Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Is Photography Dead? Newsweek postulates

This is bound to get some discussions going. Big time. Read it all. It has a lot for us to think about.
Is Photography Dead? | Newsweek Entertainment | Newsweek.com:
"In the late 1970s, however, the concept of fiction in photography reared its little postmodern head. 'The big change in attitude from realist photography,' says Lawrence Miller, who owns a prominent photography gallery in New York, 'was when Metro Pictures [one of the hippest galleries in SoHo] showed Cindy Sherman in 1980.' Sherman's fictional self-portraits—fake 'film stills' with the artist posed as a negligeed blonde on a bed, or a dark-haired femme fatale in a chic apartment—weren't photography's first turn away from the straight, nonfiction reportage most people think of as great photography. But her pictures represented something new in the way that photography was considered as art. It wasn't just for reportage anymore. The Talbotian esthetic door was now fully opened for photographers to make photographs just as well as to take them. The advent of digital technology only exacerbated photography's flight into fable."

1 comment:

bmillios said...

I think it's funny that the argument is between art and reality.

We have no discussion when it comes to film - there are reality films, and there are "art" films.

What is happening technologically is that cameras are becoming closer to video, and video equipment is getting closer to the resolution of cameras.

The canon 1D Mk III at 10 fps?

New HD video cams that fit in a large pocket?

You see the gap closing.

I don't think photography is going away any time soon. I do think that photographers will need to broaden their horizons, however.

Bill