Mandy Martin, Puritjarra 2, 2005. For further information on MANDY MARTIN, refer here: http://www.mandy-martin.com/
If there are diverse kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing place, then we need to learn to value the different ways each of us sees a single place that is significant, but differently so, for each perspective.
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looking for something firm in a world of chaotic flux
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the end of art photography?
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May 05, 2006
Sebastian Smee, the well-known visual arts writer and critic for The Australian, says that photography's grip on the public imagination is in decline. Or more speficially photography as an art form is on the wane and that it's losing its grip on the public imagination. I'll spell it out as the article will go off line.
Smee says that photography has finally become just another way of making images.That's partly because of the sheer number of photographic images that surround us, many of which we take ourselves, digitally, and partly because the photo is losing its association with capturing reality. Smee says:
Plenty of photographs appear in survey shows of contemporary art. But for the most part, that the medium is photography is incidental. All the strange idiosyncrasies that once made photography so beguiling are breezily ignored by most of today's photographic artists (as they are called). Instead, the camera is used as a device simply to record or illustrate something else (be it an idea, a fantasy or a thin slice of reality).
So photography's hard-won victory - its gradual acceptance as an art form during the course of more than a century - turns out to have been a pyrrhic one. The medium's special aptitudes, described but never quite pinned down by astute practitioners and critics in 150 years, no longer seem quite so special. Instead, photography has become ubiquitous, frictionless and trivial.
What backs up the claim?
Smee says that:
It was a conviction that photography's great purpose was to record historical truth. Thus the documentary, or realist, strain of photography has always been strong. In recent years, it has enjoyed something of a revival in the art world, which occasionally grows ashamed of its navel-gazing tendencies and looks to photography to reconnect it with the outside world. But in terms of the culture at large it is a faux revival. In truth, the status of documentary photography, or photojournalism, has been slowly draining away since its golden era in the 1970s. To compensate, some of the best photojournalism has shifted sideways into a cultural arena it previously spurned: the art world.
I cannot see why photography can be both documentary photography and art photography as opposed to one or the other. But Smee plays off the oppostion:
Sadly, this awkward new context has only added to the insecurities of the great photojournalists. Displayed in art galleries, their work tends to meet with popular, but rarely critical, success. Their claims to represent objective truth inflected with moral urgency have been thrown into doubt by critics and philosophers of the image. [the Brazilian Sebastiao] Salgado, for instance, has been repeatedly accused of falsifying and even betraying his subjects by making images of trauma and destruction too artful, too beautiful.
In contrast to Smee's claim that photography's strength is to record historical truth, I would argue that photography is an interpretation of reality, with the interpreting starting with the photographer's choice of what's included in or left out of the frame. Photography probably only won recognition as an artistic medium when it moved beyond merely attempting to depict reality.
Smee says that photography today has been thrown back on itself and the question of what it must do to retain interest as art is once again freshly alive.
The problem is that, thanks to the digital revolution, the frisson of excitement that used to accompany photographs (the knowledge that the image was evidence for something real, a trace of something that happened) is slowly disappearing. It's not as if photographers haven't been involved in fabrications and manipulations since the outset. The early days of the medium were full of trickery and theatre, cases of day being turned into night just to suit the photographer's purposes. But today the whole context has shifted: the layers of artifice seem unending and the thread connecting photography to the real has been snapped.
I would have thought that the digital revolution has given an energy boost to photography.
Smee concludes on an upbeat note:
There are photographers who are still making great art. Henson is one of them; so are American Sally Mann and New York-based British photographer Adam Fuss. What they seem to have in common is an acute sensitivity to the medium's inherent aptitudes, its original, fragile relation to reality. The liberties they take can be breathtaking: artificial staging, deliberate obscuring and ghostly distortion of the image. But somehow (primarily by resisting the siren call of digital manipulation) they manage to hang on to photography's precarious connection to reality.
There 's the argument.
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I am generally very impressed with the postings here at Junk for Code, and so took the inclusion of Smee's piece as a signifier to it's importance. I don't want to whore out my own blog, but I've written a critical review of his article at Surviving Image fatigue, and couldn't find a direct email to our gracious Junk-for-Code author, Gary.
Having not been attached to the Aussie Arts grapevine for long, I had not heard of Sebastien Smee, but I'm sure his position makes the subject of his article more important than its content.