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June 14, 2012
Joerg Colberg's post in Conscientious entitled Photography After Photography? (A Provocation) claims that photography has finally arrived at its own existential crisis. He defines it thus:
photography has long been running in a circle. Over the past ten years, it has increasingly become dominated by nostalgia and conservatism...Even the idea that we now need editors or curators to create meaning out of the flood of photographs ultimately is conservative, looking backwards when we could, no we should be looking forward. Who - or what - can move photography forward, looking forward?
His explanation for this crisis is that it is digital photography that has resulted in the current stasis of the medium running in circles. He refers to digital pictures created on “smart” phones, using “apps” - fake analog images. He adds that the digital world falls crucially short here, for more reasons than one.
First, there really is nothing at stake. There is no artistry here other than the application of some software filter that in a very deterministic way makes your new digital photograph look old. So there is no chance. Art without a trace of chance, a trace of an accident isn’t art. No artistic risk, not art (just ask William Wegman’s dog). What is more, it’s deeply reactionary, but in an uncommitted way. You could, for example, buy a real old camera and stuff film into it, to create your genuine old-timey photographs, but that effort isn’t even made. It’s a pointless nostalgia, where you’re yearning for just that one aspect of the past without all the rest. In contrast, Breuer and Brandt really break down their images. It’s real, there is no going back.
Colberg's account of photography's existential crisis is that its practitioners for the most part are incredibly conservative as far as the medium is concerned. He says that to use jazz again, with its current wave of nostalgia photography is at risk of becoming the Dixieland of the visual arts.
Photography as an art form needs to evolve, otherwise, there’s stasis, and stasis in art is death. So the question is: will photography survive the conservatism the vast majority of its own practitioners have come to embrace?
I concur with Colberg's argument that there is a strong current of conservatism in contemporary photographic culture. His account highlights photographers using archives, photographers using google street view, and photographers using nostalgic filters on their phones. However, we need to include both the fetish on digital technology, camera and lenses at the expense of the picture itself, the marked unwillingness in photographic culture to address aesthetic issues, and the way the traditional publishing, curating and gallery level. This is especially the case in Australia where these institutions have basically turned their back on the work being published on the web, even when it is of high quality. They are content to exhibit the same old people year in and out.
One pathway out of the institutional stasis is the Flak Photo Collection which is a digital archive of contemporary photography and the 100 Portraits exhibition that was selected from the digital archive of Flak Photo. The pathway is digital media, which is transforming photography so that it can flourish outside the constraints of traditional publication and exhibition. This pathway recognizes that photography is no longer restricted to the gallery wall or the printed page and that photography now regularly—and sometimes exclusively—appears onscreen.
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