…people hold onto the creaky, dusty notion of photographs as some sort of reality; this only increases the potential for complexity through the many different possible readings of work that challenges or contradicts this restrictive perception of what a photograph is or what it can do. I consider this a wonderful gift to me as an artist, or any artist making work that disregards this concern with the real.
Read more on Conscientious Extended | A Conversation with Christian Patterson.
1 Comment
To ask photography to be a precise documentation would be the same thing as to ask literature to be descriptive just because it uses words.
This would be no fun. The great thing about technical development in photography is that you can create the world more and more the way you see it.
There’s an interesting exhibition at the Annenberg Space for Photography about digital art based on photography. In a documentary, shown in the round room, you are introduced to a variety of digital artists who all do not care about what’s real and what’s not (reality is so perspective dependent that it doesn’t exist as a solid ground anyway).
As an interesting counterpoint, one of those artists still does not work with digital images, but creates his astounding image in the dark room – following Escher’s great images through the means of photography.
Painting has never seen itself to just copy the world (except in some horrible salon painting during the 19th century).
Now the photographer, through developments in digital technology, has a similar amount of freedom to create anythingthat the painter always has enjoyed.
By the way: there has never been photography that created real documents. Since the 20’s it has been altered intensively (when they removed Trotsky from all images where he was depicted with Lenin) Photography – digital or not – has always been manipulated
Now we see this as a freedom, and the only limitation is: do not disturb the world you are building in your images through technical or esthetic shortcomings.
Comments are closed for this article!