"The Digi and The End of the World as We Have Known and Loved It. By Danny Lyon"

Ranchu

Ranchu

Veteran
Local time
10:42 AM
Joined
Sep 7, 2009
Messages
2,708
"The Digi and The End of the World as We Have Known and Loved It. By Danny Lyon"

"So that is it. That digi thing you are holding is radioactive. Better watch out it doesn’t burn you and your house down! And be careful about the little children playing with it too. It might make them morph into something you don’t feel comfortable around. No amount of tattoos will turn them back into human beings. They will have to have feelings for that, and so will you."

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/08/danny-lyon-end-of-age-of-photography.html
 
Morca007 said:
Read as "The world is not exactly a it was when I was young, therefore I am fearful and despondent."
Click to expand...

:) . Yes , but it is kinda sad to see all the old stuff go. Two days ago I was smoking a cigarette , watching sunset above my grandparents deserted village and I thought that it will never be dark here again at night you know, it will just be more lights and more traffic , but more people? Not really. and all we got to show for that "progress" is more trash from people that are just passing by.

It reminded me also of that quote from Watchmen , that old Silk Spectre said that as she gets older , the past just gets brighter and brighter , even the bad stuff look better.
 
Danny Lyon said:
It is the acceptance of, and our insistence on this instant expendable experience that is the core of the rot that is bringing down the civilization we used to call home. This insatiable desire to own, and show off on the subway, to upgrade, and upgrade and upgrade, until you don’t have enough money left to buy a beach towel without going into debt, has reduced people to slaves of consumption. It is no difference, (accept it's worse), than the consumerism of the 1950’s that destroyed the culture, and ethics and morals of the people of this country ....
Click to expand...
Hm - hasn't change been the only constant our culture has come to rely on over the last two thousand years? Every generation has to come to grips with this constant change, and ours is no exception.

As for our desire for stability and constancy, maybe today, we have to make more conscious choices - e.g. actually making hardcopies of what we want to persevere.

Most of what we do is temporary anyway, and probably isn't of much interest except if we actually decide to transform our work into some kind of a more durable form. It's up to us to decide. Temporaryness wasn't an option before - now it's the rule.

However, that doesn't mean that we actually have lost the ability to decide what we want to survive and what we deem to be unworthy of survival.

It's up to us to decide - and I like that choice.
 
Last edited:
Things change, what can I say. Both my grandparents and my parents said it was better back then. I guess every generation says that when they get older.

Bob
 
The world we lived in back then, is no more. Everything about it is now different accept for the album. It is exactly the same. Neither an artifact, nor a “picture”, nor a relic, it is an actual piece of reality of that world, that love, those people, that family as it was in 1970, and it will be that way forever. -- Danny Lyon

That statement touched me. Our family had albums, but it is only my younger brother who continues the tradition. He used to browse my darkroom trash bin for fragments of photos, torn test strips, rejects pulled from the developer, stopped and unfixed things that he put into a book. Many have bronzed over, some darkened, some obscured almost to oblivion, but they are the only evidence from an early period because in times of despondency I purged everything. Nothing is left but those fragments in my brother's album.

Danny Lyon's photography has always been very important to me. While I am just about Danny's age, and I was a photographer at the same time, I am one who grew with his work. We each rode motorcycles, lived in the same neighborhood along with others who walked by each other without much notice - some of whom became rather well known, and others who are more important and remain benignly obscure, including a curator who wanted to promote my work, and especially the University of Chicago professor who will be unnamed and whose wisdom persuaded me to leave photography as a profession: he probably saved my life.

Danny Lyon - how telling it is that I find his writing against the digital paradigm only in the digital paradigm.
 
Last edited:
We are actually more transitory than the things we create and claim to own. In a generation or two after our death, only a handful of people will remember us, and they will care nothing for our stuff. The world was never like we remember it. :)
 
He did some great work in the reportage mode. Books like The Bike Riders and Conversations With the Dead will always be sought-after classics.

More of his whacky rants here in this video recorded panel discussion from the NY library...

http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/part-iii-truth-and-authenticity-photography

(The video is over an hour long, but worthwhile with Mitch Epstein, Tod Papageorge, Paul Graham, and Katy Grannan participating along with Lyon)

Cheers,
Gary
 
To look at it from the other side, here we have a painter, a photographer, and an art critic proclaiming the end of painting, over the course of a century and a half:

"Of this moment, painting is dead" - Paul Delaroche, 1839, upon seeing a daguerrotypie.

"I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over. This is the end of painting" - Alexander Rodchenko, 1925.

"It is but a matter of time before painting will be understood as the pure idiocy that it is." - Douglas Crimp, 1981.
 
Last edited:
Hmmm, Danny, lotta those treasured albums were lost, went moldy, or were thrown out during moves, too. Or they were never shared with a wide audience. And I'm sure everyone who took family photos had them printed by fine art printers to archival standards instead of getting "****ty prints" made en masse by the roll. Equating the photos you sell in a gallery that will "last centuries" with the memory/history/totemic photos most of us make in a family/personal context is entirely disingenuous. (yeah, some of us take large format, archival negs and prints of our family moments...maybe .00002% of the people making photos out there...and never was many more of us.)

(Seriously, when you print a pic from digital, it's actually kind of a big deal for most people, so I bet the prints mean a lot more than the stack of 3x5s we used to get showing every frame and then lose the negatives or let them rot in the paper envelope in a hot attic...)

So many people USE their photos more now--sharing them instantly with friends around the world, maybe even showing slideshows from an LCD projector or on a flatscreen after a big trip... Beats looking at them once and stuffing them in a box, possibly. (As much as I have an inherent weakness for the surreality of leafing through boxes of ancient photos for which I have only a faint context, I don't think leaving such a box behind is most people's primary goal with photography.

Things have certainly changed. Things always change. Images won't always be the same...and now, yes, we are awash in them. Oddly, this would seem to be a photographer's paradise, but there's a massive backlash, seemingly to me based on the loss of exclusivity of being a "photographer" by virtue of gear and technical knowledge and (most importantly) willingness to follow through with a relatively costly/laborious process of making images.
 
I was just riding the PATH from Jersey City into Manhattan and the fellow next to me was fiddling with his toy, reading something and then moving things around with the tip of his finger. Across the way another rider was playing with her toy, while three benign women sat next to him staring into space, glancing at him now and then, and wondering what they were missing. Next to me another young moron was rocking back and forth to audio coming into his brain via his plugged up ear hole and his iPod. What is it about these people that makes you want to assault them?
Click to expand...

I think it's the self-absorption, the technology-worshiping idiocy, the jettisoning of sociability he rants against here that's closer to the heart of the matter.

We think our technology is good for godsake, that's it's doing something for us while we remain bovinely indifferent about what it's doing to us.

The author is just raging a bit over a dying light, perhaps.
 
Seeing as the art the author practices was lambasted for similar reasons at its inception--technology overtaking art--the irony isn't lost on me.

It's like a guy on the Leica forum lamenting the loss of slow, studied, manual photography like he does with his M3...a camera specifically designed to be the fastest-focusing, rapid-shooting camera of its day.
 
Was he furious that everyone on the New York subway was reading the Times, Enquirer, or Reader's Digest, or glaring threateningly at everyone around, prior to portable electronics?

I don't recall it being a prime spot for friendly, easygoing social activity when I grew up there, long before cell phones. In fact, I remember wishing the guy with the boom box would turn down the Run-DMC just a notch, or maybe get some of those cool headphones...
 
I am very surprised at the negative reaction to this article on this forum. I read it last week and thought it raised an interesting point. Lyons, writing about a photo album made by his father, says:

Though the paper pages have become brittle, I can still look through these albums, and most of the pictures look pretty much like they did when he put them inside eighty five years ago. I am his son. I am touching, and holding and looking at, and smelling something my father made with his eyes and hand, when he was younger than I and all my four children are today. He was then a young man I never knew, but I can see what he saw, and can own and can touch what he made.
Click to expand...

I think one of the problems with digital photography is that it is never reduced to a final form. There are always more tweaks to the photos, or another set of images to share on Facebook, but how often does anyone actually print out digital photos and make an album out of them? Nowhere near as often as when everyone got every picture they took back from the lab as a print, I'm sure.

This article really struck a cord with me. Last year, I re-cconnected with my father and his family after not seeing them for 23 years. My father's sister gave me a photo album containing family photos going back almost 100 years. With that photo album, my aunt gave me back my family history in a way a CD of digital images never could have.
 
Everyone has a right to express himself. Some people are more romantic, some less, for some only today's business is of importance. "Digi" photo is a part of world change, high excitement with digital communication will pass, at some point it will become just a bore. It is already happening, for average person it is too complicated. But it will stay with us. On the other hand I am seen as a nut, shooting film and making own prints. The world is now too fast for that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom