Over the years he has also published four small books of essays and interviews (Beauty in Photography, Why People Photograph, Along Some Rivers, and Art Can Help ). Of these the critic Richard Woodward has observed that they “are defiantly free of postmodern attitudes and theorizing, arguing that one of the chief purposes of making art is to keep intact an affection for life.”
At other times, however, photography is more like hunting and gathering, a much more random pursuit where serendipity rules. While all of the above ways of working are part of my personal experience to a greater or lesser degree, it’s interesting that almost all of my best-known (and by coincidence, favourite) images were taken fleetingly, spontaneously.
photography can no longer be seen as: a uniform practice with a fixed cultural meaning: Photography is a complex and diverse practice across time and space, and it would be naïve to assume that all photographers confer the same meaning on photography or even that they are following the same practice … photography must be understood simultaneously as a social practice, a networked technology, a material object and an image.
“It’s not just the meaning of the image that has changed – the act of looking does not have the same meaning. Now, it’s about showing, sending and maybe remembering. It is no longer essentially about the image. The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone …. The culture has changed. It has all gone. I really don’t know why we stick to the word photography any more. There should be a different term, but nobody cared about finding it.” Wim Wenders, 2017.
If ICP wants to turn its back on art history (and its own collection), and conceive of all images as equally valid elements of one giant image stream, that’s its prerogative. But then do something with that vision; don’t junk art history just to reproduce the web! The role of a 21st-century photography museum should be to analyze, synthesize, and historicize our understanding of today’s dispensation of images, rather than just to replicate the products of the search engine and the hashtag. A museum, this museum, must be so much more than an aggregator – more than a collection of JPEGs to be fleetingly contemplated before we swipe past.
"I think it’s very clear that we need to come up with a name for synthetic generated images that look like photography. I’ve heard some interesting suggestions—some good, some bad. The best proposition so far, which I have from somebody commenting on my social media accounts, is promptography. I liked that a lot. It tells you that it’s something else, and it should not be mixed in the same category. We need to be clear to say it is not photography. It’s using the photographic language. With the same tool, I can use the language of painting, I can use the language of drawing, I can use the language of 3d animation… the options will become more and more. It’s an explosion since last summer, and by the end of the year, we can’t know where we’ll be." Boris Eldagsen, the creator of the PSEUDOMNESIA: Fake Memories
This is the visual end product of erasing a 868x1024 pixel jpg of Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing". I selected a 1-pixel diameter Eraser tool in Photoshop and erased the 888,832-pixel artwork over five sessions and a total of nine hours and thirty-three minutes (a total of 973 “Eraser” actions). The story of the erasure is encoded in the metadata in the History Log file. This 104-page text serves as a digital palimpsest; an epic poem which begs a more general question about how truth has retreated from our retinal environment. This text was published in book form, and I present to you the empty jpg, free of the load of its information - a very manual form of compression. For more information please see http://geraintedwards.com/?page_id=6388
Jason Farago
So what does it all mean when even the sacred world of art is transformed and meme-ified for the broader internet? To me, the art world meme reflects the inevitable collision of the high art world with, well, everybody else. In a world in which the average art appreciator can feel empowered to create, remix and revamp, the art world meme is the internet generation’s version of sketching at the museum. In the future, Warhol predicted, we’ll all have our 15 minutes of fame. But now that everyone can become famous, we need new metrics for lasting fame and success. For the art world, becoming a meme might just be one of those metrics. After all, living on in people’s Photoshop queues and social media ensures that an artist’s name echoes throughout eternity… or at least the Twittersphere. - hyperallergic **
What is a ruin after all? It is a human construction abandoned to nature, and one to the allures of ruins in the city is that of wilderness: a place full of the promise of the unknown with all its epiphanies and dangers. Rebecca Solnit A field guide to getting lost
One might easily surmise that photography has of late inherited a major role as an undertaker, summariser or accountant. It turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened totting up the effects of the world’s activity. This is a kind of photograph that foregoes the representation of events in progress and so cedes them to other media. As a result it is quite different from the spontaneous snapshot and has a different relation to memory and to history. - David Campany
It was a picture editor’s nightmare. Fortunately, a small committee of Winogrand’s friends, headed by John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art, obtained corporate grants to have all of this film developed, proofed, and sorted. Then they spent months laboriously examining the proof sheets, searching for images that seemed to reflect Winogrand’s controversial style. They chose 25 pictures to accompany a retrospective of Winogrand’s life work that was exhibited at MOMA and later published as a book (Winogrand: Figments From the Real World). - Tom R. Halfhill
If one observes the movements of a human being in possession of a camera (or of a camera in possession of a human being), the impression given is of someone lying in wait. This is the ancient act of stalking which goes back to the palaeolithic hunter in the tundra. Yet photographers are not pursuing their game in the open savanna but in the jungle of cultural objects, and their tracks can be traced through this artificial forest. The acts of resistance on the part of culture, the cultural conditionality of things, can be seen in the act of photography, and this can, in theory, be read off from photographs themselves.
- Vilém
Flusser, Towards a philosophy of photography, page 33
“…Julia Dolan, the Portland Art Museum’s photography curator, says digital technology may have many more people taking pictures but that doesn’t change what constitutes a photographer or a good photograph. “It’s an issue of intention,” says Dolan. “That’s what separates us from Robert Frank. I can make a grocery list, for example, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning poem." Dolan also thinks it’s a tad grandiose to assume this is photography’s democratic era. "Photography has always been available to the masses,” she says. “That was true way back even in the 19th century. Digital technology has just amplified that perception and added new abilities for us." Intention, as Dolan meant it, suggests a few things: a knowledge of photographic technique and composition, and also photographic history. That means the best pictures have a larger design behind them, a skill that often eludes amateurs…
…Or maybe his stark reproach is a reminder that feast and famine can be partners in this profligate photographic heyday. Frank, now 87, continues to keep his artistic intentions lean and hungry by pushing back against the legacy that has defined photographic practice for 50 years.
For the millions of us with smartphones and little pocket cameras, he still has much to show us.”
People talk about photography being a universal language but really it’s not; it’s multiple languages. The dialogues you can have with neuroscientists about photographic images are as interesting and as provocative as the dialogues you can have with artists. People have wildly different contexts in which they use photographs — different criteria for assessing them, reasons for taking them, priorities when looking at and evaluating them. It creates incredible possibilities for dialogue when you realize the medium is so flexible and so useful. - Martin Heiferman
Numbered consecutively, a SITUATION may last a few hours, or two months, and might be photographic imagery, a film, a text, an on-line interview, a screenshot, a photo-book presentation, a projection, a Skype lecture, a performance etc. It might take place in Winterthur or perhaps in São Paulo or Berlin and be streamed on our website. The idea is to construct a constantly growing archive of SITUATIONS, reframing the idea of exhibition in relation to new technologies and both our local and global audiences. fotomuseum.ch
A photograph is one second. It’s just the middle of a bigger story. They’re silent. They can’t provide those answers. That’s the most amazing, powerful quality of a picture. It lets the viewer get behind the wheel and have their own interpretations. - Curran Hatleberg via the Slate
“The object of art is to make the reader or viewer or listener aware of what he knows but doesn’t know that he knows… And this is doubly true of photography, because the photographer is making the viewer aware of what he is actually seeing and yet at the same time not seeing.” -William S. Burroughs **http://www.obscuraweb.org/essays/real-really-sacred-world-part-3**
Many people of the era argued that giving attention to the patterns built from such scraps was a waste of time. This was especially pronounced, they argued, when true beauty was all around. All a kaleidoscope viewer had to do was put down the instrument of false beauty and look up at real beauty in nature. Such admonitions could have easily been lifted directly from recent op-eds on our society’s use of cell phones Atlas Obscura
I can get out of the car and stand by the edge of the highway and take a picture that looks like a totally natural landscape, untouched by the hand of man. I could move back six inches and include the guardrail in the picture and the meaning of the picture changes dramatically. There is a marginal point where I can stand here and it’s one picture or I can stand there and it’s a different picture. And this decision, of what is the meaning of what’s in the rectangle is entirely my decision. It sounds wrong, because I didn’t create the landscape, but that decision so drastically alters the meaning that the weight of the decision becomes very interesting Stephen Shore
An Uncommon Interview with Stephen Shore (2007)
The Lost City Who hasn’t been compelled to peer down dark alleyways, what do they expect to find, why isn’t the cacophony of the city enough to keep people on the main street?
All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare Benedict Spinoza 1632-1701
Photojournalism has become a hybrid enterprise of amateurs and professionals, along with surveillance cameras, Google Street Views, and other sources. What is underrepresented are those “meta-photographers” who can make sense of the billions of images being made and can provide context and authenticate them. We need curators to filter this overabundance more than we need new legions of photographers. - MotherJones **http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/07/bending-the-frame-fred-ritchin-photojournalism-instagram**
Tellingly, neither Falls’s fades nor Laric’s videos fit comfortably in the traditional category of “photography,” an assessment that could be made about many of the best works in the show. This, of course, is to the curators’ credit, but it raises a serious question for ICP and institutions like it around the world: with the medium chafing against its historical constraints and its boundaries becoming increasingly blurred, isn’t it time, once and for all, to tear down the barriers that have kept photography from expanding its territory? In short: is the “photography museum” necessary?
Defining “real photography” is inescapably hard, there’s no single reality. Context shapes everything. As much as many have perceived photography as the objective record, it’s always thrived as a subjective interpretation. The photographer matters. Viewpoint matters. Context matters. Ten photographers take ten portraits of the same person at the same time, and what do you get? Ten portraits, ten viewpoints, ten interpretations. The people behind the camera matter as much, or more, than the people in front. - TAYLOR DAVIDSON
Nazarov cited the example of this photograph of a Syrian child drowned off the Turkish coast. The image was widely shared on social networks last September, but the discourse around this sharing was fractured and if often lacked the context provided by the articles in which it originally appeared. “When a network is ignorant about what it’s sharing, ignorance becomes a network effect,” said Nazarov. “Creators cannot derive value from the spread of their works, because it is impossible to discover their identity. Consumers are disenfranchised, because they cannot have rich interactions with the media or its author.” - ICP
The photographic present is now clearly digital, the digital image has become a networked image, and photographic practice has shifted from primarily being a print‐oriented to a transmission‐oriented, screen‐based experience. The photograph now occupies the same space as the video game, the film trailer, the newspaper and the artwork in a virtual museum. It becomes part of an endless stream of data.
Photography has had more lives than a lucky cat, each with its own convoluted story. It has had many deaths, too. For over a century, the medium’s demise has been announced regularly. The first challenger was cinema and then came television, the electronic image and most recently the internet. Yet photography has been nothing if not resilient and adaptable. Its essence does not reside in any particular technology or in any particular social function. Indeed the argument still rages as to whether there is an essence at all, or just a loose shifting affiliation of characteristics. David Campnay
…the story of the invention of photography has become the stable platform on which all the medium’s many subsequent manifestations are presumed to be founded. (To paraphrase Jacques Derrida, photography’s historians have a vested interest in moving as quickly as possible from the troubling philosophical question, “What is photography?” to the safe and expository one, “Where and when did photography begin?”)
At the same time, the circumstances of photography’s invention are commonly used to establish the medium’s continuity with a linear development of Western practices of representation reaching back to, inevitably, the Renaissance. Any questioning of photography’s beginnings therefore also represents a questioning of the trajectory of photography’s history as a whole.
Batchen Geoffrey; Each Wild Idea : Writing, Photography, History ISBN 9780262523240
Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press
Associated with, and Informing the diverse current practices of photography, is a growing cultural shift towards a conception of the Internet as a platform for sharing and collaboration. The emergence of the photo-sharing platform (eg., Flickr) means that the photographs of millions of individuals are now contained within online databases connected to each other by hyperlink, tag, or search term; streams of visual data dissociated from their origins and only by semantic tags and placed in a pool with other images that share similar metadata.By giving up the attributes of a photograph as a unique, singular and intentional presence, the networked snapshot is becoming difficult to comprehend with the conceptual tools of visual literacy and photographic theory. https://lightpaths.net/group/
Batchen combines Foucault and Derrida to argue that photography, like writing, is more than an inconsequential medium. Photography is, by definition, the writing of light. It is a paradox, a “message without a code” in which both nature and culture are directly implicated in a mutual play of power dynamics. Batchen advances the notion of “photopower” to reinvest photography with the value it lost to positivist aesthetics. Jorge Lopez
When i first was initiated into photography, early 90’s let’s say, during the last legs of the darkoom, though nobody quite understood that yet, the talk [and i was brought up in a real west coast mystical tradition rather than an east coast street style] the talk was all about learning to really see and by extension, through one’s photographs, teaching other people how to see. you know, people don’t really see; a photographer is a seer. these days though the prevailing dogma is that the photographer is like a curator; a photographer shows people what’s worth seeing rather than learning to see for themselves. - James Luckett, Galata Bridge (via photographsonthebrain )
Sternfeld speaks of a new grammar of photography, as it shifts from a "privileged discrete act to something more continuous and and generic. Daniel Palmer; iPhone Photography Mediating Visions of Social Space. pg 92, Studying Mobile Media Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone. ISBN 978-041574-829-1
In fact, photography itself begins to split into two entirely different beasts: the networked image laden with metadata but possibly lower pixel density, and the silver gelatin print, a static, hidden artifact of high visual value. Craig Mod
I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.’ Let me get this straight, I say, astonished: each image he has produced is the result of one single shot? He nods. And what happens, I ask, if you don’t get the picture you want in that one shot? ‘Then I don’t get it,’ he answers simply. 'I don’t really worry if it works out or not.
I figure it’s not worth worrying about. There’s always another picture.’ He makes his genius sound almost accidental, I suggest. He thinks about this for a while. 'Yes,’ he nods, smiling. 'There’s probably something to that. The “almost” is important, though.’ William Eggleston **http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/jul/25/photography1**
Is it a search driven by desire or fear, and how much of a struggle it must be for some, not to take that first tentative step into the arduous journey, destination unknown. Stuart Murdoch 1991
[P]hotographs are not, as it is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other sights...Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our way of seeing (Berger, 1984:0910) “Ways of Seeing”
There are too many images, too many cameras now. We’re all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It’s just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art anymore. Maybe it never was. ~ Robert Frank
Like the bombsites of yore, London’s construction sites are rapidly ringed with hoardings to keep the curious at bay. Yet developers are rarely people to pass up an opportunity for self-promotion, and rather than leaving these hoardings bare they plaster them with computer rendered imagery visualising what the structures taking form behind them might eventually become. These images are easily dismissed by someone steaming past as simply another part of the artless visual muzak that makes up the background of any large city. But like other parts of that banal patchwork, the imagined images which ring London’s development sites reward a closer reading, as an example of Capitalist Realism which perhaps says much about the way developers and the assorted architects, engineers, town planners and contractors who are their adjutants, want us to believe (and perhaps even want to believe themselves) about the developments they are building. http://www.disphotic.com/capital-realism-art-photography-and-gentrification/
Every subsequent century has brought with it some innovation that increases the availability of images, culminating, of course, in the invention of photography and the recent digital revolution (the ultimate auratic meltdown, in Benjaminian terms). https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/web-prints-62813/
“...capture fascinating moments in time: a gesture, expression, or composition that may exist for only a fraction of a second, but can leave a lasting impression of the wonders, challenges, and absurdities of modern life”
22 Quotes By Photographer Minor White - John Paul Caponigro
Ultimately, specificity is part of photography’s subversiveness; a photograph can never really be allegorical. You’re you, and your pictures are yours, and what you bring to a photograph is not separate from it. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/your-camera-roll-contains-a-masterpiece
The buildings themselves, rather than much loved landmarks on the horizons, often become empty totems to greed, social cleansing, a creeping global monoculture, and an utterly illusory performance of transparency, which ends in the complex off-shore tax structures employed by so many developers in order to avoid paying even minimal taxes in the jurisdiction where they make their profits. http://www.disphotic.com/capital-realism-art-photography-and-gentrification/
Photographs of nude bodies, however, naturist or otherwise, can serve a range of purposes and, like all photographs, they are open to a wide range of readings and meanings, reinterpretations and reuse. Photographers and publishers may argue for the value of full-frontal nudes to communicate health, artistry and freedom, but even photographs produced for non-sexual communication can serve sexual ends. Annebella Pollen University of Brighton https://theconversation.com/pubic-hair-nudism-and-the-censor-the-story-of-the-photographic-battle-to-depict-the-naked-body-171236
Pioneering photographers like Hurley and Hine were pushing against inferior technology to produce technically exquisite images, but the camera technology of today means the real skill and the real statement sometimes lies in taking a wilfully ‘bad’ image. Lewis Bush, 2018, huckmag.com