Death of photography... again

[Guy Mancuso]

I don't look at things like film era and digital era and what was art and what was not. It's just a medium to get to a end. The end is a slice of time or better said a decisive moment in time to record. Why I like stills over video it's a slice only not a 30 second spot. I remember a single image far longer than I will ever remember a dialogue of them. This is why I got into photography at 16 was I can capture a image of my time here.

 

[Guy Mancuso]

I'd simplify that further and elide the digital and film bits:

"When I find a camera that does what I want it to and doesn't piss me off in the process, it's a keeper."

I don't care whether I need to use a menu, a button, a knob or dial, or a user manual. I do care that the controls and the explanation for how to use them is appropriately accessible, understandable, and rememberable for the tasks that I need to do.

I have no illusions that this is easy to achieve either.

I honestly don't care what it takes to get something, it's all a process to the end goal. I never talk about how hard it is to get something cause my reward is getting it. How I got there is meaningless, I do care like you said is knowing how I did it so I can do it again. That part is important in the process of achieving the image but only for recall.

 

[Ben Rubinstein]

Thought of this thread while reading this:

The more things change...

 

[Shashin]

Puts has obviously never heard of Jerry Uelsmann.

If you are going to write about photography, it is important to know something about photography. It is more than just cherry picking "facts" (actually, opinions) to "prove" your opinion.

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

Puts has obviously never heard of Jerry Uelsmann.

If you are going to write about photography, it is important to know something about photography. It is more than just cherry picking "facts" (actually, opinions) to "prove" your opinion.

That's photography based art or design. Graphic artists have been doing that for ages without claiming to be photographers. Some of his works are impressive although he often mimics the concepts of surrealist painters like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.

 

[Shashin]

That's photography based art or design. Graphic artists have been doing that for ages without claiming to be photographers. Some of his works are impressive although he often mimics the concepts of surrealist painters like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.

First, Uelsmann shows Puts hypothesis that silver images cannot be manipulated false. All the work is from silver images done in a conventional darkroom. His work is just as manipulated as any from a computer.

Second, Uelsmann's work is photography. Or are you saying it is not photography because it is art? Are you saying a studio shot made on film that is not photography because the elements have been arranged or designed? Painters have been making landscapes for a long time, should landscape photographers call themselves painters?

All artists base work on some precedent. No one is completely unique.

Put's is making a logical fallacy. He is taking what he likes and believes and then trying to frame it as some sort of absolute "truth" about photography. What he should do is go out and see what photography actually is in its entirety and then come to a conclusion about it.

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

Interesting question: Where is the border between photography and design? I remember a long discussion about paintings and design at art school. We never reached a conclusion (Think Mondrian etc.).

While Uelsmann's pictures are undoubtedly photos, the question for me will often be: What has the strongest visual impact, his photographic or his graphic abilities. It's a question that probably has as many answers as there are members on this forum, but it's still an important consideration.

 

[Shashin]

What has the strongest visual impact, his photographic or his graphic abilities.

We can ask the same question about Salgado. Just because he does everything with a single exposure does not ignore the graphic compositions. Personally, I think you are talking about two things that cannot be separated--think Arnold Newman, he certainly "designs" his shots.

Of course, art schools have had a natural dislike of "design," thinking it somehow inferior. But what is composition if not design?

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

But what is composition if not design?

Design, art, photography... they are all closely related and they mostly follow the same rules. That's what makes the distinctions so difficult and the discussions endless and mostly without conclusion

 

[Shashin]

That's what makes the distinctions so difficult and the discussions endless and mostly without conclusion

I don't think so. Art and design do not define a media nor process. Photography does. But I do think Puts' definition is way too narrow for photography which already contradicted it before digital came onto the scene.

 

[rmorris]

It seems like people have always been stuck with the idea that photography will have its death when stronger and better suits arrive on their shores and quite frankly, there really is a detach with what hardware you use to shoot and what goes when you are actually on it. Personally though, photography though the advancement in art is here to stay.

 

[fotografz]

If the stalwart guardians of the past would've held absolute sway over "what is worthy art, and what is not", there would have been no Impressionism, Post Impressionism, and all that followed. Putt's is postulating like the French Academy of the 1880s.

Whoever named Photography was either a forward thinking genius, or an accidental one.

Translating the meaning as being "painting with light" is a manipulated definition, and probably a throw back to a time when people were struggling to associate something new with something known ... painting.

Bullshyt.

If that were true, then Typography would be painting with type ... and Videography painting with video.

The literal meaning of the suffix -graphy is "writing" or "art of writing" ... or "field of study" (as in "Geography").

Note that there are no such words as paintgraphy, or oilgraphy, or acrylicgraphy

Photography is an open ended concept with no limits except those imposted on it by those who would stifle it ... yet the "art of anything" is like a weed ... it'll find a way to grow.

The masters of photography should be the ones forwarding the art of it, not striving to choke it.

Who cares what the medium of capturing the photons and fixing them as an image may be? What does that have to do with the art of writing with light? The only thing that matters is light, and what you say with it.

Looking forward to organic sensors and whatever follows that ... in the meantime current digital is what is, and film still exists as a different choice.

-Marc

 

[DavidL]

If the image has a message that might help, if you had a nice massage that might also help. Although I believe none to be ultimately true. The ultimate truth, I was recently told, is shown by "An old ladies finger pointing" So to me not the two dimensional representation of a multi dimensional phenomena.
Sorry just the musings of someone who becomes, what they call here, an Old Age Pensioner. I have accepted the Mayan calender so I actually will become a New Age Pensioner.

 

[Godfrey]

It seems like people have always been stuck with the idea that photography will have its death when stronger and better suits arrive on their shores and quite frankly, there really is a detach with what hardware you use to shoot and what goes when you are actually on it. Personally though, photography though the advancement in art is here to stay.

Okay, I have no idea what language this post is written in. .."photography will have its death when stronger and better suits arrive on their shores and quite frankly, there really is a detach with what hardware you use to shoot and what goes when you are actually on it" ...? Huh?

 

[Godfrey]

Photography, like Mr. Spock, has been dead before.
Happily, it just keeps coming back to life.

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

As and interesting comment to this discussion, I stumbled over a very talented, young (17 years old), apparently Norwegian photographer, or is it digital artist, who in this video reveals how she creates her work:

Speed edit video - YouTube

Here's some more of her work:

Flickr: Vilde Indrehus' Photostream

This is undoubtedly the future of photography. Many, possibly most, young artists work like this, and the tools at their disposal will only get better. But photography is just a part of it. Although the end result resembles a photography, what I see is to an increasing degree digital art.

 

[fotografz]

As and interesting comment to this discussion, I stumbled over a very talented, young (17 years old), apparently Norwegian photographer, or is it digital artist, who in this video reveals how she creates her work:

Speed edit video - YouTube

Here's some more of her work:

Flickr: Vilde Indrehus' Photostream

This is undoubtedly the future of photography. Many, possibly most, young artists work like this, and the tools at their disposal will only get better. But photography is just a part of it. Although the end result resembles a photography, what I see is to an increasing degree digital art.

Fascinating. Very personal and poetic work.

"Digital Art" actually just refers to the same manipulation that has been around for a long time ... in the guise of "imagination" ... film makers employed it right from the get-go and weren't hampered by any "In Box" thinking like still photography can tend to ... with the exception of the Jerry Uelsmanns of the photo world.

Personally, I was heavily influenced by the psychologically intriguing sequential works of Duane Michals when just starting out.

When I was just a lad entering the field of advertising, I worked at an art studio servicing the ad agencies. What the retouchers there could do with a photograph was amazing. If you could dream it up, they could make it a reality ... and that was when it was bleach and dye, and no easy task.

Digital photography and software has made that level of imagination more accessible to many more talented and creative people that use photography as the base medium.

Even beyond that ... it is spurring on a new mainstream type of personal "image making" process ... the collaborative effort.

A friend of mine grew bored with standard photography, and ventured out into this collaborative approach. He dreams up some scenario, shoots the bits and pieces and works with a bunch of "digital artists" all over the world to make his imaginative "illustrations". Is it photography? Personally, I have no idea, nor does he particularly care.

Thanks for posting this Jorgen!

-Marc

 

[Stefan Steib]

As and interesting comment to this discussion, I stumbled over a very talented, young (17 years old), apparently Norwegian photographer, or is it digital artist, who in this video reveals how she creates her work:

Speed edit video - YouTube

Here's some more of her work:

Flickr: Vilde Indrehus' Photostream

This is undoubtedly the future of photography. Many, possibly most, young artists work like this, and the tools at their disposal will only get better. But photography is just a part of it. Although the end result resembles a photography, what I see is to an increasing degree digital art.

the point is that younger artists just use it all and no more think about if this is "legal" or "original" or "authentic"...... and the discussion here in the forum is happening about 30-40 years after art mainstream has done so.... I mean the only thing that really counts is the image, the result and the imagination that brings us there.

And again this sentence fits (which is really old):
"Nobody ever asked Hemmingway about the brand of his typewriter....."

In 1990 I changed my Logo-motto on my businessletterhead to "silver and electronic imaging" today still my passport states I´m a "photographer" but what I actually do is "imaginator", put up a vision the customers agree to follow and this is changing the way we all take a reception to the world.
we change the expectation of how things look like. Like artificial strawberry taste this is now the way children grow up. And sooner or later they understand that they can be part of it and start giving their phantasies input. this is the real advantage of this all. It makes the world more colorful, more interesting and different.
It has a price , a difficulty for many to see the things as they are because the do not look anymore as they expect them to be like in their imagination that was made up from outside. But those who have their own view on the world will fascinate the rest and have a much broader public now than ever before.

Overall the word is choice. People can choose what to do once they understand the mechanism. They need to be tought about the mechanism and then they can decide. That´s all.

Greetings from Lindenberg
Stefan

 

[Stefan Steib]

In some respects the begin of this erosion of classic photography is about 100-90 years old. Moholy-Nagy, Umbo, Roul Hausmann, Paul Citroen, Jaroslav Rössler, Alexander Rodshenko, Jaromir Funke, Germaine Krull and El Lissitzky have broken path for "new Vision", Bauhaus did the theory and transported this into Filmmaking too. Painting inspired Constructivism, that got into photo , that created film and got back into multiexposure, collage and print reproduction, cut and reuse in the other media.
the use of the computer is just another medium, nothing really new.



regards
Stefan

 

[micek]

Like Jorgen, I think there is something that separates film imaging from digital imaging, but I have come to terms with it. From Monday to Friday I am a pixelographer, and keep my clients happy; at weekends I am a photographer, and keep myself happy.