Contemporary Photography boom - digital or b&w?

[Rob Vinnedge]

Mapplethorpe, Penn, Kenro Izo, Michael Kenna, all contemporary or near contemporary photographers, have integrated platinum into their aesthetic. I could compile a long list of photographers who fall into this category. Age of process does not necessarily doom it to extinction.

Don't get me wrong. I welcome new tools and materials and agree that they often add to the efficiency of image making. My whole point in joining this thread was to say that the "subculture" of ULF and alternative process photographers is very much alive, but overlooked by Mr. Woodward in the Artnews article, though perhaps not by other curators and critics.

[adrian tyler]

in the contemporary art circuit, what i can see here at least, the mantra is "large format colour print", and i don't see a lot of "new" alternative fromats in the "market". neither in the galleries, nor the art fairs.

the emerging mantra, as far as i see it, is "digital" and i personally think that this is one of the reasons for photography's acceptance to art collectors, even "pure" photographers have to make large format prints digitally.

so given that scenario it's only a matter of time until the realisation that things that you are trying to say with a camera could be said much more eloquently with a trip through your imagination and the computer... exciting times... adapt or die?

[paulr]

"Age of process does not necessarily doom it to extinction."

no, certainly not ... oil painting is still alive and well after all. but this issue isn't about the extinction of a process. it's about the relevence (hopefully) or the trendyness (cynically) of the work being done in a process. so the age of a process doesn't doom it to extinction ... but the hipness of a process may doom it to marginalization. artists working in most of the esthetic or conceptual traditions that are most current seem to be moving away from the darkroom and towards a more mechanized approach. a little less steichen, a little more warhol. the pendulum is always free to swing back the other way, but this is what's going on right now.

the photographers you mentioned aren't really examples of the people driving contemporary photography (thought i don't know Kenro Izo's work). Mapplethorpe's long dead (and mostly famous for fairly conventional, 1980s style silver prints); Penn is almost 90 if he's still alive, and mostly famous for work he's done decades ago; and Kenna's famous mostly for silver prints, and has been doing the exact same thing for the last 30 years.

[paulr]

by the way, Rob, i should add that if part of what rubs you the wrong way is the melodramatic tone of the "adapt or die!" warning, i certainly agree. in this context dying might just mean reducing your chances of appearing on the cover of Artnews, which may not even be the ambition of most people we know.

but there's a kernel of truth behind the sentiment. i first heard this argument a little over ten years ago. i was discussing the issue with a few photographers, including Jock Sturgess. It turned into a pretty heated debate. At the time i was such a staunch traditionalist i couldn't even imagine photography that didn't involve some kind of 4:00 a.m. self-crucifixion in the darkroom. i was taking a digital-over-my-dead-body kind of stand .... and Jock, whose work was technically and esthetically very conservative, and who had never worked with a digital process in his life, took the opposite view. he said, "look, the history of photography is littered with the bones of photographers who refused to adapt, and i don't want to join them." he pointed out that for every Atget, who managed to change the world with an anachronistic approach, there were hundreds who we don't know about, because they stayed put and allowed history to steamroller them.

i thought he had some good points. i don't feel the pressures of change as strongly as he did (of course i'm not supporting myself by staying relevent to the art world, like him), but i've definitely become less dogmatic and more open to change.

[Don Wallace]

I think Paul has expressed my sentiments. The "survival of the fittest" is a little overstated, but for some, the changing realities of the art market are significant. Some of us should be so lucky as to have to worry about the status of our work in the high end art market.

At a more mundane level, and if this forum is any indication, there seems to be a fairly comfortable blending of digital and traditional processes. Currently, image capture remains to be largely traditional, perhaps mainly because of expense. However, there are many photographers use digital methods to clean up negatives for digital printing, and even for making new negatives. David Fokos, one of my favourite photographers, scans his negatives, works on them in PS, and gets new negatives made from the files for use in platinum printing. Digital processes may never be able to reproduce exactly what traditional black and white can do, but it will do other things, and materials and techniques will evolve, as they always do.

BTW, Paul, I was in New York last June (for the first time ever) and saw visited some of the Chelsea galleries (I think it might have been you who recommended a few to me in this forum). Among the treasures I saw were platinum prints by Cy Decosse at the John Stevenson Gallery. I have not quite caught my breath, even now.

[Jim Ewins]

What is sick is the validity that the above comments give to those shrill voices.

[paulr]

"Among the treasures I saw were platinum prints by Cy Decosse at the John Stevenson Gallery."

i haven't been there ... a friend just recommended that gallery to me yesterday. sounds like i need to take a look.

[Brian Ellis]

" . . . 4:00 a.m. self-crucifixion in the darkroom . . . "

Great line. As much as en entire essay could, it brings back the memories, feelings, smells, etc. of those marathon darkroom sessions.

[Oren Grad]

4:00 a.m. self-crucifixion in the darkroom

Did one of those last weekend. Still recovering...

[mrpengun]

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. "

It is a bit of a misnomer as well, since a lot of the colour contemporary photographers get shifted "up" to the Contemporary art sales, especially in London (wherein I believe Gursky's 99 cents is the highest selling photographic work ever at auction). It also helps when you get to auction a huge Weston collection...