Photography Does Not Exist Any More

Thesis and evidence.

_________________

Mike

Comments

[Scott]

If photography's dead, by some purist's definition, then what the heck have I been doing buying all these cameras? And where did all these pictures come from?

[Mike]

The "evidence" article is interesting — now those holiday snaps will return an idealized memory of the occasion. A dream. Like how we'd have liked our holiday to have been. If we could have afforded the "room with a view".

[Josh Hawkins]

The more digital impacts photography, the more it panics some photographers, the more I want to go look at the discussions that took place during the previous revolutions (35mm displacing medium format, Kodak Brownies, wet plate to dry, on and on that has upset the status quo.)

No, it's not the same, but I'd bet on similarities.

[Unbound]

What are the credentials of the person that wrote the original opinion?
The whole thing is based on an utterly false statement:
"Everybody can create technologically perfect images at this moment: the powerful post processing software will take care of all technical hurdles that the film-based photograph had to master."
Is there anything more fundamentally false about good photography than the statement above? Good exposures do not make good photographs, but basically that is what he is saying. Moment, composition, lighting control... never mind... it's exposure that counts.
It sounds like just another Leicaphile purist that can not accept that good photography can be done with anything but his beloved Leica rangefinder. Funny, because some of my most significant photography has been done with a pinhole lens on a cheap MF body to hold the film. And by using digital, I have been able to take photos that would have been impossible to take otherwise with 'standard' photo equipment, manipulated or not. Ever tried to take color photos on film at ISO 1600? Yuck.
The whole premise that film is better than digital just because film is harder to manipulate than digital is about as weak a defense of film as can be made.
I suspect that this same person allows printing of full frame only (that's how the photo was composed originally), and on fiber based paper only (glossy not allowed.. the world is not shiny).
If it wasn't done on film, it isn't photography.
Yeah right. Gimme a f'ing break!

[Dion]

...for certain definitions of photography...

Just not the dictionary definition.

[Craig Norris]

If we extrapolate this trend, in twenty years we'll be able to buy a camera that shoots photos in advance. That is, using this Microsoft-sponsored technological advance, you can shoot all the photos of your holiday to Greece before you actually leave home for the airport.

Another extrapolation suggests that all the images on Flickr could eventually become derivatives of each other, slowly morphing over decades to become one single image that we all took.

[Norris]

Art is to an extent a collaboration between the artist and his tools. The balance varies. Emphasize pure visualization and you get a highly controlled, rather remote presentation that I associate with Ansel Adams. Emphasize emotion and process and you get a rawer sort of art. It is the latter case where the medium has more influence. You can copy Jackson Pollock's style in Photoshop, but I don't think Pollock himself could have done so.

Photography is more amenable to pure visualization than many mediums, and digital photography more so than the wet kind. I think that someone like me, who never really felt completely in control of the process but found that things that happened in the darkroom sometimes gave results I liked but hadn't expected, is less likely to move easily from one form to the other than someone who approaches it from a purer conception-to-execution angle.

[Wolfgang Kuechle]

Thank you for another quite interesting article that makes me think about my own standpoint.

All in all, I have to object strongly to the opinion expressed in your link. In my point of view, the author falls victim to a missconception about what photography really is and about what it is not.

If I understand correctly, the author makes the following claims about what true photography is:
1) functioning according to the law of physics (interaction of photons with silver halide)
2) depends for its very existence on film
3) Is something of it's own, not just another sort of art
4) limited to an elite, not everybody can take a good picture
5) no post processing, result depends only on location, viewpoint and moment of exposure

Looking at this list, I immediately get the impression, that photography of this kind never ever existed ...

Let's have a close look at the individual statements:
Ad 1): Well, actually digital photography also depends on the laws of physics, maybe even more than traditional photography with it's dependency on chemical processes.

Ad 2): Hmm, a quite arbitrary statement and what exactly is "film"? If you look at the huge difference between the emulsions of the very early photographers who even had to produce their own kind of film with it's very own characteristics on the one side and the high-tech films of our days, they have not much in common. Some of the very early photographers did not even use silver halides and they definitely were not using "film" but glass plates and other media. Within the almost 200 years of photography the substrate for capturing the light was always in a process of change. Mostly these changes were evolutionary by slightly improving the media and making it easier to handle. The switch from film to a digital device is certainly the most revolutionary step in this chain of progress, but this doesn't make it "the end of photography"

Ad 3): That's just another arbitrary claim. What exactly is art and why should photography not be just another kind of art? It sounds like the author thinks it is degrading photography to think of it just as some other kind of art. I do not understand this point of view. For me to make art means to contribute to thousands if not millions of years of human culture. It is something that counts. Somehow you get connected to all those artists in the history of mankind, starting from the early humanoids sitting in their caves and producing their first paintings on those walls. What should be bad about counting photography as a kind of art? I don't get it.

Ad 4) Well, that's what progress is all about. For me the only sense of technological progress is to make life easier and to make usefull techniques accessible to as many people as possible. In some way this is a process of democratization. I do not think that it harms photography in any way, that making technically good pictures is getting easier and easier year by year. Looking through the vast amounts of pictures on flickr or other communities, you can easily see that there still remains enough room for the real artists. Although it is pretty easy ourdays to fly to Yosemite from each and every location on this planet and take a technically correct picture from Half Dome and print it with a professional printer on fine art paper, it will take you a long way to even come close to the results of an Ansel Adams. Is it the end of photography, that plenty of people have fun with their digicams and the resulting pictures? I don't think so. Quite the opposite, actually. If you start making snapshots, you start to think about how to improve. That's the first step into serious artwork photography.

Ad 5) At last, that's an easy one. Never ever has photography been reduced to these points, it's just too simplistic.

Ok, that has become a long post, sorry for that. As a conclusion I am reminded on the famous saying "The message about my death is largely exaggerated". Photography is alive and well, it rocks!

[Kainnon]

In arguing that photography is dead, the assertion is that photography is a process that yields a specific type of product. In this case, exposure of an emulsified silver halide strip to light via a glass lens.

Of course, that assertion is to be contested. Photography is no longer tied to that particular meaning.

The author has pointed out that popular ideas aren't necessarily true, and calls upon an analogy of the "flat/round world". However this analogy falls short on two factors. First, it is an appeal to scientific legitimation. Second, it's a slippery slope.

What has happened is the author makes you accept the grounds that yes, the world is round. This has a scientific basis. However, "photography" is not round. Nor is it the world. "Photography" is also not "scientific." Yes its definition and origin is "writing with light," but let us ask, what is it to write? Am I writing this paragraph, if I mearly press these keys? Or must the term "writing" only be used when holding a pen (with my chicken scratch symbols)? or for that matter, clay tablets?

If you can't tell, I'm making the analogy that "photography" is similar to "writing." It is a form of communication

"Photography" as "writing with light" has definitely changed with the advent of digital. And a change in definition is definitely in order. "Writing" took a turn with the printing press, and for that matter, digital as well. I'm sure the collective as a whole can come to a somewhat agreeable definition of what "photography" is. Words after all, refer to ideas, and those ideas change over time. I would suggest the author make a new word phrase and apply that limited definition of "photography" they're currently using. May I suggest "old-school-film"? The rest of us can continue on (digital or not) and call it photography.

I concede however, photography can not show us what the written word has, and so my analogy does fall short to some degree. Words are symbols of an ideal world, while photos are of the real world. Editing words, we edit ideas, but editing photos does not edit the real world, but our conception of it. Let us not get carried away, and idealize a medium that is not ideal to begin with.

And to conclude, I'd like to say is thank goodness we have spell check. For these words could not have been my own without it. And soon enough, neither will my photos.

[Dierk Haasis]

'Photography', n., from ancient Greek photos graphein meaning 'writing with light'.

That either means photography has never been except with copiers and scanners. Or the whole idea of putting an ideological superstructure on top of a perfectly easy to comprhend concept like photography - is nonsense.

[Craig Williams]

Are they photographs or images scot? Are they cameras or image capture machines?

Btw i'm not a purist, i do both digital and analog. One is instant gratification(the modern way) and the other is an exciting surprise(not always good). Maybe photography as we know it is dead but long live photography

[tom]

another dinosaur... next!

[Paul Mc Cann]

Mike, is this just a troll?

The thesis is fascetious twaddle which IMHO doesn't justify denunciation but no doubt will produce screeds of it.

Paul Mc Cann

[Adrian]

Somehow reminds me of the current "Flickr is bad" discussion on several photo blogs.

So why does the author snap away with that lowly Leicas? Photography was dead since mass produced films replaced personally prepared glass plates... NOT!

[Nicolas]

Photography is dead?
Then, long life to photography!

Only those naive enough to think photography is about objectivity, will mourn and not rejoice.

[Janne]

The incidentals of a particular imaging technology have - understandably - been mistaken for essential features of image recording in general. This category mistake has been exacerbated as the technology in question has been in such widespread use for such a long time. That does not preclude it from being a mistake. Similarly, howls of protest erupted with the advent of sound film; for a generation of film makers, film was _essentially_ a non-spoken visual form.

The author in the first link is frankly either very poorly read, or is willfully ignoring the very real fact that film photography has never been a "pure" art with no manipulation. It's frankly hard to take it seriously; the rant sounds akin to a hardcore British car enthusiast who with a perfectly straight face states that British cars never ever break down even as they stare at the pieces of an exploding gearbox strewn festively on the road behind the ruins of their MG.

[Der Norbert]

Haha, that's great. Somebody just found another way of saying: "Hey, i'm better than you!" Oh, it's a Leica user and he quotes french. Why am i not surprised? ;-)

[Nicolas]

And well, as said in the column of August 2nd, "those who don´t know history are bound to repeat it". Aren´t they?

[Frank]

It is the old 'analog' versus 'digital' debate again. I have seen that in so many areas. In music for example, when digital sampling keyboards started to arrive (read: became affordable), a big group of acoustic instrumentalists were afraid that they would become extinct, since now you could just play the sample of the violin on a keyboard. Of course things changed, but both digital musical instruments AND acoustical instruments still exist. Its just that ANOTHER way of making music has been added to the possibilities to create music, that's great, isn't it? I think the same is true with digital photography. The treshold (money wise) now has been lowered. Lots of young kids become addicted to this medium, they don't have to spend a fortune on film and developing cost, and once in a while, somebody discovers they want become a photographer as a profession. And of course, at a certain moment they will discover the 'old' craftsmenship of analog photography again and maybe get interested in those techniques as well.....

Frank

[khufu]

Cartier-Bresson would make the same masterpieces with an M8 as with an M3.

It's the seeing, stupid.

[Doroga]

Everyone can make technically great photo - excellent! Creative people who have difficulties with chemistry & night vision now CAN make a wonderful photo.

[John Roberts]

*SA

I disagree. I think photography ceased being photography long ago when film replaced glass plates. It's been all downhill since then. How can a camera that doesn't require a tripod be a real camera? "Hand-held" exposures? Give me a break! And through-the-lens, in-camera metering? It makes me want to tear my hair out! No, real photography has been dead for quite a while.*

[Dave]

Hmm... I guess 'music' doesn't exist any more either, what with the advent of digital recording studios and compact discs. And I suppose that there's no such thing as 'driving' any more now that embedded computers in our cars sling 1s and 0s around to make us safer, more comfortable, more exhilerated. Not to mention that 'literature' is DEAD I tell you! These cursed word processors and digital printing presses simply suck the soul from what could be words of greatness were they only set to rag paper on an Underwood manual typewriter!

Thanks for posting this, Mike - it's a good and poignant reminder that the world of photography is no more immune to ignorant and outright dangerous thinking than are politics or religion.

[Bambang Indrayoto]

I couldn't care less.

I am still using my digital camera when I like to, and using my film camera when I like to, too.

When I see the picture in a piece of paper or in my monitor, I still call it a photograph.

[Tim Jackson]

It is easy for a person to construct an argument that is based on a peculiar redefinition of a term that has a commonly accepted meaning. It is not, IMO, worth spending time or effort in addressing such arguments.

I'll spend that time continuing to use my digital cameras to take more photographs!

[btrancho]

In spite of what he says, Puts' real thesis is that photography is all process - "the interaction between photons and silver halide grains". So photography didn't exist until photographers started using silver halide. That would certainly surprise a lot of 19th century masters.

Extend his argument and you also have to say that music doesn't exist any more.

This is simply chauvinism.

[Nigel]

This viewpoint is not unique to photography. It seems analogous to the situation in other arts, such as in music when mixing from two records developed as a technique to produce new music, in literature when Joyce and then later authors extensively quoted earlier works by other authors, and so on. The core of the debate seems to be whether photographers as artists can accept their form has finally gone post modern.

[Puplet]

I agree completely. All readers should send their Leica M8 and related lenses and accessories to me... I'm doing you a favour, I know, but they'll just take up space otherwise.

[Colin]

Is this post supposed to incite conflict and therefore discussion?

[Ed Z]

Eh, this is just a "film rules, digital suxors!" argument that tries to sound intellectual...

his argument essentially boils down to "digital is not "real" photography because it can be altered, as opposed to a negative which is "fixed" at the moment of capture.

Honestly this is just a silly argument. Film photogoraphy can be altered *plenty* during the darkroom process. and digital photography *does* have "unalterable" negatives - they are called RAW files, which is simply the data that the sensor records, unprocessed and unaltered. just as the negative is the "data" that film records.

[Robert Roaldi]

Reality-reconstructing software like that will come in really handy for despots of the future. Think how easy it will be to frame people for a crime they didn't commit. It would make for an interesting sci-fi plot: someone who doesn't like you puts you at the scene of a crime; your best bet for an alibi might be that you happen to simultaneously appear in hundreds of other surveillance camera shots. (But which ones are real.) Think how this might alter the work of historians when they interpret war photos.

I can't wait for sophisticated temporal interpolation. Take a picture of a bank at 10:00 then again at 10:30. Then, by clever time interpolation software you can reconstruct who robbed it at 10:15.

[chuck kimmerle]

Photography does not exist anymore? Well, I guess that takes care of my archiving dilemma. Now I can spend the money on an X-Box.

[Wayne Stewart]

Phooey!

[Ivan Paganacci]

Here we go again, technology opening the door to the masses and causing fear in the establishment.

Stating the obvious... Good photography will always require the instinct of what makes an image interesting, which even people who've mastered the craft usually lack. Photography didn't kill painting and sculpture, nor will Photoshop kill photography. Even priests managed to keep their jobs after the King James Bible hit the streets, so will landscape photographers (though at a greatly reduced income).

I'm going to use the tools we have now. To make relevant art, if that's your goal, requires living in and understanding the present.

[stephen]

as soon as you get off your high horse and get your nose out of the air, i hope you'll realize that people have been manipulating film images since forever. i remember a raging debate about that in photo school decades ago. combining elements from several images takes greater skill with film than it does with photoshop, but still can be done. (http://www.photographymuseum.com/phofictionsmontages.html)
i would also contend that all the photoshopping in the world will not make a great photograph. adobe does not yet have a cartier-bresson filter. as henri himself said, a camera is only a tool.

if you don't believe that collecting light on a sensor is photography, then make up another name for it, and get over it.

[Charles Earl]

Do we really have to keep this fantasy of film being "real" photography. The negative was never written in stone. You can go back to the days of glass plates and find examples of emulsion scraping, and plate sandwiching. I don't miss film at all digital is a wonderful way to do what I always did without the toxic chemicals in the house.

[Fred Morrison]

It began with National Geographic re-arranging the pyramids, and all of it is symptomatic of the path civilization has taken over the past 40 years. I was born 50 years too late...text messaging while driving. Jesus!

[Gingerbaker]

When the author of an article in English doesn't translate the most salient quote in his essay from the French, methinks there is pretension afoot.

And what is this about "a final picture that can hardly be altered"?

Where did the terms "burn", "dodge", and "mask" come from, anyway?

[Dale]

Okay...I have to admit, the Microsoft technology is scary. Worldwide collaborative merged photos is a bit over the top. However, I have to completely disagree with the thesis that 'Photography' is dead. Yes, the tools and processes of image creation has changed. But, the point of photography is the meaning in the image; not the process by which it was created.

These types of arguments always seem to be asserted by those who are afraid of change and would prefer to maintain status quo. But, I would suggest, a fundamental element of photography has always been about technological advances in producing 'better' (substitute your own meaning here) images, improving permanance, and developing new ways for the individual to express what's in the mind's eye. Under that criteria, is photography dead? Or, is it simply progressing as it has always done.

My rant is over :)

[Dave Jenkins]

Oh, goodie! Photography no longer exists, so maybe we can hope the Putz will stop his everlasting speaking from Sinai about it!

Dave Jenkins

[Dennis]

Photography has been in transition since 1839 (or earlier by some accounts). Get over it. It has, is and will continue to evolve. It has always been the audience that has lagged behind the medium.

[Joe]

From an extreme position to an extreme solution.

I was never much of film photographer during the earlier full-manual days, but did photograph more and improved at the craft as AE and AF aides were introduced into the equipment. After digital had evolved for a few years I bought a basic P&S. The results eventually pushed the film gear out the door, now completely replaced with a digital system and workflow.

With my early digital ventures it was auto-everything, but gradually I've returned to using manual techniques over the available automation. However, I would not go back to a time where a histogram or image review or camera automation is an available option as I work.

I photograph more now than when using film, my image work is better, and I enjoy the raw workflow and digital printing process much more than the old darkroom environment. Digital's and photography's evolution have been positive for helping me see, and there appear to be many indications of further positive developments.

[Tim Gray]

Some random thoughts...

They said music was dead when digital synthesisers became mainstream.

A similar controversy arose (not claiming that painting as an art was dead, but close) when the super-realism school started to appear.

I'm also reminded of the 100% photoshop rendering of a train - took a couple of thousand hours (if I recall) and was absolutely photo realistic.

If photography is dead, then long live photonography (to paraphrase a previous post).

Debate is good.

[Olaf Ulrich]

Erwin Puts wrote:
> "The best way to understand this difference
> is to take pictures with a film-loading
> camera like the M7 and the sensor-provided
> M8. Handling of both cameras is quite
> similar, but mentally and in the workflow
> there is a world of difference."

I guess he meant: almost that kind of mental and workflow difference you'd get from loading one M7 with Tri-X and another with Velvia 50, right?

-- Olaf

[Adam Isler]

This is the kind of debate that's hard not to get in to, tho' I think it's ultimately pointless. But, as my wife will aver, I was never one to avoid wading in to a pointless debate, so here goes.

I think there are 2 ways to look at any visual art. One says it doesn't matter how the image was created; all that matters is the final image. And I incline to this point of view when I'm using Photoshop to dramatically change my intial RAW capture (and that's a digital word - we never called film exposures "captures"). In this view, success is all a question of the artist's vision, not of his method, which is irrelevant.

The other perspective is, as has been said earlier, that the medium is the message. It does matter what medium and techniques were used - a kind of photographic equivalent of literature's so called "new criticism." In this case the artist's knowledge of composition and the technical mastery of his/her medium are key - and that's why a Jackson Pollack is different from a toddler's similar-looking creation.

I think there can be no doubt that the images that come out of a "digital photography" workflow look like photographs (at least to the layperson). It's equally clear that in addition to understanding apertures and shutter speeds and the zone system and hyperfocal distances, most of which remain relevant, the digital photographer now needs to master curves and layer masks and has replaced spotting with a dye brush with the clone stamp or healing brush. When I started in photography I had to develop a sense of distance for my manual focus Voigtlander; now thankfully the camera focuses (usually) for me.

At some point these changes add up to enough difference in the techniques of the medium that we may call it a new medium, regardless of whether the final images are different or not. I don't doubt that similar debates raged about whether painting with acrylics was the same as painting with real oil paints, or about whether hand mixed oils were the same as paint out of a tube). I'm not sure we can pre-define where the line of crossing into a new medium is though some will surely say we've passed it and others will deny it. Art historians of the future will no doubt decide (or debate) it.

In the meantime, go out and make pictures please, master your craft(s) and let me know where I can look at your work.

Adam

[jimwitkowski]

Well Mike, you certainly woke up the troops this morning.

[John Minor]

Wow, thanks for posting this essay. After reading it I ran outside and pulverized my digital gear with an F4. Thanks for stopping me from looking stupid. Hey wait, my bazillion point meter system broke! Now how do I make fine art?!
This message brought to you by the Northern Wisconsin Department of Tongue In Cheek...

[charlie d]

Both funny and scary!

Nice post

[Michael Lijewski]

Zeno declared motion an absurdity and Diogenes refuted him by walking around the room. Thus I think I'll go take a digital photograph.

[Gordon Buck]

Suppose a film based camera was used to take a photograph and the negative was processed chemically but then scanned, adjusted in Photoshop and then printed on an inkjet printer. Is the result half a photograph?