Photography After Photography? (A Provocation)

Also, kind request. Could everyone site examples of what one means. Actual images or pictures to illustrate a point or opinion. Then I'm sure something is not getting lost in translation and that I get your argument completely.
 
To me, for example, everything is a photograph. The surface of a piece of paper is constantly being bombarded by light and is capturing it, absorbing minute quantities of it in the process. Some minute part of the structure of all surfaces are constantly being rearranged when light hits it. Film was sensitive enough to capture the changes in light and make it visible to humans. But everything around us is taking photographs all the time. We just don't have the technology to extract information from those surfaces yet. So not only is every 'surface' a photographer, they are (it is) a far more persistent and involved a photographer than anyone with a camera.
So that leaves us with the 'act' of pressing a shutter release. Which if we look at critically, in its simplest form, is a tool for communication. Communication with either one's future self, or to other people as a shared experience.

I think you are leading yourself up the garden path Boid.

It simply doesn't make much sense to say "every surface is a photographer" , because the intentionality of the photographer is missing from a surface; "photography " (or we can substitute "painting" or "writing") is an activity undertaken, largely by humans, by people.

"just the act of pressing a shutter release" is simplisticly reductionistic (or mechanistic) ... you take photographs Boid, (I've seen them!) ... did you "just" press the shutter? ... no you didn't ... you looked, envisioned, thought, felt, acted ...

saying "everything is photography" removes the meaning from the very idea of photography ... it kills it more surely than nostalgia ever could ... you could equally say "everything is cheese" and it wouldn't be any more true (or false, come to that)
 
I think you are leading yourself up the garden path Boid.

It simply doesn't make much sense to say "every surface is a photographer" , because the intentionality of the photographer is missing from a surface; "photography " (or we can substitute "painting" or "writing") is an activity undertaken, largely by humans, by people.

"just the act of pressing a shutter release" is simplisticly reductionistic (or mechanistic) ... you take photographs Boid, (I've seen them!) ... did you "just" press the shutter? ... no you didn't ... you looked, envisioned, thought, felt, acted ...

saying "everything is photography" removes the meaning from the very idea of photography ... it kills it more surely than nostalgia ever could ... you could equally say "everything is cheese" and it wouldn't be any more true (or false, come to that)

I'm just envisaging a time when Google Glasses meets the RED Camera with a Lytro sensor and unlimited cheap storage. Then one'll be photographing constantly and grabbing hi-res screen grabs of what one saw through the day later at the computer. To be a better photographer, one would have to shoot interesting subjects. Which means better photographers would need to have more interesting lives! I really do not want to go to Bosnia.
 
I tend to disagree with the author about what photography is or should be. I personally don't think that photography is an art. I see it as a medium for documentary with an artistic bent. More discovery than creativity. A photograph always begins as an illustration of the real world. If every modern photograph is boring then we're all in trouble because it means the world gotten boring as well. I think that the best way to futureproof photography is to recognise it's value as a means to record history.
 
I tend to disagree with the author about what photography is or should be. I personally don't think that photography is an art. I see it as a medium for documentary with an artistic bent. More discovery than creativity. A photograph always begins as an illustration of the real world. If every modern photograph is boring then we're all in trouble because it means the world gotten boring as well. I think that the best way to futureproof photography is to recognise it's value as a means to record history.

Maybe the photographer lies to you and only shows you a stilted stylized version of 'history' the way he sees it? I think photography is probably the worst medium to record history because of the limitation of the medium itself. Too one dimensional, and too narrow, only being able to portray one story at a time. I love examples, so here's what I mean, take a look at this next picture. It's one of the world's iconic images of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a handcuffed prisoner -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nguyen.jpg

Here's what the photographer, Eddie Adams, had to say about the pic -

"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths ... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?"
 
I'm just envisaging a time when Google Glasses meets the RED Camera with a Lytro sensor and unlimited cheap storage. Then one'll be photographing constantly and grabbing hi-res screen grabs of what one saw through the day later at the computer. To be a better photographer, one would have to shoot interesting subjects. Which means better photographers would need to have more interesting lives! I really do not want to go to Bosnia.

I can think of nothing that would motivate and engage me less, either as a participant or as a consumer. I take the approach of a gourmet, not a gourmand. If the buffet approach was the sine qua non of fine dining then every Michelin-starred restaurant would be "all you can eat"... I fish with a rod, not a net, I hunt with a small-bore rifle not a pump-action shotgun...
 
I tend to disagree with the author about what photography is or should be. I personally don't think that photography is an art. I see it as a medium for documentary with an artistic bent. More discovery than creativity. A photograph always begins as an illustration of the real world. If every modern photograph is boring then we're all in trouble because it means the world gotten boring as well. I think that the best way to futureproof photography is to recognise it's value as a means to record history.

I think that is far too limiting. In regards to my family snapshots, sure, it records history. But outside of that I want to go further, even more so nowadays. If I had more time there is a lot I would love to do, much of it using the photographs as only one component in a work. Here is one example... while my kids were very young and rather sloppy at mealtime I had this idea to print "beautiful" pictures that I had taken and then use them as placemats for their sloppy meals, and write the meal and the date on the print. Purely conceptual, and arguably purely documentary (what was for dinner that day...). But far more than just that. Some might say that well in that case the "work" is no longer photography and outside of the scope of photographic discussion. But for me it is photography and photography is central to the work.

To quote Joerg, "Painting erupted once its burden of depiction was lifted." Beyond depiction, you have abstract expressionism, modernism and post modernism (and beyond). He's asking, where are those forms of photography today, where is the "new" that builds on what came before and moves into new territory? It could be argued that painting was and is also a form of documentation, but with far more variety and form. So why not push the boundaries of photography?

Photography is both documentary and art, and between those two poles lie a range of personal perspectives and desires. I enjoy and appreciate the full range.
 
Photographs don't just happen because you make them so; the image has to exist in real life and in the properties of how light travels through a lens. You can create something specifically for the purpose of photographing it, but the act of taking the photograph is just the documentation of that. The analogy to painting doesn't really hold up because that is a medium that comes directly from the human brain. It can be used to create images of real life but isn't fundamentally limited to that.
 
Nic, a photograph does not exist independently of the viewer, of his or her social, emotional, psychological, physiological, neurological (etc) context, or indeed that of the photographer who made the photograph.
there's a mistake in thinking that because a photograph is usually recognisable as an apparent representation of objects in the world, that it represents a true reflection of "reality".
and this is all without even wondering about how all those strings and things of quantum physics manage to be tables and chairs ...

When I look at an object, my eye contains a lens too ... the process of a few photons turning into an image that I "see" is unimaginably complex ...

when we take a photograph of an object, the process of lens/sensor (film)/ software (chemicals)/printing (displaying on vdu) is also extremely complex ... and then the result has to be viewed by the human, which adds all that complexity ...

when I look at one of your images from Brisbane or Sydney or of your wife, these have no reality for me; they provide no documentary evidence of anything to me without the words (tags titles exif whatever) that accompany them; if I had never seen a photograph before, could not read - if I were in the position of an alien - I might make many assumptions or guesses about what I was looking at without ever coming to the conclusion that this was a representation of a place at a particular time ...

there is the assumption that photographs and photography have some sort of special status that painting for instance doesn't have, that it has a peculiar special access to "reality" that no other medium possesses ... and yet the processes involved in producing a photographic representation, say, of a chair are no less complex, and involves just as much interpretation as a painting produced by a painter does.
 
Is it really just documentation? Is not my choice of camera, lens, form of film or digital or color or B&W to mean that it is already more than documentation of a picture? Not to mention what one can do with the image in processing. I recently shot a roll of HP5 and a roll of Tri-X of the same scenes and I got two very different results. I did the same thing with two different 50mm lenses and got the same thing. Even beginning with my choice of medium or the lens that the travels through pre-interprets the scene to an extent.

I think that Joerg would state that - yes - a photo is at its most fundamental level documentation. But beyond that it can be much more, and that is what he is addressing. How to take that basic documentation and do something more with it, something different, something unique. Something that we've not seen yet in the medium of photography. Even what we choose to document can do that.

Some of the photography that I love the most is "interpreted" from the outset - Polaroids from imperfect cameras, pinholes, photos taken on on expired B&W positive paper. It might be "documentation" but hardly in an accurate sense. Painting with light, if you will.
 
Isn't a camera a blank canvas? It is a box that excludes light until you allow it to enter in a controlled burst at the moment you choose to and in a manner of your choice. A blank canvas will remain blank, a rock will remain a rock, a piece of wood remain a piece of wood without human intervention to fashion it or to carve it or to layer it with powder or liquid etc. I know that so called real artists are sometimes very snooty about johnny come lately photography not being real art, then try to bamboozle us with explanations about how their tin of human waste is a metaphor for.......for......for what? Anyone can s@&t in a can, any one can press the button to allow the light to flood in. Which is most radical? Most different? Mondrian used to do proper painting before he started doing the square stuff. Was that an easy cop out? Let's just do coloured squares, metaphorise it......easier than trying to capture the right light, the expression, the textures of a person or scene on canvas. Does doing squares mean that art has escaped the shackles of art? It's all just mincing words in faux intellectualism by those trying to exclude people like me? I walked past half the exhibits at the Guggenheim tutting to myself. I was more interested in the expressions of those trying to fathom out the explanation behind the kiss of the rhinocerous exhibit, trying to appear erudite and understanding in a nodding acceptance of what they had been told. Duchamp's urinal? The cutting edge of 20th century avant garde? I think he was just taking the p?ss
 
I don't know what "proper painting"is ... is it like "proper photography"?

I would think that an artist who puts "sh!t in a can" might be making a very similar point to you Peter, when you capture and then publish that image of the guy in the street in (Hoxton or Dalston or wherever)
 
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