There’s a lot of talk how making photographs has become so much harder given the state of things, given there are cameras everywhere. But then, if you are complaining about that – doesn’t that show the limitations of your own creativity? What can you photograph when every picture has already been taken? Well – isn’t it liberating to know that every photograph has been taking already, so now you can really take your photographs?
Photography could be the first medium to move forward because it has made itself obsolete
Previous post: The Daily Edit – Thursday
6.14.12
{ 15 comments }
The writer identifies the source of problem himself: “…[M]aybe this is just me not being familiar enough with other art forms…” That’s pretty much the issue with photography moving forward as an art form. The “conservatism” he talks about is really just photographers’ isolation from other visual arts.
As photographers continue to study and practice in other areas (painting, graphic arts, etc) and vice versa, photography will continue to evolve. Anyone learning any visual art form really needs to spend time drawing and painting and sculpting. Those things aren’t about charcoal and paints and clay really at all, but about learning how to see (and how others in the past have seen and interpreted what they’ve seen).
“The one thing that seems unique to photography (maybe this is just me not being familiar enough with other art forms) is that its practitioners for the most part are incredibly conservative as far as the medium is concerned. So I could have also asked whether photography will survive the conservatism the vast majority of its own practitioners have come to embrace. I currently doubt it will. To use jazz again, with its current wave of nostalgia photography is at risk of becoming the Dixieland of the visual arts.” – Joerg Colberg, “Photography After Photography? (A Provocation)” http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/extended/archives/photography_after_photography/
I agree about the conservatism part – and the currently popular opposite face of that coin – banal imagery tarted up with blindly used HDR tone mapping processes which over- amplify colors and color contrast. You know the look – it’s the visual equivalent of putting BBQ sauce on everything that goes into your mouth.
I am not worried about “the state of photography” or “where photography is going”. I don’t any of us as individuals should be either.
A photographer, even one who does it strictly for money, should always have an ultimate goal for their work. My goal is to make the photographs that feel the most honest to me, so I strive at doing that even for my advertising clients. Your goal may be something different. What ever it is, just do the work of being true to yourself.
Yesterday’ s reaction shapes today’s action
As long as people want things, companies will make new things. And we will shoot those new things. You just can’t be average at photography anymore if you want to work.
I don’t think he was talking about commercial photography.
I wonder if Colberg is just expressing his own frustration, his desperate need for the new in a world that eats new things in one second flat before spitting them out. Or his own struggle with creativity… it is not easy.
I think he does to much talking and not enough doing. It’s possible to be nostalgic and new, its possible to take grainy black and white pictures and be new, you can use an app or not – one thing we know, the magic when it strikes cannot be explained, but we’ll feel it. Greatness is might be slow in coming, impatience is easy. Problems are easily spotted, not so easily rectified. His ‘fear’ of conservationism demands something radical that he thinks he hasn’t seen before. But art is always replaying the same themes and it is possible to tell a story in an old way and still have it be interesting.
I think Colberg suffers from what our society in general suffers from, internet overload, desire to consume the next new thing and the dissatisfaction/emptiness that comes with it.
Take your camera out and go take some photos.
While I agree with a lot of what Colberg is saying, I think he’s a bit too focused on a particular kind of art photography, i.e. the one that’s hung on the wall and displayed in galleries. But let’s look at another area of art photography like e.g. photo books. If we liken the photo book to other sorts of books (e.g. novels) we can see how photography might proceed without having to reinvent itself. Writers are deeply shaped by the history of literature yet they don’t necessarily have to fundamentally reinvent language in order to make meaningful work that is new. I don’t want to say at all that a photo book is the same as a novel but I think we all agree that a photo book can be read in a certain way.
I’m so bored with the “We’ve seen it all before” so-called “critique”. It is arrogant, lazy and more banal than a thousand Flickr streams. Who can claim to have seen it all, let alone comprehend it all? Who seriously thinks they have some kind of elevated, privileged perspective of the explosive, ceaseless activity in all zones of photography at this particular moment? Just using the word “photography” in this way, as if its eleven letters can somehow account for the multiplicity of the medium in the contemporary world is absurd. Ultimately it serves only to betray the narrow-minded and jaded perspective of those that subscribe to this hollow point of view.
Thankfully, photography itself is indifferent to our petty opinions about it and what we believe it should or shouldn’t be doing, now or in the future. It will continue to progress and evolve – most true progress will go unrecognized in its own time – despite people making the exact same claims that are regurgitated in this rant at regular intervals over the past 150 or so years.
Nice!
“There’s a lot of talk how making photographs has become so much harder given the state of things, given there are cameras everywhere.”
Is this a typo? Making photographs is much easier than it ever has been. Making money from taking photos of course, is harder than ever (and making great photographs might be harder).
He is saying that making “meaningful” photos is harder because “all the photos are already taken”, but that is not his theory, he is being rhetorical, if it is “all done”, maybe we can move the medium forward. This is his point.
I enjoy photography much more now since slashing the twitter blabberers who go on about the same nonsense… I’ll take the approach of discovery through stumbling across things, over the desperate din of clicks and chatter.
More photography taking place.. with far less thinking about photography.
Nostalgia? You mean like for Van Deren Coke’s work or maybe Lucio Fontana’s paintings? I don’t see how being nostalgic doesn’t apply to JC’s choices of Marco Breuer and Matthew Brandt. I think it’s all nostalgia. When you don’t see what thrills you or are confused about your perception of art you have to try connect to happy minded thoughts to be satisfied, appeased or otherwise make yourself “comfortable”, not negative ones. We’d much rather fill our cups with happy than sad. I think he was also taking a swipe at Alex Soth’s last rant.
I think it’s easier to move forward and be creative when there are less possibilities, and less choice because there is more direction. Why not find direction for going forward by studying and implementing ideas and concepts from the past ?
What he is writing about sounds like a first year art student’s dilemma of finding out you’re not as original as you might have thought.
“I think it’s easier to move forward and be creative when there are less possibilities, and less choice because there is more direction. Why not find direction for going forward by studying and implementing ideas and concepts from the past ?” Amen.
If the art scene does not stop to promote visual garbage and photographers producing weak work under a name they have established ( I mean have you seen Martin Parr’s diner photo with the ladies?) photography will not evolve, period. What I question is the selection of work curators follow and what is the procedure. Making photos is easier than ever? This is where the problem starts.
And to add. If all these people writing blogs in the thousands would stop and go cover the world (yes the real world! It actually exists) we wouldn’t be dealing with photoshop images and people photographing their families, boyfriends/girlfriends, etc. And no, I don’t want to see your fictional story on drug addiction. I want you to go out and show me the drag addict’s life. That is, if you have time from checking the news update on digital photography and posting on your blog.
Comments on this entry are closed.