John's False Start: show me the money...

A recent article in Newsweek opened with the question, “Is photography dead?“. The title is a play on the purported words of Paul Delaroche, the painter who some hundred and fifty years ago, after viewing the Daguerreotype for the first time, is to have said “from today, painting is dead”. The associated debate over the general well-being of painting has been raging for quite some time.   But a century and a half later, while Paul Delaroche is certainly ashes and dust, this plastic art is alive and well.  It appears some wish it were dead, arguing for example that the isolated act of painting stands in the way of artistic collaboration.  However,  it remains as popular as ever amongst patrons of the arts.  Consider the painter Jasper Johns, for example, who isn’t (dead, that is).  While he is arguably a one-artist show, I think it safe to say that art lovers world-wide remain appreciative of his work.  They’ll pay a lot of money to own it, too: Johns’ piece, False Start (1959), sold at Sotheby’s for $17 million.  It was later flipped by the entertainment guy David Geffen to  the hedge fund guy Kenneth Griffin for a whopping $80.1 million.  Not bad for the work of an unsociable, isolationist painter.

But back to photography.  The Newsweek article seems preoccupied with the growing ease by which digital photographic images are now manipulated.  But as I mentioned in an earlier post, photographic manipulation is as old as photography itself.  The article goes on to claim that “photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist’s imagination, except that they lack the painting’s manual touch and surface variation”.   “The next great photographers”, it concludes, “will have to find a way to reclaim photography’s special link to reality”. Really?  Since when is a photographic record of a moment fundamentally more “real” than a plein aire landscape painting? In both, the artist interprets the subject via the final image; and like the painter, the photographer lends her/his point of view to the imagery, choosing as much to exclude what is there as to include it, all in order to convey some story. Even prior to post-processing, the photographer’s selection of exposure, lens type and perspective all work to create an image that is not, in and of itself, necessarily real, yet may in fact be true to the artist’s experience of the subject.  So while the issue of “faithful record” certainly is of concern in photojournalism and documentation, it strikes me at best as irrelevant in the gallery.  As Pilate once queried, I might ask in reference to art: what is truth?

Newsweek’s opening question is not new – in fact, Stephen Bulger held an exhibition entitled “The Death of Photography” in 2008, while  Darius Himes wrote the essay to accompany the exhibit’s catalog, an extended version of which can be found here. Portions of Himes’ article wax nostalgically over the darkroom experience, now in serious decline. He predicts that, while alternative processing methods such as platinum printing and cyanotypes will live on because they involve simple formulas and available materials, “(t)he same is not true, or has yet to be seen, for the sheer number of copyrighted, company-specific products that are rapidly disappearing from the shelves of camera stores worldwide”. In other words, the really “good” (in terms of image quality) silver gelatin formulations, being the patented property of a declining industry, are doomed to go the way of the dinosaur.

Sally Mann, Untitled (1998), from the "Deep South" series

But if standard chemical processing truly is destined for extinction it is because, in the eyes of practicing photographers, an overall better technology exists: digital.  Better, you say?! Yep – more accurate in terms of  of colour, now of equal or better dynamic range, and more amenable to fine tuning in post-processing.  All that without the hassle (and smell) of chemicals. (No doubt there will be some who will miss that smell – I’m not one of them.) Meanwhile, artists such as  Sally Mann, who’s current equipment consists of  wet plate collodion 8×10 glass negatives and a 100-year old 8 x 10 bellows view camera, will keep “the old arts” alive with their remarkable imagery and creative vision.

In the end art pundits and publications die;  as do even the artists.  What remains is the art. No doubt, the modes of expression for many artists will continue to  evolve.  But true to Darwinian form, some forms of expression will remain so well suited to certain artists that, like crocodiles, they just won’t change much over the millennia.  The Leviathan of paint and collodian wet plates adopted by the likes of Johns and Mann will continue for as long as those vehicles satisfy the artists’ own creative characters.  Other artists will adopt the technology of the day, while still others will seek new, yet untapped forms of expression.  Does it really matter?

And so for those forbearing enough to reach the end of this long-winded post, I leave you with a short clip that I believe summarizes the debate rather nicely…