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July 14, 2011
I never see the print edition of European Photography here in Adelaide and I cannot afford to subscribe to it. Thanks to the internet I can access some of the archived material online just as I can with net photography. We are increasingly seeing photography produced for the prime aim of being presented and viewed on the Internet--net photography.
Andreas Müller-Pohle says that museum or gallery photography marks the highpoint in what is known as “fine art photography”. This
had set out to free photography of all sorts of ideologies (such as dogmatic documentarism) and broaden its aesthetic agenda or program. At some point in the 1990s however, that progressive impulse languished in aesthetic redundancy: it had all been done before. For aesthetic programs exhaust their potential if no new terrain is being opened by technical innovations. And as fine art photography had no other agenda but an aesthetic one, its decadence, its drift into the sleek and the decorative, was inevitable.
Photography on the net expands the classical discourse, that one-way communication, with myriad interfaces, for now everyone can play along, everyone has a chance to be seen, and what is more, everyone can vote and be voted on. Local examples include the Melboune based Altfotonet.org and Urban Photo Magazine
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