I’m a photographer ... what’s a camera?

@ Photo_Smith

The same arguments can be made about "traditional" modes of photography such as documentary:

"Why bother making the 'work'...? This isn't new exiting work we're seeing it's the same old stuff re-packaged...

What we are seeing is not a new understanding of the world around us its a repackaging exercise, more of the same... "
 
RichC said:
@ Photo_Smith

The same arguments can be made about "traditional" modes of photography such as documentary:

"Why bother making the 'work'...? This isn't new exiting work we're seeing it's the same old stuff re-packaged...

What we are seeing is not a new understanding of the world around us its a repackaging exercise, more of the same... "
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Yes of course they can, which is the whole point of my post I'm not the one claiming a new form of 'cameraless new conversation' is taking place. You seem to think that taking others images represents a new way of seeing, your OP talked about people who found images and presented them as their own, people who don't need cameras, people who use many stills and take one of two out.
This is not a new form of art or even a new way of doing things, it's a re-hash-which is fine and basically very little art is original thought.
That is my point–there is no 'new conversation' going on just the echo chamber that has always existed.
 
PKR said:
This kind of thing (practice) is quite common today. Many photo-arts people rip images and alter them very slightly in Photoshop and claim them as unique (under the law) and copyright them as their own. Some if this is done openly as “art” and a lot is done, not so openly, for profit – the resale of valuable imagery. The courts in the US have often sided with the image lifter and not the original image creator.

Much of the "remaking" of original art is just marketing .. "new and improved" as seen by the latest maker. If the art world/media buy it. It's pronounced "Art". See the early work of Jeff Koons.

http://www.jeffkoons.com
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Sure it is, but it doesn't make these people original their work is derivative and there is nothing wrong with that.
I fail to see how lifting an exact copy of an image like the Walker Evans/Levine example is even remotely similar to Jeff Koons work (which I know well)

I would say that derivative work is fine, but not to a point of absolute plagiarism (like Levine's Evans example) where no new interpretation of the work is made.

All this is old hat recycled ideas though and not a 'new conversation' and that is one of the main points, lets not dress up plucking images from a video stream as some kind of new innovation freeing us from the chains of legacy photography, pushing us into the 'brave new world' of 'cameraless' photography or other such 'luvyness'
The king has no clothes.
 
I would return to Szarkowski's Looking at Photographs or The Photographer's Eye; and the Gallery of Rangefinderforum.com. After this I don't think many of the original post's propositions are defensible.

All crafts require the acquisition of skills with the tools of the trade. Some degree of software cleverness is for most of us now also a prerequisite. If we are acquiring our own images then we will need a camera. And we will need to have learnt how to use that, and other cameras, and we will need to have taken a lot of pictures and got reasonably good at it. Alvarez Bravo's contention that he was a photographer years before he ever held a camera only has meaning because he subsequently held, and used, magnificently, a camera.
 
RichC said:
Joachim Schmid has been known as a photographer for three decades - since the 1980s - and has been widely published, and his work exhibited in many major international galleries and museums. But he doesn’t take photographs, instead he collects and displays other peoples’. He is particularly famous for his “found photography” work, where he picks up discarded snapshots - torn and ruined - from the streets and displays them: see reused snapshots.
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I'm afraid I'm not post-modern enough to comprehend how finding a finished photo counts as being a photographer.

I mean, even repacking the same ideas that have been shot countless times before result in different images because of different styles of shooting and the like. I don't really see Schmid or even Ruff's contemporary work as photography but rather I see Schmid as a conceptual/appropriation artist and Ruff as a digital artist for the same reason I don't consider a sculptor to also be a quarry worker.

Maybe I'll one day see anyone working with photographic images is a photographer, but until then Hannah Hoch will remain a collage artist, Gottfried Helnwein's hyperrealist paintings based on photographs will remain paintings and not photographic derivitives, and Sherrie Levine as a photographer in the most technical sense but primarily as an appropriation artist, at least in my eyes.

It's pretty late here so I hope I'm coherent enough for this to make sense
 
OK, let's take the example I gave of contemporary photographers exploring the virtual world of Google, since calling these practitioners "photographers" seems inappropriate to some here.

The appropriation of Google images is a new - and relevant - conversation. It comments on our relationship with technology and the world, in particular the impact of the former on the latter.

Our view and understanding of the world is increasingly mediated by the camera and remote viewing, and the virtual is often more familiar than real.

Consider modern warfare: we experience it at a remove, whether as the public seeing highly selective media images (with journalists "encouraged" to be embedded within the military forces) or as combatants killing at a distance (most notably as drone operators).

And in the UK, we are the most surveilled society in the world, with an estimated 2-4 million CCTV cameras in the country, most operated by private companies.

As a final example, a writer overheard two teenagers flying for the first time:

"'Woah! It looks just like Google Earth!' (It helps if you imagine Keanu Reeves [The Matrix] saying this.)"

This is a complete inversion of how humans have usually experienced the world hitherto. To these teenagers, a simulation did not represent reality, it was reality. To them, Google Earth did not look like the world: the world looked like Google Earth.

Look around you. Virtuality is increasingly becoming the norm, with reality experienced at a remove: rather than talk to their companions, friends sit in silence next to each other communicating via texts and social media; rather than meet face to face, we video conference; when we want to see something, we turn to Google Earth and Google Maps - and that virtual representation we increasingly take as truth, to the extent that we make decisions about what we see in Google, or are content that visiting the scene in Google is equivalent to reality, so physically going there in person is unnecessary.

Technology is disengaging us from reality.
I'm not saying here whether this is good or bad. My opinion is irrelevant to this post. The situation just is: it exists.

So, it is very relevant to comment on Google. And why not through photography? After all, the camera is at the heart of Google Earth and Street View, so it is entirely appropriate.

And to photograph a virtual world may require a virtual camera.

Some here should perhaps reflect on the relevance of photography to the world, and how changes in culture and technology can and does change what we mean by the words "photography" and "photographer". (And it's no good appealing to the dictionary - they simply reflect use, and are always out of date and often wrong. Trust me on this: I write dictionaries as part of my living!)
 
All this meta-art is ephemeral. It is commentary. It is not art in any enduring sense. Ask your grandmother what photography is and you will get closer to the answer than what a lot of this thread suggests. The notion of 'progress' and the exigencies of our digital existence forcing us to recast the very nature of photography does not seem right to me at all. A photographer is a human. The sun is still a source of interesting light. Is there something more?
 
RichC said:
The appropriation of Google images is a new - and relevant - conversation. It comments on our relationship with technology and the world, in particular the impact of the former on the latter.

Our view and understanding of the world is increasingly mediated by the camera and remote viewing, and the virtual is often more familiar than real.
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I understand what you're saying but don't feel this is a 'new conversation' everything you've written could be said about the emergence of the Sunday supplement or national Geographic in the 1950's and 60s

The people cutting up those images to make art in the 1970's what you are talking about isn't new, it just differentiated by the gear used-the PC
It is relevant and key to look at how these newer technologies change our behaviour–just the projects you show don't do that they just use that tech, they aren't showing us how that changes our society at all
 
Re. Szarkowski's "The Photographer's Eye" - many contemporary photographers consider his writings to somewhat restrictive: he was a confirmed modernist, and thought that photography should stick to what it does best. For example, he said that photographs are poor at narrative, so photographers should avoid story-telling. Prescriptive, no?

Other mediums - literature, cinema - may be better at narrative, but just because narrative is more difficult in photography is no reason to avoid it.

In short, Szarkowski is respected, but culture and how photography is used by and what it means to society have changed since he wrote his books - even if we assume that his views were universally accepted at the time (which they weren't).
 
People cannot understand how things were seen and understood retrospectively ... the Greeks at the time Homer (no not that Homer, the one in a frock) had no word for blue, if you read him you will find the sky described as "rosy fingered" or the sea as "wine dark" they had no concept of Blue, their eyes were, obviously, just like ours but the were not ready conceptually to understand what they were seeing.

I expect when some poor sod tried to say "actually the sky is blue" lots of folk through up their arms and shouted their disagreement .... in a forum too, I expect

Happy Xmas to everyone!
 
RichC said:
Re. Szarkowski's "The Photographer's Eye" - many contemporary photographers consider his writings to somewhat restrictive: he was a confirmed modernist, and thought that photography should stick to what it does best. For example, he said that photographs are poor at narrative, so photographers should avoid story-telling. Prescriptive, no?

Other mediums - literature, cinema - may be better at narrative, but just because narrative is more difficult in photography is no reason to avoid it.

In short, Szarkowski is respected, but culture and how photography is used by and what it means to society have changed since he wrote his books - even if we assume that his views were universally accepted at the time (which they weren't).
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An interesting piece on Winogrand. He talks a bit about photographs and narrative about 1:26 in through about 2:40 or so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl4f-QFCUek
 
I like cameras the same way I like cars, old classics.
Cameras make my pictures and cars get me from A to B, but I like to go in style, use beautiful tools. Why not ?
Poeple having a love for sport shooting also like nice guns and poeple playing golf enjoy beatiful golf sets.
 
As a final example, a writer overheard two teenagers flying for the first time:
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The first question is whether there really is a "Department of Education • North Carolina State University" and whether "Dan Sutko" exists and is part of that organisation.

Then comes the question of his veracity in both general terms and this particular case.

Finally comes the question of whether the conversation, having been accurately recorded, was accurately perceived. After all, it's possible that the speaker was being ironic or just plain "silly".

This is not to be argumentative but to show that the foundations of the remainder of the argument have not been laid. So why not just say "I think that..." and proceed from there?

This all just personal opinion and we should none of us pretend otherwise. My personal opinion is that, far from disengaging us from "the real world", this technology widens our horizons and deepens our understanding.
 
Sparrow said:
People cannot understand how things were seen and understood retrospectively ... the Greeks at the time Homer (no not that Homer, the one in a frock) had no word for blue, if you read him you will find the sky described as "rosy fingered" or the sea as "wine dark" they had no concept of Blue, their eyes were, obviously, just like ours but the were not ready conceptually to understand what they were seeing.

I expect when some poor sod tried to say "actually the sky is blue" lots of folk through up their arms and shouted their disagreement .... in a forum too, I expect

Happy Xmas to everyone!
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Thanks, Stewart!

Originally Posted by RichC
Joachim Schmid has been known as a photographer for three decades - since the 1980s - and has been widely published, and his work exhibited in many major international galleries and museums. But he doesn’t take photographs, instead he collects and displays other peoples’. He is particularly famous for his “found photography” work, where he picks up discarded snapshots - torn and ruined - from the streets and displays them: see reused snapshots.

Its all just semantics, but I'd call this person a visual artist, not a photographer.
All photographers are visual artists, but not all visual artists are photographers.
 
Ok. So I've just come back from a day at the museum kunstpalast in dusseldorf where the photographer Andreas gursky was having a solo show. His work uses the language developed by documentary photographers and moves into a contemporary realm via post production manipulation. I couldn't help but think of this thread while walking through his show. His pieces of the tour de France, the stock exchange or Frankfurt airport are fine examples of his work.
 
We call people who take ownership for creating photos they themselves do not shoot....Art Directors! Yes, they have a concept...can you realize it for them? Can you light it for them, develop it for them? Can you make the model express it for them? Or back seat drivers....who do not actually have a drivers license. Yes these are the kind of people who label themselves as something but can not actually create...on rearrange!
 
I just knew it would get to Gursky at some point ... however, I don't see how he is relevant to this discussion, even wikipedia calls him a "visual artist"
 
I deliberately didn't mention Gursky. But I will mention Thomas Ruff, whom Wikipedia does call a photographer but is most famous for using and transforming photos taken by others - internet porn, NASA images...
 
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