What contemporary photographers are you interested in?

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Frank Version Two said:
I still don't agree (in a friendly way!) and I'll concede that any particular favorite artist is a personal subjective choice. But, if we look at the larger picture and return to the past, the New Topographers are analogous to the 19th-Century landscape photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan and Carlton Watkins.... Whereas the portraitists like Winters could be compared to Nadar (the original celebrity portrait photographer!) and Matthew Brady.

And while it is all valuable work, I'll dare to say that after 100 years, a lot of the academic and art gallery "value" will have been long forgotten and stripped away and the work will have to relate to our future society... and I think the portraits, even if they are of Tom Cruise, are going to be more important than the photos of a supermarket.

I think being collected and fawned over by galleries now is not really an indicator of future worth. Galleries like big, decorative - expensive - pictures. That doesn't mean they will be significant over time, as people who paid $300K for a Starn Twins collage in the 80s have unfortunately found out.

Or for that matter, the people who thought Henry Peach Robinson was the be-all, end-all of photography 100 years prior.

Anyway, unrelated to the above, this lady popped up on the chatter today and I think she has some amazing stuff: http://jendavisphoto.com
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I'm enjoying this friendly debate so I can't keep myself from replying 🙂

To me your analogies just don't ring true. Firstly, you're just comparing subject matter but at the same time completely disregarding the historical (and art historical) context the movements and photographers came out of. Secondly, you seem to regard it as a fact that portraits are of higher value than landscapes to most people. While I, as a portrait photographer first and foremost, can relate to this sentiment, I think there is nothing that would show this to be true.

Besides, I'd venture to say that a picture of a 99cent store or the Tokyo stock exchange will tell future generations more about the world we live in now than a perfectly lit image of some celeb.

In art history there have always been artists who were in very high regard at a certain time and then completely forgotten. I'm not saying that it's utterly impossible for Gursky to be forgotten in the future (although I highly doubt it, since he's been at it for quite some time and his popularity doesn't seem to diminish much) but I just think it's very unlikely that this will happen to all of today's highest regarded 'art' photographers.
Also, one needs to keep in mind that once an artist's work has become 'canonized' value judgements become mostly irrelevant.

Anyways, I would have liked to say much more on the topic at hand and I feel like I didn't express my thoughts very well in the above paragraphs but it's late and my mind isn't too clear right now. I'd have liked to elaborate on why I think the New Topographics 'movement' marks a certain point in art history that the 19th Century landscape photographers cannot be compared to. I also wanted to say something about there being literally millions of images of Tom Cruise or whatever celeb today and there are thousands of photographers doing perfectly lit images of famous people. The same just isn't true of Nadar's time.
Last but not least I wanted to say something about 100 years being a difficult time frame for any kind of photography considering it's archival limitations.
 
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