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

[swoop]

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

 

[LOOP]

I agree with Vanidel

I agree with Vanidel

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

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 % ?

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

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 ?

 

[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.