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November 9, 2008
Martin Parr gave a talk in association with the We are all Photographers Now exhibition put on by the Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland in 2007.
The show is a survey of trends in digital photography, particularly portraiture, and how technology is changing the genre. Parr was bought in to contribute to the debate about the significance and meaning of the democratization of image making, due to more people now possessing the means to make and show images more of the time.
The characteristics of the new age of digital imagery are distribution, combination and manipulation, and the exhibition explores the way the amateur and the professional have represented distinct and often contrary approaches to photography, each battling for supremacy. It asks: Has the digital revolution tilted the field of battle irrevocably in the amateur’s favour? Or has it swept this traditional rivalry into the dustbin?
Parr, who speaks from the artistic professional perspective, says that:
I also would say that a lot of the work on Flickr is generic. It looks quite modern, because you lot are aware of trends and the language of contemporary photography....Of course I could trawl Flickr and find many outstanding images, but I am referring to the huge numbers of bland images which are in the majority. Every time I get involved in any photo competition, it is nearly always filled with tired images. Remember most people take cliches, because they believe they are connecting with good photography by replicating an image they know already.
Fair comment. The context here is that, as blogs are changing the media, so digital amateur photography (work shown on Flickr whether it is produced through film or digitally) is changing the way professional photography---both commercial and artistic---is practised. That old duality is changing and the categories of 'amateur' and 'professional' are being undermined by the flow of images. What lies in the middle ground? Can we go behind the boring cliches and the celebration of photographers as photographers that Parr highlights?
Most amateur work as exhibited on Flickr is pretty poor---as judged in kitsch in the language of a modernist aesthetics--and I include my work in that judgement. There are lots of tired, bland cliched images. It seems that it's possible to make images as unconsciously as one consumes them, bypassing the critical sense entirely. Roger Scruton, the conservative art critic wrote:
Kitsch therefore relies on codes and clichés that convert the higher emotions into a pre-digested and trouble-free form—the form that can be most easily pretended. Like processed food, kitsch avoids everything in the organism that asks for moral energy and so passes from junk to crap without an intervening spell of nourishment.
Conservative yes---but true nevertheless. However, the full story would explore the ways that digital camera has changed the various genres of photography: portraiture, landscape, street, still life etc.
Though amateur digital photography is developing its own aesthetic, which is different from the modernist one ---the work produced is hardly avant garde in the sense of being critical of the practices of photography or changing photographic language. If Parr is right then that should be the starting point of the debate of where we are trying to take our photography.
We are learning how to be photographers in a new way as we develop our own language and create our projects in a post modern world where the old cliches of representing reality have been dumped. Many of us still cling to the old modernist aesthetic understanding of photography as we recycle the cliches of past images, and work within old romantic and modernist understandings of the photographer artist.
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Sascha Pohfleppsays that the new photography is one in which:
Interesting distinction.