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May 25, 2010
The University of Chicago has a useful keywords glossary of media terms--eg., photography by Ali Geiger. Towards the end of the entry, there is an interesting point made by Geiger, which relies on The Art of Photography: 1839-1989. (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 1989):
The medium of photography in the twenty-first century could be seen as having four primary estates: "fine art, advertising, amateur photography, and journalism." (The Art of Photography, p.8) The function of photography differs greatly in each of these estates. However, it can be argued that, "In present photography, as the museum culture becomes ever more commercial (no longer the mere preserver but the active creator of culture), the relations between these once separate orders of photography become increasingly interdependent." (The Art of Photography, p.8) There is no longer a clear line between photography as a fine art and photography as a functional art. Today we can see many photographs that would be considered fine art in advertising and journalism.
Rather that asking questions such as "Is Photography Over?” that don't really make sense, we say that the digital revolution has undermined these separate orders of photography even further. We know think in terms of pictures or images in the sense of a mediascape of signs in both our cities and on our computer screens.
This shift to 'image' loosens up our thinking since an image attracts, deceives, imitates, resembles, replaces and animates. It is precisely this unruly behavior that renders an image so difficult to grasp. 'Image' increasingly means digital image given the way that digital technologies have shifted our viewing of image away from the art gallery wall or the photographic book to the computer or tablet screen.
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isn't that what many of the pre-digital pop artists were upto as well? Taking the commercial, pedestrian and reframing it as fine art?