people will realize they can do a lot of the photography themselves. The current "style" that many are selling is easily reproduced. I'm not saying that these guys and girls don't have talent, but they are simply going on location, no auxiliary lighting, and taking photos of the client. The result is blown out backgrounds, wedding dresses, and skies.

In the studio, you'll probably see more and more professionals begin to experiment with video capture. It has already been done for at least one magazine cover and it is reasonable to assume that software and camera advances will lead to more stills from video capable of being enlarged to 16x20.

Art and portrait photographers, as mentioned previously, will start to return to film and the darkroom as a means of reconnecting with photography, as well as, a way of offering clients unique photographic prints...prints they can charge a lot of money for because so many of their fellow photographers are digital photographers.
 
'Art and portrait photographers, as mentioned previously, will start to return to film and the darkroom as a means of reconnecting with photography, as well as, a way of offering clients unique photographic prints...prints they can charge a lot of money for because so many of their fellow photographers are digital photographers.'

hey, ixnay on the bat out of the cag vay.
 
emraphoto said:
'Art and portrait photographers, as mentioned previously, will start to return to film and the darkroom as a means of reconnecting with photography, as well as, a way of offering clients unique photographic prints...prints they can charge a lot of money for because so many of their fellow photographers are digital photographers.'

hey, ixnay on the bat out of the cag vay.
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Sorry...LOL.

I mean..it's just a thought...the chances of it actually happening are remote...almost impossible.
 
mabelsound said:
I think all art movements are basically invented by critics after the fact, so that they can understand more easily the motivations of unique individuals. Most movement artists are just hangers-on. [...]
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Capital A - Art is defined by curators, critics and historians. That's the static view of art - the necessary stabilizing of art for the sake of communicable value (commercial and intellectual). Then there is the practice of art which occurs all the time by all kinds of people, some of it brilliant and overlooked because, well, that's the way the 'biz goes. New students need that point driven into their heads because so many (in America) believe that art is all about being discovered, and they are terribly non-self critical because they are entering university from an impoverished and wrong-headed high school education that fosters 'good feeling' for personal opinions rather than searching for critique.

That said, profound shifts in art as it is associated with technology (painting and drawing to wet plate to dry plate, to film, to digital...) tends to emulate the technology it supposedly replaces. It takes time for society to see that the shift is misdirection. Eventually, a successful technology liberates that which it supposedly obviates.

What's next? Probably a bio-interface, the perfect roving eye, 3D, holography. And after that? The opposite - slow photography, printing that shows the hand of the artist, so to speak. (Not necessarily so-called Fine Art. Like how many more photographs of canoe bows and lake horizons, or one-light nudes do we need?)

My personal experience in this points to a man named Donald Eugene Camp. He and I rather grew up in photography during the same period, and had the same professional experience, although we were not in direct communication for decades, having worked a world apart then. (Military, then photojournalism where he was the finest PJ I've ever known.) Camp now does large format to very large, handmade emulsion prints that attend to slow imaging. (I have not checked lately on Camp's welfare. He is seventy years-old. Life becomes difficult.)
 
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Frankly, I do not care, what the next movement will be about. I just hope it will be about great images. From my point of view, if somebody has to explain to me, why what I see is a work of art, then almost certiainly it is not a work of art. There are photographers that are considered top dog artists today, even classics, but they leave me cold. The Becher's water reservoirs and all their school of documentary photography in my opinion is not art at all. The closer we get to reproducing the visual reality, with natural colours, sharp images and impersonal perspective, the less moving are the results in my eyes.
 
MichaelHarris said:
I honestly think Polaroid will make some sort of comeback in the film and art world.
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Polaroid Daguerreotypes will herald the biggest comeback in commercial history :)

I always hoped silicon film would not be vapourware. I think it has disappeared without trace?

010212-1302-49.jpg
 
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