JOLLY DAYS

Photography's Decline

This essay about photography's decline is swinging at ghosts; neither photography is understood as the craft that it is, nor is the nature of art fully comprehended.

The reviewer despairs for photography:

…you can't help but wonder if … [photography] hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now “sculpture” can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography's vast variety possible. But it's also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul.

The reviewer thinks photography had a soul. Digitalization is actually a logical extension of the mechanical, distanced craft of photography. A perfect fit. Pure content, thence manipulated.

The reviewer says,

Art and truth used to be fast friends. Until the beginning of modernism, the most admired quality in Western art was mimesis—objects in painting and sculpture closely resembling things in real life. William Henry Fox Talbot, who produced the first photographic prints from a negative in 1839, immediately saw the mimetic new medium as an art form.

The association of realistic representation with “truth” is a misunderstanding that was clarified in the early twentieth century. (He should have said “the most admired quality in nineteenth century art.”) But it became evident you could do a lot on a canvas that did not parrot the apparent. The pop culture's tendency to find value in mimesis — “it really looks like a duck” — never was connected to truth seeking as the reviewer seems to indicate. It is the craft that is admired in mimetic representation; it is the faux familiarity embedded in simple realism that is reassuring (a requirement for pop culture acceptance — the lack of demand for inner engagement).

As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation.

The reviewer refers to “painting's manual touch and surface variation.” There is little empathic connection to the expressive power of painting in that formulation; it misses the spiritual, intellectual and emotive powers of painting.

Art presents an individual world — if successful, a fully realized world — which the zeitgeist may or may not find useful. Photography presents a useful — sometimes beautiful — document about a physical moment, devoid of the spirit of the age or the inner journey of a single life.