Is Photography Over?

As Douglas Nickel, among others included in the SFMOMA symposium based around the question “Is Photography Over” have said in response to the question, “the answer to that question depends on what we mean by “photography” and what we mean by “over.”” Photography, as a technology, is currently rooted in our social construct; millions of people use it numerous times a day for several different reasons and applications, ranging from security cameras to candid images on Facebook to amateur photography on Flickr to a potential exhibition setting. To say that it is over as in, never to be used ever again would be ridiculous. So, over in a fine-art setting? There’s new work being shown all over the world every day in various exhibitions and museums, and although this world might be a small one, it still continues to present new work on a consistant basis, showing no signs of slowing down in terms of photographers or artwork that utilizes photography.

For me, I identify primarily with Joel Snyder and Lorca-DiCorcia, in that it’s the idea of photography, and what it truly means to be a ‘photographer’ in the modern sense, that is over; not photography itself. Photography is alive on multiple levels, but of course, the analog process has lost serious ground to the digital age of photography… but this is more true in a commercial sense, not necessarily an artistic one. Amateur photography is primarily digital, and represents an extremely large piece of the photographic industry, and in turn, affects the potential outlook of where photography is going, in one way or another. However, there is something to be said about someone who goes through all the necessary steps of learning a craft piece by piece, learning technical and conceptual ideas and thoughts behind what it is they’re doing and how they are doing it, all to create a single image. This kind of care for the single image is one of the things that I believe to be over, in a generalized sense. We live in a world of images that we often times take for granted, and believe to be true, but are also keenly aware of their potential to be a fallacy. Because of this, photography as a medium is constantly under scrutiny regarding its ability to depict truth. Even though the way in which the images are made has changed rather rapidly, the content remains the same as it always has; portraits, landscapes, architecture, etc. The possibilities of photography have simply expanded, leaving more (or less, depending on process) room for the photographer’s ability to manipulate imagery. Digital is here to stay. Until they develop hologram technology, anyway.

 

Manovich:

In this reading, Lev Manovich, a scientist, artist and designer who uses data sets to create abstract pieces of art discusses the phenomenon of web 2.0, and the effects that social media, and its ability to spread information faster than ever, has on the contemporary art world. Web 2.0 is essentially the transition between when the world wide web was used more so by professionals, as opposed to nonprofessionals. Also, the internet has since moved away from its prior primary use in publishing, and has moved towards a communication tool. Manovich poses the idea that if we indulge in this new form of communication, and interact with it on various levels several times a day, are we not allowing ourselves to be taken hold of by commercial media, and the countless times during the day that we are exposed to it?

Uh, Yeah…I’d say so. I am absolutely terrified of looking at advertisements on the margins of some social media sites, as they use sites I’ve recently visited to generate advertisements that I might be ‘interested in’. I even saw one that was for a flower delivery service that specifically delivered to Milwaukee, where my girlfriend at the time was living. This customization feeds into what Manovich discusses with De Certeau’s “The practice of every day life”. De Certeau gives an example of how one moves through a city, and relies upon the fact that the individual is able to take different paths to reach the same destination. This is then equated to how we interact with social media, and how we are led through the commercial ‘city’ so to speak, by customization of items, layouts and interfaces.

Manovich then poses the question, what is this shift in the way we interact with commercial media affecting the world of art? I would, for the most part, agree with his belief that it is ‘irrelevant’, in that making art has never been more successful, commercially or otherwise, and that this digital shift will only allow for more innovation and change.

Jason Evans’ essay Online Photographic Thinking was next on the list. He confronts photography and the digital age in a manner of praise. According to him, the digital age is nothing more to photography than the next step in a long lineage of advancements. It also allows photographers to get their work seen by a far larger audience, establish themselves more readily and effectively in the online (and in effect) real-world art community. While this is, in a sense true, Amir Azaki’s email response makes a valid point in that, while the audience is indeed much larger online, the time spent with the work is often times fleeting and forgotten. Viewing work online, as Azaki points out, is also focused on the image, not the artist, as is in the modern art world.

 

 

Liquid Intelligence

In reading the introduction for Jeff Wall’s Liquid Intelligence, I found the points he makes about liquid, and more specifically water, in regards to photography rather interesting. I would agree on the fact that water is indeed crucial to photography’s current existence, both in the process itself and in the way that photography acts in and of itself.

Wall speaks about liquid and photography as if they are inherently connected, the random complex contours that are found in his image Milk somehow represent or reflect each other’s existence. The form that is captured at a particular moment by the dry or mechanical aspects of photography, Wall says, echoes the ‘prehistory’ of photography.

Photography and the Digital Age

Ever since I first became interested in photography, probably my sophomore year of highschool, I understood that there was a change occurring between what photography was to me (an analog process, full of life and honesty) and what it was becoming (digitized and cold). I embraced analog photography as my ‘photography of choice’, not giving any sort of attention to the possibilities, both positive or negative, of the digital age.

This week’s readings finally begin to touch on what the digital age is really doing to the photographic medium. At it’s basic core, photography is a means of representing truth, as the medium inherently requires light reflecting off of objects in the scene to react with the light-sensitive material in the negative, giving at least some sort of sense of reality to the analog process of photography. Now, in this day and age, we are forced to wonder if the images we are looking at (regardless of the process used to make said image) is real.

Clearly, the digital age has increased the amount of imagery we encounter on a daily basis exponentially. Making images has become easier than ever thanks to programs like Photoshop and the constant re-invention of what used to simply be a light-tight box, now acts like the swiss army knife of the digital image (or film, for that matter).

Technology is constantly advancing, for example: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/06/a-camera-that-could-care-less-about-focus-introducing-lytro/1 the Lytro has taken the concept of focus out of photography completely. Now, the user no longer needs to focus the image before capture. As Ritchin states in his essay ‘After Photography’, one of the main characteristics of the digital age for photography, and virtually every other digital media, is that of translating content into code. The Lytro camera is an excellent example of this, as it captures the image in its entirety, and stores every pixel that was captured into code, allowing the photographer to only access that code in post-production, leaving depth of field and focus up to the creator. Products such as this are almost certainly going to undermine the classic or professional photographer’s existence by way of user friendly and hassle-free means to making a beautiful image.

I made the same statement about Photoshop five years ago when I began thinking about the potential harm that might come to photography as I saw it then. I enjoyed the hands on, time-consuming manner in which I made my images, and Photoshop threatened that notion. What I failed to realize, however was that photography was not something that was static or constant, like the images I was producing. Photography has been constantly changing, leading up to this point (knowingly or unknowingly) of digitization and the way in which images are created and digested.

Where does this leave the photographer who, still loyal to their analog roots, but understands that change is both inevitable and possibly even necessary? It puts photographers in my generation, in particular, in a strange and cloudy arena, warring between old practices and new technologies. Corey Dzenko’s essay brought an interesting thought to light. Even though the methods with which to make images has drastically changed over the past 25 years, the images look the same. Even though an image might have been taken digitally, the ability to lull the viewer into believing the image has been untouched (falsely or otherwise) thanks to the belief that, even in the digital age, an image depicts reality. This, according to Dzenko’s essay, seemed to me to be the loophole that allows photography to survive in these modern times.

Race in the Contemporary: Winant, Cotter and Thompson

This week’s reading was in regards to race, not only in a contemporary art setting, but in its origins and its place in our world today. Howard Winant starts the readings off with The Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race, which argues over what the concept of race truly is; is it an ‘idealogical construct’ or an illusion meant to ‘divide and manipulate’ people, or is race something that truly exists in our lives? Winant refrences historian Barbara Fields in saying that race cannot be passed down through generations without reinventing itself. I find this to be true to a certain degree, as even though race is something that would appear (on the surface, at least) to no longer be a concern to our generation, it still holds fast in our social construct, wether it be in pop culture, as Thompson will argue later in our readings, or in something as seemingly trivial as stereotypes.

Winant goes on to say that even though this thought process is shared by many, yet refutes it by quoting W.I. Thomas: “[if people] define situations as real, they are real in their own consequences.” Winant contiunes to say that race is part of our social identities, to a degree, and we have not come so far as to ‘be without a race’.

I had a more difficult time understanding the objective side of racism from Winant’s point of view, but what I gathered is that for race to be an objective condition, it would limit itself to having ‘no concept’ as Winant puts it. He talks about how to be objective about race is to reduce it, in a sense to a level of absurdity (races as colors)

As his solution, Winant posits 3 conditions that should apply to a critical idea of race:  it must apply to contemporary political relationships, it must apply in an increasingly global context, and it must apply across historical time.

 

Krista Thompson’s reading, titled The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop, was a strange read for me, to say the least. I have listened to hip hop for many years, and feel as though I understand its purposes and meanings rather well. To hear a genre such as hip hop discussed in an academic setting was particularly uncomfortable. Thompson’s essay focuses primarily on light, and how certain light is used to convey the idea of “being seen being seen”, comparing it to a young girl going to prom, hired several photographers to play the part of the “paparazzi”, so that other attendees would “see her being seen”. This idea of light playing a part in being seen is then transfered over to the concept of bling, which was again, strange to read about in a critical setting. Thompson compared bling to the camera flashes, and discussed the effects of extreme lighting, music video styles and the use of chiaroscuro, a painting method that utilizes highlights and shadow to show depth of an object.

Fried, Chapter 6: Jean-Francois Chevrier on the “tableau form” ; Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Luc Delahaye

Chapter Six was a very exciting read for me, partially because I feel as if I really grasped some of the concepts and ideas presented, and also because I feel like I saw a small, but interesting connection with some of the examples and thoughts in chapter six, and what I’ve been doing in my own bodies of work.

The chapter is essentially a break-down of why the tableau form works as it does, using three excellent examples of photographers that really helped me understand how the tableau works. The first example, Thomas Ruff (a photographer I had always sort of written off, having never seen his work in person, and not understanding his motive) gave me a first glimpse of how the tableau form can be used for anti-theatricality (something I thought at first, was contradictory).

The interviews and quotes that Fried used to make his points were also especially helpful. Hearing Ruff (in particular), Regis Durand and Peter Gelassi talk about his work was particularly eye-opening, if not simply entertaining, as I had always knew that a photograph was an object that existed in time and space that represented……………something, right? But the part that for some reason amazed me was that Ruff just left it at that; not only in his portraits, but in his other works, as well.

The large-scale nature of these images, at first glance in my mind, would seem to increase their meaning somehow. However, after reading Ruff’s ideas behind the portrait images and the brief quote regarding his “Houses” series, it is simply a space, whether it be the front of a house, or a person’s face.

This was the first comparison I made to my own work. Initially, I responded to the example from his “Houses” series on a strictly visual level:

 

(an image from my spaces series on the left, Ruff’s image on the right) I began to make comparisons to all of his examples given in the reading, and have come to realize that this is what he is doing, plain and simple. Coming into this class, I thought everything would have to have a meaning behind it, and that idea terrified me, because with my spaces series, I don’t want meaning. I simply want a visual experience. The tableau form, for Ruff, is simply an extension of this. To quote Ruff, “…They look at the curtains and try to figure out what sort of people live behind them… [But why can’t they] go up and say, aha, big photograph, big head, take the picture as a picture and say, thank you, Mr. Ruff, well done?”

 

After reading Fried’s introduction to “Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before”, my understanding of what contemporary photography was truly about finally started take hold.

The first, and one of the most discussed ideas in the reading, was the idea of photography, in a tableau-like form, be made specifically ‘for the wall’, as mentioned by Jean-Francois Chevrier. Thomas Ruff, Jean-Marc Bustamante and Jeff Wall especially were used as an example on many occasions, as this idea of large-scale “table-sized” prints seemed to be one of the most important trends mentioned by Fried, as the ideas of theatricality, ‘fascination and absorption’ play deeply into the success of these images.

His first example was one of my favorite photographers, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and his long-exposure stills of empty movie theatres playing through an entire film, resulting in a blank, white screen illuminating the rest of the theatre. While Fried notes that Sugimoto’s stills are part of the ‘new era’ of photography, he does also say that they are not in the same line as Wall’s giant illuminated prints, due to their size.

I have only seen Sugimoto’s work in person, a selection of his seascapes: 

Having viewed these images, and not his theatre work, I can better understand what it is Sugimoto is talking about in regards to how his work is perceived. These images force the viewer to lose themselves, not necessarily in the size (they couldn’t have been much larger than 8×10), but in scope, as there is no focal point with which to focus on, every image would be identical if it weren’t for the effects of the weather on the day of shooting (not unlike the theatre images, where the loss-of-self occurs in the white blank screen, only to have the screen’s surroundings pull you back to reality).

Even though Fried does not mention this particular body of work, I feel it runs in the same vein as what Fried was discussing regarding the similarities between Sugimoto’s smaller prints, and the more contemporary use of the tableau form, such as the example used in the reading, Jeff Wall’s ‘Movie Audience’. Although they are quite different in both scale (Fried even goes on to say that Sugimoto’s Dioramas or Movie Theatres, (I’m going to add his seascapes into this) would lose intensity if printed at a larger scale) and how the work is experienced physically, the experience of being ‘drawn in’ or lost in the image is what I understand to be their common link to this era; While size certainly magnifies this effect, it does not seem to be the sole cause of it, either.

I was also very interested in Jean-Marc Bustamante’s work, as this was my first time looking and reading about some of his work. His notion of ‘entre-deux’ or the in-between seemed especially interesting to me. In particular:

“the event [more broadly, the motif] is placed at such a distance, and contained that these images move beyond the context in which they were made, the geographic setting and so on, and engage the viewer in a one-to-one relationship soleley through their physical presence… My aim is to make the viewer become aware of what his or her responsibility in what he or she is looking at.”

I could be misplacing my understanding, but this sounds suspiciously like what Alberro was discussing in last week’s reading, when he states:

“The resurgence of philosophical aesthetics has coincided with a new construction of the spectator. When, for example, prominent contemporary artists claim that “meaning is almost completely unimportant” for their work and that “we don’t need to understand art, we need only to fully experience it,” they place value on affect and experience rather than interpretation and meaning—rather than contextually grounding and understanding the work and its conditions of possibility. This shift from the cognitive to the affective negates some of the most productive intellectual achievements of twentieth-century critical theory, which had attempted to reveal the social construction of subjectivity, even if it was understood as always already provisionally configured.”

Thoughts on Contemporary Photography

I always thought that photography was about making something beautiful to look at, something that would provoke an emotion or perhaps inspire someone else’s ideas to do something of their own. A pretty naive way to look at photography, I’ll admit, but after reading the three texts for this week, I’m convinced I haven’t the slightest clue how to start talking about photography intelligently, let alone art in modern, postmodern and contemporary periods. Everyone has to start somewhere, I guess.

That being said, I did notice some things that began to make the pieces of this confusing puzzle come into place. I made a simple 3-column list for modern, postmodern and contemporary–taking notes, writing down words that come up in texts, names or ideas that I can associate with the periods; simply in an attempt to understand what the differences really are between them. Now, I could be off on some of this, but I’m sure I’ll get my facts straight in the next day or two.

Now, from what I understand, modernity was about making things new, rejecting the realistic, and adopting a new way of thinking in regards to not only art, but religion, identity, both as artists and individuals, political and social constructs, and a rejection of the ‘old’.

Postmodernism, from what I understand, took modernism and rejected it by focusing more on the differences in society between race, gender and social events that both united and divided groups and, at times, the nation. (I’m still working this one out…)

And then, we have contemporary art. The first thing that comes to my mind is the digital age, along with the development of the world wide web. Anything and everything is accessible through one technological device or another, and art is no exception. In contemporary art, it seems that artists are replacing ‘image for object’ as their central concern (Alberro, p60). To me, that meant that the meaning behind a work of art was no longer as important as the image for what it is. This idea made sense to me. Thanks to everything so accessible at a moment’s notice, it seems that our generation is beginning to reject the idea of looking deeper into art, and is embracing a new age of short-form documentaries, large-scale printing, and easily accessible art. With our attention spans dwindling, things must be “easy to get, hard to forget”.