The future of photography

[Jay DeFehr]

Rick,

Any similarities between photography as an art form and photography as a casual recording medium are mostly superficial, despite appearances to the contrary. That the Sherman photo resembles a snapshot is not accidental, but the larger point is that Sherman's work is part of the discourse that constitutes the art form, while a casual snapshot is not, and I don't think technical proficiency has been a hinge point in that discourse for a very long time, any more than an author's typing skills are part of literary theory.

You might be right about any given artist's intentions and distinctions, but it's the art form at large I'm interested in here.

Technology is one aspect of the medium, and one most posters, myself included, have commented on here, but I'd hoped to see more comments about the ways changes in science, culture and philosophy might affect the art form. Surely a connected world thinks differently about a great many things than the one that preceded it. Will our children see themselves and each other differently than we see ourselves and each other? How will the issues they'll face as a species affect the way they picture their world? In a world of ubiquitous machine intelligence, how will this particular collaboration (photography) evolve? The technology directly related to imaging is only one very small part of the technological changes that are re-shaping the world and our species, revealing previously unknown mechanisms, and challenging long held beliefs. Will a person who sees himself as a cultural locus create the same kind of work as one who sees himself as special type of person (artist, genius, etc.)? Can the role of artist be maintained if free will is believed to be an untenable hypothesis?

Thank you for your thoughts.

[Peter York]

I spent Thanksgiving in Taos. A day trip brought me back to the Andrew Smith Gallery in Santa Fe. Their collection is very impressive, with a broad range of techniques and styles, though the post-modern seemed underrepresented.

The only unity I could find amongst the selection was that 1., each print had a "presence" to it that drew me in, and 2., each photographer was able to repeatedly achieve that "presence" in a body of work. I believe this is and has always been the essence of photography as an art form, irregardless of aesthetics, process and technique.

However, Rick's comments now have me wondering if the print itself will continue to be the basis for evaluating a photograph.

[Brian C. Miller]

Brian,

Your paranoid vision of the future hasn't played out yet, though we already have robot photographers that make photos without human intervention and report directly to state agencies, and machine intelligence has been a part of photography since the advent of the exposure meter; even the extinction type is a form of machine intelligence, to say nothing of today's eye-tracking auto-everything wonder machines, so you should be quite comfortable with the concept by now. Machine intelligence is inevitable and becoming ubiquitous. Every technological advance has been met with resistance by some faction of the population, (Church, luddites, Unabomber, etc.), and some have managed to slow progress, but none have been able to stop or reverse it for long. Creating technology is what our species does and we can't decide to stop evolving. I'm sorry the world is such a scary place for you.

Forewarned is forearmed. You are not paranoid when you know "they" are out to get you. I once put a honeypot on my DSL line for a couple of weeks, and I kept track of the statistics. There were between 500 to a bit over 1200 attacks per day, with the majority coming from fellow subscribers on my ISP. Every country in the world with an Internet connection was represented. At home I run behind a firewall and my computers have malware scanners. This is not paranoid, but simply good common sense.

To think that we will "evolve" without somebody being a total jerk is just plain hiding from the basic facts of human behavior. And, "you still have not told me in which direction to point the camera -- and this is what matters."

Technology enables different things to be photographed, but once this becomes commonplace, then the thrill is gone, and the question of advancement becomes a question of artistic talent. Machine "intelligence" will not replace this. As evidence, do we have a real AI? A real Turing prize winner? Even in games, what is considered as AI is just a set of algorithms. The "intelligence" of the camera AI still can only assist the photographer, not replace the photographer.

[Jay DeFehr]

Brian,

To be clear, I never used the term AI, you did. The term I use is machine intelligence, and I gave some examples. As for Turing prize winners, stay tuned. I think an interesting question regarding the Turing test is whether all people could pass it. I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.

In which direction you should point your camera is a meaningless question, however clever you might find it. One could just as meaninglessly ask, When should I press the shutter, or what lens should I use? Without context, the questions have no meaning, and so they don't matter at all.

We already have robot photographers, but as of now, no one is calling them artists. Expect that to change. We have robot painters' works exhibited in museums alongside human artists' works, and machine composers creating works good enough to fool experts, and of course, machine chess players good enough to beat the best human players. Why do you suppose photography is so exceptional in this regard?

[clay harmon]

Jay, it sounds like you are fishing for some commentary about the effect that changes in the wider world that we live in will have on photography as art. Is that a fair summary?

My not-very-organized sense of things is this: In a very broad sense, art photography has always been a half wavelength or so behind the painting world. Just as advances in sciences in the early 1900s were in a sense reductive and atomizing (quite literally!), the painting world began to explore the basic components of the form - from the early cubist endeavors on through the graphic simplicity of much of the very modernist painters. I think the best and most sensitive artists were able to pick up on these vibrations in the Weltanschauung and find a way of expressing their reaction to these changes.

Yet at the same moment that Picasso and Braque were engaging in their reductive exercises, the art photography was still working in the romantic world of the pictorialists. The modernism and exploration of photographic content for its own sake as practiced by Weston and others didn't come until about 20-30 years after the cubists had already had their fun.

But running counter to this atomization of the world during the 20th century, ever more profound advances in media from radio to television to (now) the internet have had the effect of connecting rather than atomizing the world. These technological advances have given rise to a culture of celebrity and popularity.

And this trend was picked up pretty quickly by Warhol and Lichtenstein in the Pop Art movement. But sure enough, about 20 years later along comes Cindy Sherman with her photographic take on the nature of celebrity and pop culture.

What I am getting at is that photography has always had this 'anxiety of influence' (yeah, go read some Harold Bloom) in its relationship with the traditional art world. In many ways, the photographic art that seems to have passed the test of some years all seems to be an echo to some degree of an earlier movement in the painting world, no matter how vehemently Edward Weston protests this notion in his Daybooks.

So if I were betting, I would say that in all likelihood, the art photography that will last will be something that in some way echoes the painting world of the recent past.

One thing that strikes me about painting world in the last 20-30 years is that technique seems to be back and in some cases even celebrated. Representational art is no longer necessarily a dirty word. And much of it seems to celebrate emotion, anomie, oddity, connection and the lack of connection.

I don't think that the ridiculous MFA project large color prints of slack jawed people standing around awkwardly in poorly lit rooms is going to be this echo. You can see that is what they are trying to do - especially the anomie and disconnection part. But in my opinion, a great deal of it has been hit with a very large stupid stick.

What would be interesting if there developed some movement in the photographic art world that just said 'screw it, I'm going on my own' and created some genre that truly was a reaction to the real world, and dealt with it on its own terms rather than being a reaction to what was happening in the painting world twenty years ago.

On the other hand, I could be full of shyte.

[r.e.]

One of the many things that is interesting about this thread is that Jay is actively curating it (to use the current jargon) and that it has not degenerated into the kind of slanging match that, given the subject, could well have ensued.

[Jay DeFehr]

Clay,

Thank you for your very thoughtful, and thought provoking comments. Bloom's "anxiety of influence" is a very interesting conceptual framework, and I think your application of it to the relationship between photography and painting is quite astute, though I tend to favor evolutionary psychology to Freudian.

Bloom's ideas about the nature of creativity resonate with me, and are along the lines of what I intended by my proposal of a person as a cultural locus as opposed to a discrete originator of creativity. I meant to suggest those two ways of understanding creativity more than to claim one is more valid than the other, and in fact, I believe a sort of duality exists by which a person is both a cultural locus- a role player in the work of the species- and a discrete originator of creativity, which is the mechanism for doing the work, much like the errors in copying the genetic code create mutations that interact with selection pressures to drive evolution.

Since painting and photography are both visual arts, they both draw from the same conceptual pool, and painting had a significant head start in its lineage, but I think the collaboration with the machine is closing that gap, and pointing towards a true divergence, fueled by the rapid evolution of the machine. I think photography, or whatever follows it, will be able to deal with concepts with which painting can't easily cope. It will be very interesting to see how things develop.

Thanks again for your very insightful comments.

[Struan Gray]

*I* am the future of photography. So there.

I'm only half joking. I am one future of photography - the one that accepts that still imaging is a mature art, stops trying to be new, new new, and simply uses photography as an established tool to communicate something I want to say. I want to use photography to drive my own perception and visual thinking forward, but I have very little interest in advancing it as an art.

FWIW, I don't think there are many stylistic or aesthetic innovations which have not been tried before. For the upper reaches of art-for-arts-sake creativity, that leaves technical innovation as the only mechanism for change. Which is cool, because it completes the circle back to the vernacular, grubby world of mass-market consumption.

I agree with those who see digital as having democratised the established metrics of quality. Thank God for that. It's worth noting that 'digital' encompasses the capture medium, as well as the clever chips and algorithms which run the imaging device and control the presentation medium.

That said, a large piece of paper or MDF with coloured materials stuck to it makes continuing sense as a way of presenting single static images of any size.

Where digital has made a quiet revolution is in the power of combined images. Averaged shots, combination portraits, long exposures and collage are nothing new, but the ease and scope of digital versions has, for me, produced a quantitative change significant enough to be qualitative too.

I am also struck by how often visiting a contemporary art museum is like visiting a science centre with my kids. It's not just that both nowadays seem more concerned with entertaining and inducing emotions rather than engendering thought. Nor is it the trivial fact that the designers of both sorts of experience know of each others' work. There is a unity of feel that suggests such institutions act as a kind of authority of cool - they are the gatekeepers who decide which options outside the core curriculum of our lives should be worth giving status to.

I personally am very resistant to the idea that a canon (which is inevitable) should do more than inform my own aesthetic responses to the world. I miss the sense of discovery, of serendipidity, you get in classical art galleries.

A prediction? Interactive art will take off. If only as a comment on the surveillance society and a way of sidestepping the ghastly dullness of video installations. Works which respond to the number, mood and activity of visitors will become increasingly common. This could be as simple as pseudo-sculpture that tracks viewers' head movements and simulates a 3D scene on a display. It could be as complex as sound sculptures which incorporate, solera style, the auditory history of viewers' responses. For photography, I can think of many, many fun things you could do with a fast-refreshing display and a mix of viewer-sensors and recognition software.

But there is always still room for one more sonnet, or song in C-major, or archivally-processed black and white fibre print.

[Brian C. Miller]

In which direction you should point your camera is a meaningless question, however clever you might find it. One could just as meaninglessly ask, When should I press the shutter, or what lens should I use? Without context, the questions have no meaning, and so they don't matter at all.

Nope! That is the essential question of photography. Cameras photograph a subject. That is what cameras do. No more, no less. Today you will think, "what shall I write?" and then you will write it. The same with the camera. You, and every photographer, will pose to yourself the question, "what should my subject be?" The selection of the subject is the very basis of photography. Without a subject, photography becomes meaningless. Therefore, "where do I point the camera" is a photographer's greatest question.

We already have robot photographers, but as of now, no one is calling them artists.

Nope! Name one robot that is used to independently photograph a wedding.

You use the phrase "machine intelligence" but what is really needed is "artificial intelligence." You claim that "machine intelligence" is an exposure meter. That is not intelligence. Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines intelligence as "the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations." An exposure meter is not intelligent. Neural networks and genetic algorithms are parts of artificial intelligence. A "45 Point AF System" and "63-zone metering system" in a camera do not denote intelligence. These are parts of a tool, and the tool does not answer the question of where to point the camera.

Phrases that you formulate come back and haunt you. I shouldn’t have formulated “the School of Resentment.” I once called them a “rabblement of lemmings,” and I run into that phrase everywhere. And I now wish that I hadn’t formulated the single phrase that I seem to have given to the language: “the anxiety of influence.” Of course everybody misunderstands it.
...
It’s actually the relationship between one poem and another poem, one novel and another novel, and so on and so forth.
Harold Bloom, interview by Jesse Pearson

(emphasis added)
Can we photograph without "the anxiety of influence?" Can we create photographs without relationship? Of course the word "anxiety" isn't a good term for the phrase. Does another photographer's work create anxiety? That's a question you'll have to answer for yourself. Me, I usually think to myself, "I can do that." And that's what Arthur Fellig said: "Anybody can do what I do."

[clay harmon]

I agree that his phrase is maybe not the best formulation. But he wrote it and now we gotta live with it. Like many concepts, it really only puts a name to something we already inherently understand.

My understanding of his meaning is that nothing is created in a vacuum. Everything an artist makes is inevitably composed in the presence of observations and influences he/she may have had up to that point. And because creativity is a constant struggle for originality despite these influences, there will be evidence of this struggle in the completed work.

Now I'm gonna go make some pictures

(emphasis added)
Can we photograph without "the anxiety of influence?" Can we create photographs without relationship? Of course the word "anxiety" isn't a good term for the phrase. Does another photographer's work create anxiety? That's a question you'll have to answer for yourself. Me, I usually think to myself, "I can do that." And that's what Arthur Fellig said: "Anybody can do what I do."