12.1: 12PH THE DEATH OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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Whenever two or more old coots with cameras get together, the subject naturally turns to the death of photography. Things just are not how they were. People don’t look at photographs anymore, they just scan over them. Digital photography is too easy. The only true photography is with film.

Actually, people said the same things about painting when photography was invented. So it serves us photographers right now that we have the disrupted technology. And painting was not dead after all.

Photography is changing. I myself have much useless information in my head, and can quote you the formula for D-76, which was a developer (chemical solution) for film (stuff you used to put into cameras). And I can tell you about… Never mind, as I said it is useless information. So, I am marginalized to some extent. Gone are the days of big cameras and the alchemy that proved I knew what I was doing.

Photography has not only changed technically, but also in the way we consume it. That thumb flipping through [insert favorite social media app here], barely giving a second for each image we see. Photographs are an integral part of how we communicate with each other now. And we perceive them in a way that is different than in the last century.

So, photography is not dead, but it is becoming something it was not. Personally, I don’t know the ramifications of that change or even how I should deal with it. This isn’t a negative thing, but a pretty cool thing. We don’t know what is going to happen—the door is open for experimentation and surprises.

So far, most of these experiments are (of course) deadends. JenniCam (Jennifer Ringley) was a site with a web cam pointed to everything Jenni did, day and night. Seems a little perverse now (it didn’t then), so I guess that is why it didn’t last. I used to follow a blog of a woman who photographed herself jumping in different settings. Then it just disappeared. Things Organized Neatly is a blog by different photographers. Photoshop Tennis (modify an image and pass it on) is pretty low art, but it has stuck around. And apparently, there is also still room for photography as it was. Tumblr and Flickr both left out an ‘e’ and are full of new and old photographs repurposed for thumb-flicking.

There are things that are new and exciting that have happened after the turn of this century. I just saw an exhibit by Viviane Sassen, whose conceptual work left me high and dry, but whose images were incredible in their playful (?) handing of darks and lights. Miru Kim takes nude self portraits of herself in different situations. Michael Wolf is best known for his buildings which are reduced to patterns, while Edward Burtynsky reduces earth modifications to abstracts. Matthew Christopher’s photographs are of abandoned buildings.

Matt Stuart continues the tradition of street photography, while Doug DuBois continues a tradition in narrative portraits, Christopher Payne continues a tradition in architectural photography and Alexander Gronsky continues the tradition of landscape with his photographs of the outskirts of Moscow. Martin Parr’s photographs are almost surreal in their humor and Mark Nixon is most well known for his series of teddy bear photographs titled Much Loved.

Theatrically staged photographs such as those by Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson have become noticed after the turn of the century. Women such as Ilona Szwarc and Andi Schreiber have taken photographs exploring women’s identity. And Brandon Stanton has a well-known series of photographs titled Humans of New York.

There are other newer pursuits in photography that defy categorization, like the images of 9-Eyes (Jon Rafman) that are culled from Google Street Photographs, and sites like Craigs List Mirrors (Eric Oglander) that put together mostly anonymous images culled from the web.

As I wrap up these ‘essays’ about photography and photographers, what bothers me most is not how many photographers I have included, but how many I have excluded. How could I leave out Irving Penn, one of the best known photographers? Or Tina Modotti, whose history is as interesting as her photographs? And the playfulness of Kenneth Josephson? Or Neal Slavin, a photographer who forced the young me to think about how I was photographing? I have to stop now, because ending this name-dropping is difficult indeed.