The following is a teaser of a longer article you can find on my Patreon. If you’re curious, there’s the option of a trial subscription. Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).
tldr: Photographers spent so much time and effort on making sure that their medium was accepted as art that they managed to discard vast parts of its potential, while locking themselves in an environment that doesn’t serve the vast majority of them well.
I should probably start off by noting that I actually like art (some of it, obviously, not all) and that I have no problem with photography as art (ditto). At this stage, I don’t see a point in rejecting art photography per se. Or maybe I should write “photography as art” because that’s a better way of understanding what I want to think about in what follows. After all, photography can be all kinds of things. It can serve to illustrate something (for example in cookbooks), it can be used as evidence (such as when the police will send you a photograph showing your car speeding), it can be used to augment information in some fashion (such as when newspapers use photographs next to their articles), it can be art (such as when you hang large photographs in expensive looking frames in a barren room that’s mostly frequented by the well off), etc. But photography also is a means of very basic communication. People — and by that I mean everyday people, people who usually have never studied photography — send each other photographs. These days, they often do it with the little hand-held computers that are being referred to as smartphones.
As a communicative device, photography is unsurpassed. Granted, it has its deficiencies, most of which are grounded in the basic fact that people see in a photograph what they want to and/or are able to see in it. But a photograph’s visual immediacy more than makes up for it. While you can read a photograph — study the way it’s composed and what basic facts it conveys, that read will always only be secondary. I don’t believe for a second that anyone is able to immediately jump to a reading, without having a photograph’s visual flash impressed into their brains. You do not get this immediacy with any other medium. Other media rely on time to achieve their ends. Photography not only stops time in its frames, it also is able to convey something on a time scale that’s similar to the short moment the shutter was open. I don’t know whether this basic fact already poses a problem for photography as art, but it just might. After all, art relies on someone finding the time to be exposed to it. Art is based on time and also space in ways that photography is not. Thus when you insert photography into an art setting, you already make it conform to conventions that (at least in principle) are somewhat alien to it. In effect, photographs in an art setting are usually made to operate like paintings, which, again, works well some of the time.
It was rather telling that when digital photography arrived on the scene, the first thing most art photographers did was to try to use it in exactly the fashion they were familiar with. The main questions were: how can we produce large prints that have as much detail as we’re used to? In principle, there’s nothing wrong with this approach (in particular if you’re interested in selling prints). But you could easily argue that digital photography finally realized the medium’s most inate potential, namely the ability to easily produce any number of identical copies of the same photograph. Shoehorning it into the old art approach threw that away. With digital photography, you can also easily create any number of photographs of the same thing or scene, which, it turns out, is what most people do. Again, this was something that was immediately discarded by most art photographers. On top of that, the complaint that there were too many photographs emerged — as if, somehow, there were a way to quantify or define what the right number of photographs might be. The flood of photographs, the talking point goes, leads to “us” (the assumptions behind the “we” here are never explored) becoming numb to photographs or to not fully appreciating something any longer. It’s really quite a reactionary response to what could have been an incredibly liberating moment in the history of photography.
And it was a liberating moment in the history of photography as all of those people happily taking and sharing photographs experience it every single day. The only people struggling with all of this were and are the photographers who consider themselves at the forefront of their medium: the artists (or photographers who think of themselves as artists).
There’s something incredibly tragic about the fact that in 1917, Marcel Duchamp put a urinal on a pedestal, signed it (“R. Mutt”), and that Alfred Steiglitz (yes, that Alfred Stieglitz) exhibited it at his 291 gallery, only to then proceed to treat photography not as something like the equivalent of the urinal but instead as something akin to painting. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to imply anything by equating photography to a urinal. It’s just that Duchamp picked a urinal, a mass-produced and rather mundane object. Photography itself can be mass-produced, and mostly it’s rather mundane. Prosaic even. Which, if you think about it, has enormous potential if you insert it into an art setting. But of course, the moment you try to emulate painting, you will have to throw almost all of that out of the window. In some grim sense, I have to hand it to all of those art photographers, in particular once digital photography became prevalent: it takes some determination to stick with a narrow convention of what your medium can do while camera makers put enormous efforts into demonstrating how outdated that approach is! And, to reiterate this yet again, that outdated approach can produce some good art, as it sometimes does.
But it often does not. A lot of contemporary art photography feels stale, rehashing the same ideas over and over again, using the same formats and approaches.
[continued on Patreon]