Comments on: Is Photography Over?

By: Jan Leonard

Jan Leonard — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:35:24 +0000

The photo you show of the man reproduced 5 times with use of mirrors, do you know anything about it?

We have a picture very similar to this one. Taken in 1946, during the war in NYC by Lane Studios. The man shown may be a military man, ours is in military uniform. Seems this was popular during WW 11.

By: william thornton

william thornton — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:18:00 +0000

The more pertinant question, to me ,is what happens now the photography can be art? Now that photography may absorg techniques of mass medias, it may begin to have meaning and get away from the narrow notions of deciding it’s relavance, its previouses uses as propaganda and its relavance to diseminating information. (Stalin didn’t need Photoshop.)
The questions advanced by Painting and Sculpture give us an opportunity to mind meaning in the act of observing. Questions of lying abound and always have. So? Those tricks and neither new nor valid to the bigger issues. All Art lies!

By: Stan Heller

Stan Heller — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:09:16 +0000

While photography is not “over,” is definitely has transformed in the digital age. The alchemy of the darkroom has been replaced with astonishingly powerful software that gives the creator much more power over the image than in previous times.

As has been noted elsewhere, the use of photography as a tool for historical documentation has come into question, thanks to the ease with which images can be manipulated.

(Imagine what Joe Stalin would have done with Photoshop. Better yet, don’t.)

The perception of photography is changing. The camera, once the arbiter of truth, has been taught to lie with extreme conviction. While this is not new, it has accelerated to the point where almost every image we see has been modified or enhanced in some fashion.

One door closes. Another opens. Photos still are the most reliable means of documentation. Now, more than ever, they are also “the stuff that dreams are made of.” The art form is not dead. How it will be used is in rapid transition.

I think that is what evolution is all about.

By: Bruce Campbell

Bruce Campbell — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:48:18 +0000

Of course Photography isn’t over – nor is it likely to be as long as the medium is available as a resource for artists to draw on (so to speak). The idea that its over is as silly as those who started expounding that Painting was dead towards the end of the last millennium!

In David Hockney’s recent documentary “A Bigger Picture” which follows his return to painting in his native Yorkshire UK over a two year period, for the first 90% of the doc he repeatedly expresses the opinion that its now the time for plein-air painting to supersede photography, given that most painting since the renaissance was based on a camera eye’s view of the world, so no more photography for him. Then at the very end he’s seen combining digital camera images with paintings to make prints, which prompts his interviewer to say “I thought you said you were finished with photography?” to which David Hockney replies “Wasn’t it Sickert who said “never believe what an Artist says, only what he does.”!