What Future For Photography?

We recently went to the Bill Brandt show at the Museum of Modern Art.

Brandt is a very famous photographer, but in all honesty, when I saw most of his work my reaction was ‘what’s the big deal?’

I don’t want to come off as an intellectual troglodyte, and I have a long running love-affair with photography. I even own a few Salgados. But the Brandt photos were… feh.

OK. But what’s the big deal?

The NY Times review of the show was written with typical ‘art criticism’ praise:

 A Camera Ravenous for Emotional Depth

I understand, at least intellectually, the historical import of Brandt, placed in the context of photography per se.  But again, the images, for the most part, feh.

Why the feh?

A piece in The Guardian today helped me put it in perspective.

Facebook users alone are posting more than 300 million photographs a day.

Add to that another 11 billion photographs uploaded to sites like Flickr and Instagram and you have (here the word Tsunami is an understatement) of photography.

There are, in fact, no words to describe this explosion of visual content because nothing like this has ever happened before in human history. Even after the invention of the printing press, it took  generations to reach 15 million volumes published, a mere grain of sand on the beach of photography’s explosion.

What then is the impact on the world of photography of such an astonishing inundation of visual imagery?

Like an adolescent boy pawing through a mountain of Playboy magazines, after  while what was once a stimulating image increasingly becomes commonplace and not quite as wonderful and interesting as it was at first glance.

So too it is, I think, with photography.

In the world before photography was invented there was painting, and a good portrait painter was guaranteed a life of employment and a lifetime of work. The wealthy and noble would pay a fortune to have their own images captured forever on canvas, and the essence of most painting was the rendition of the most lifelike images that their skills could command.

When photography emerged in the middle of the 19th Century, the skills to accurately reproduce reality in oil became, if not worthless, certainly less interesting.

Painting responded by ‘unleashing’ the creative talents of its painters and the age of Impressionism and Modernism were upon us.  OK, photographs could perfectly capture reality, but what photographer could capture emotion in the way that Matisse or Picasso or Rothko could?

Painting changed.

My guess is that if Mark Rothko had been producing his paintings in 15th Century France he would not have found much of a market at all. Maybe there were people doing Rothko-like paintings then, but clearly none of them ever saw the light of day or survived. Crazy is what the people at the time would have called them. Or talentless.

Now digital photography and the web (and everyone having a HD camera in their iPhone and soon in their Google Glass) seem to have rendered the idea of a professional photographer increasingly obsolete.

What value is there in being a ‘professional photographer’ in a world in which there are more than a billion cameras recording and uploading images every day?

Probably not much.

If there is a future to photography for the future it is most likely in a world of photography as a fine art and  world in which the images captured can transcend merely reproducing what one sees.

Maybe.

But what that looks like is probably as far removed and as distant from what we understand photography to be today as Mark Rothko would have been from a Titian.

Meanwhile, Bill Brandt?

eh….

Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013