John M. Setzler, Jr.

Is Photography Dead?

Article by: Peter Plagens

Newsweek Magazine – December 10, 2007 – pages 94-96

I was browsing the current issue of the current Newsweek magazine when I stumbled across an interesting article titled “Is Photography Dead?” As a photographer, headlines like this one always catch my attention. I have seen and participated in so many debates on issues of photography that my mind immediately starts to roll with ideas of what might be found in articles like this one. The first two sentences in this article grabbed my attention…

“How is that even remotely possible? The medium certainly looks alive, well and, if anything, overpopulated.”

How could photography be dead? Is it remotely possible? It seems like everyone has a digital camera or a cell phone camera. In fact, overpopulation is an issue. The author of the article brings William Henry Fox Talbot to the table early in the article by including an 1844 Talbot photograph right under the main headline. For anyone who has studied the history of photography, we know that Talbot is really considered to be one of the fathers of modern photography. Using a Talbot photograph to launch this story creates an anchor or starting point to help describe how photography has evolved since its beginning. Modern photography, as we know it, began in 1839.

“In the 1920s, small, inexpensive fast-shutter cameras like the Kodak Brownie appeared. By 1950, according to Kodak, nearly three quarters of American families owned cameras and took 2 billion photographs with them. By the 1970s, they were taking 9 billion pictures a year, and most of them quick, informal snapshots.”

I would hate to see what these numbers look like today. The advent of digital photography makes it extremely difficult to estimate how many photos are taken annually. I’m sure a large majority of them never get printed and are only displayed on computer screens. Once the initial expenditure of a digital camera is made, it doesn’t really cost anything in terms of film and processing to make photos. Any way you try to imagine this, the numbers of photographs being made are increasing exponentially, and will continue to do so.

After reading through this Newsweek article several times, I have I keep coming back to one simple conclusion about the author. Peter Plagens, like many other viewers of photography, has his own expectations about what he’s supposed to be seeing. His pre-conceived notions about what photography is supposed to be clouds his view on what photography can be. The following quotes from the article support this evidence:

“Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can’t help but wonder if the entire medium hasn’t fractured itself beyond all recognition.”

“But it’s also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography’s artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera.”

“By now, we’ve witnessed all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers – formerly bearers of truth – into conjurers of fiction.”

“Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of the lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer’s attention as “evidence” rooted in reality.”

“The next great photographers – if there are any – will have to find a way to reclaim photography’s special link to reality. And they’ll have to do it in a brand new way.”

The repeating pattern in all of this shows Mr. Plagens’ notion of what photography should be. He believes that photography should remain a simple documentation of reality in some way or another. In fact, photography is probably one of the first artistic mediums that has been held to such standards. I’m burned out on listening to this type of commentary.

Maybe the term photography itself is subjective. That, in a way, differentiates it from other art forms as well. It’s not often that people view a painting and find themselves questioning whether or not it really is a painting. Most sculpture is fairly obvious as well. Photography isn’t so cut and dried. Maybe we don’t really know how to define photography, but we seem to know it when we see it. The line gets hard to distinguish when we start looking at photographic art. Sometimes the art may be pure and simple photography. Other times the medium may be obscured. We may be looking at some form of art that contains photography, or is loosely based in photography. How much straight-from-the-camera material must an artwork contain for it to be called photography? 51%? More? Less?

There are a couple different schools of photography that must be considered when talking about the validity of photography. Photojournalism seems to be the preferred method of the author. The purpose of photojournalism is to describe reality. Manipulations and editing of photojournalistic images doesn’t include the introduction elements that did not exist in the original image. Legal manipulations of photojournalistic images should not include modifications that change what the viewer would think of the photograph. It’s also generally unacceptable to remove any element of the image in photojournalism. You can crop an image as long as it doesn’t change the original theme or idea of the image by doing so. There are also numerous accounts in recent history of photojournalists getting caught and fired for falsifying reality through the process of image manipulation. Some of the more interesting cases of this include instances of photographers staging a scene to create a story rather than capturing life as it happens. This can be just as deceptive as digital alteration of a photograph.

Another school of photography is photographic art. Photographic art encompasses a lot of different ideas, and it is also difficult to define. When I view my own portfolio of work, I have some images that are photojournalistic in nature others that are photographic art. I have staged scenes that either mimic life or create an altered reality. I have also manipulated images in such a way that they would not be photojournalistic in nature. In my opinion, to be considered an artist, I have to inject some of myself into the final product. That injection may or may not allow the final image to remain within the realm of photojournalistic imagery. In this article, the author cited works of quite a few photographers to make his points more clear. Some of the classic great photographers such as Dorthea Lange, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank were used to illustrate the author’s idea of photo realism. On the flip side of the coin, photographers such as Andreas Gefeller, Didier Massard, Thomas Struth, and Cindy Sherman were used to illustrate the broken aspects of photography. If you should decide to Google a few of these photographer’s works, you will see the chosen line between what the author believes photography is or isn’t.

Maybe at some point in the future, viewers will learn how to look at photography. Critics shouldn’t really concern themselves with how an image came to be. Ultimately, one of two things will happen when we look at any image. We will either like it or we won’t. There is always the possibility of indifference, but if we are thinking about like or dislike of images, it’s fairly easy to classify them. If we spend too much time trying to classify images by type, we won’t really see what the artist is showing us.