There aren't (m)any: Well, I feel a little better this morning...after doing some digging last night, it appears that there are no "histories of the digital transition," at least that I could find. So that makes me feel a little better about not having read one.
By "digital transition" I mean what I've defined before as the main period of the transition to digital imaging, from 1994 to 2011, with antecedents going back to the earliest glimmers of digital in the 1970s, and the extension of it (still dynamic, certainly) from 2011 to today. At best what we seem to have gotten so far are specialized chunks of that history, and updates in the form of afterthought-type chapters tacked on to earlier histories. But no author has really attempted the synthesis yet. Granted, it's a vast subject, and generally so ill-understood that even museums with trained curators haven't much more than the faintest idea how to cope with the cultural changes yet. (Some do try. For one thing, however, museums, like art dealers, deal in objects.)
Something Else: Speaking of recent dyspeptic meanderings and the state of photo history, here, in Spanish, is a brief article, which I'm told is controversial, in which none other than Sebastiao Salgado himself (surely among the top two or three dozen most eminent photographers alive) predicts the demise of photography in 20 to 30 years. I was only able to read the auto-translate version, so I can't go a lot farther into the subject. In auto-translate form (never dependable) the second paragraph supposedly reads, "...despite using a digital camera for a long time, the Brazilian photographer does not seem very convinced that the changes of recent years have been for the better. 'I do not believe that photography lives more than 20 or 30 years. We will move on to something else,' he assured during the delivery of the 'Personality Award' in Rio de Janeiro."
I know what he means. We at first (dully, perhaps?) believed that digital would just a further technological step forward, helping us do with greater freedom the things that were already established practice when it came along. By now, it's become quite clear that the changes are going to be much deeper than that. Truly, photography is in the process of becoming "something else" than it was in its first 155 years.
Dense irony: Reader robert e wrote: "Oh the irony! As we debate how easy photography has become, the most publicized photo of the day is one of the most difficult ever attempted."
Clarence H. White, about 1920
First photo teacher: I've mentioned Clarence Hudson White, founder of the first photo school in the USA, several times in recent weeks, and it turns out there's an excellent recent book out about him—it's called Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925. It came out only a year and a half ago, in 2017. Its author, Anne McCauley, is David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University. The photo of White above is by White's student Doris Ulmann, who was a most interesting photographer in her own right. She had a high-flying career as a society portraitist, but also went into Appalachia in a time when it was generally inaccessible to outsiders (cf. Catherine Marshall's congenial 1967 book Christy) to make portraits of what were then called "hillbillies"—in the same soft-focus, platinum-print style she used for the swells.
A companion book for Clarence White would be the 1996 Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography by the award-winning curator, museum manager, lecturer, writer, historian of photography and coordinator of publications Marianne Fulton, who has numerous outstanding books to her credit. The two little one-paragraph editorial reviews at the Amazon page, from Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal, give a nice little thumbnail synopsis.
That's all I got for today...
Mike
(Thanks to Inaki Arbelaiz)
P.S. ...Well, maybe a little something else:
Somethin' Else by Cannonball Adderly, 1958
Something Else!!!! by Ornette Coleman, 1958
Something Else by the Kinks, 1967
Something Else by Tech N9ne, 2013
Something Else by the Cranberries, 2017
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(Not) everything must fade away
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Mike Connealy: "Biographies of photographers can be a useful way to explore the history of photography. I have read a couple recently about photographers working in the '20s and '30s, which is the period of most interest to me. Larisa Dryansky's bio of Ilse Bing is particularly good in the way it places the photographer's work in the context of the time. Brassai's autobiographical Letters to My Parents is enormously entertaining."
John Custodio: "Check out this history of the digital transition—From Darkroom to Daylight by Harvey Wang."
psu: "Re Salgado's interview, as a Spanish speaker it seems to me that his main point is in the third paragraph, where he says that 'photography is coming to an end because what we see in the cell phone is not photography. A photograph has to materialize, you have to print it, you have to be able to touch it.' Sure. I guess. At some level I think this is nonsense though. But even if you believe it...it's not like you can't print phone pictures. It's just that the majority of people don't, just like the majority of people in the past did not make prints past the little 4x6 automatic color prints from the mini-lab. So what's different?"
Joseph Reid: "My Spanish is by no means perfect (or even especially good) but I agree with Luis Aribe's comment. The third paragraph spells out Salgado's point, which, I think, Mike has made on TOP, that a photograph is an object. A digital image is something else. I don't agree that photography will be dead in 20 or 30 years (barring the perfection and ubiquity of holographic imagery). When I first read about digital photography, circa 1991, I thought photography would be dead in 20 or 30 years. I figured that, because digital would make manipulation so easy, the culture would lose faith in the veracity of the image and the image would become obsolete as as a representation of reality. Now, clearly I was wrong and I no longer see that happening. I think there will still be a need far into the future to record events and objects faithfully for many different purposes. As an art form, photography may evolve as painting began to evolve while photography was young—to increasing levels of abstraction. That didn't kill representational painting but it probably made it a much smaller field.
"Which way photojournalism goes (and I classify Salgado as a photojournalist) is another matter. The personalization of all forms of journalism is trendy, and the democratization of journalism—crowdsourcing, 'citizen journalists' who happen to be in the wrong place at the right time with a smartphone—is having an effect on how news is presented (or may be a consequence of it, chicken vs. egg, I don't know). Examples are gonzo print journalism and the U.S. TV news industry's insistence on inserting presenters into the narrative. This affectation has spread to photojournalism and art (see D'Agata's work) and is what just about all individuals' social media accounts are about. So, I don't see photography dying in a few decades, but Salgado may certainly be correct about the aspect of photography that we call the print. Not that this makes me happy."