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Thread: Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

  1. #1
    tim atherton's Avatar
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    Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

    Interesting (if slightly schizophrenic) editorial in Art News on the boom state of contemporary photography, the potential loss of materials, the growth of digital, but also the interest in traditional materials for contemporary work
    (thanks joerg)

    - a few excerpts for "academic discussion and criticism" (take the time to read the rest):

    "The year 2005 may be remembered as a watershed in the history of photography, a crucial date when one generation of artists lifted off into blue sky while another was brought down to earth, left once again to ponder its slave-master relationship to technology."...

    "“You can’t have a show about contemporary art anymore without having photography as a central element,” says Sandra Phillips, director of the photography department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Art photographers are now gossiped about on television, with Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson rating mentions by the snarky art students in the HBO series Six Feet Under. Larry Gagosian has added Alec Soth and Sally Mann to his roster of heavyweights. "...

    "The history of photography, unlike that of painting and sculpture, is bound up, literally and figuratively, with books. William Henry Fox Talbot, Jacob Riis, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Larry Clark, William Eggleston, and Nan Goldin are only a few of the artists whose original prints have exercised far less influence than the reproductions in their books."...

    "New York dealer Lucy Mitchell-Innes, who ran the contemporary-art department at Sotheby’s in the 1980s, has observed that the multiple nature of photographic prints no longer bothers collectors. “People now want to own pictures that other people own,” she says. “That’s a major shift, and photography is one reason why.”"...

    "But the independent British curator and critic senses that the mood is shifting again, thanks in part to technology—“I think there’s anxiety about digitization,” she says—and in part to the swinging pendulum of taste: “We’re coming out of ten years when big color and big prints were the norm.”

    Bright predicts a revival of black-and-white photography, citing the work of Shannon Ebner and Markéta Othová, neither of whom is represented in her book. “Their work is quite poignant, not staged, and they make smallish prints,” she says. “There’s a desire to return to modernist esthetics, to what photography used to be and how we imagine it should be.”"...

    "Papageorge has never made an exhibition-quality ink-jet print, and examples produced by his graduate students at Yale have yet in his eyes to “reach the level of poetry.”"...


    PS - this issue of Art News is about photography
    You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn

    www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog

  2. #2

    Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

    Thanks once more Tim (and Joerg) for posting something relevant. You have the nack of picking out the bits that caught my attention.

  3. #3

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    Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

    “I think there’s anxiety about digitization,” No kidding!

    Nice find.

    David Crossley/Crossley Photography....

  4. #4

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    Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

    Watershed, major shift, shifting again... Hmm. Media talk.

  5. #5

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    Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

    Media talk.



    Indeed.



    If one writer can't dig up a new "story", then someone else will be found who can.

  6. #6
    Resident Heretic Bruce Watson's Avatar
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    Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

    ...to what photography used to be and how we imagine it should be.

    Oy. Who is this "we" and how to I separate myself from "them?"

    Bruce Watson

  7. #7
    Abuser of God's Sunlight
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    Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

    "Oy. Who is this "we" and how to I separate myself from "them?"

    judging by the quote, it's someone who likes modernist, black and white photography ... like a lot of people on this board.

    if you want to separate yourself, come to new york and i'll take you to chelsea ... you might end up wanting to join them again

  8. #8

    Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

    Oh please people, do none of you read this as a kind of marketing trend report for the art photography market? Compare it with an article in some business magazine, no more no less than that.

  9. #9

    Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

    I found this part intersting:

    "Traditional black-and-white still dominates the fine-art photography auction market. Of the 241 lots sold last year for a total of almost $16 million at Sotheby’s New York, department head Denise Bethel estimates that less than 10 percent were color prints. Collectors still balk when offered digital prints of any kind. "

  10. #10

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    Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

    "Traditional black-and-white still dominates the fine-art photography auction market"

    Not surprising, collectors tend to buy "names" and the "names" in photography for all of the 19th century and most of the 20th centuries were b&w photographers. Other than Eliot Porter (and I've read that he's very much out of favor in fine art circles because his work is too pretty and easy to "get") I can't offhand think of a really well-known photographer before roughly 1980 who worked primarily in color. Of course now someone will come up with a major color photographer before 1980 who I've forgotten about but the basic point is still valid I think - it's the famous photographers whose work tends to get collected and until the last twenty five or so years the vast majority of them were b&w photographers.
    Brian Ellis
    Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticize them you'll be
    a mile away and you'll have their shoes.

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