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Artforum On Photography

Arthurwg

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The latest issue of Artforum (Nov. 2025) has a special section on photography that may be of interest. It starts with "Fugitive Processes: The Materiality of Photography," and goes on to discuss "The Future of Photography: A Roundtable," plus portfolios by several art photographers and more. I'd like to hear your thoughts.
 
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It is a thought provoking read.
 
The uninitiated would think "What's the big deal? Just make a new copy." It's interesting that photography can be about both unlimited reproducibility and the uniqueness and impermanence of what is considered a "photo".

We had discussion on Cindy Sherman's print-replacement program on here before (that thread may have ended up locked - those type often do....)
 

There is actually a reference to that Cindy Sherman program in the article - which Don might be referring to here.
I thought this from Jeff Wall was interesting:
"JW: Today happens to be the final day of a project I began in 2005—making reserve copies of all my transparencies. Twenty years later, the last roll is running and the last prints are being made. I did it because I knew I could produce excellent, long-lasting prints, pushing the problem of preserving those transparencies back another fifty years. By then, there’ll be another solution. I’ve never felt the need to do the same for silver gelatin or—so far—for ink-jet."
Those "transparencies" are, I expect, the wall sized Cibachromes.
 
Don_ih said:
I'd expect they're the transparencies from which the Cibachromes were made?
Click to expand...

I wondered about that.
But as his most valuable/recognized work is in the form of large, backlit transparencies, and as the reserve copy project he refers to has taken 20 years, I don't think so.
 
I just read through large parts of a master's thesis by Samantha Ackerley called "Preserving Jeff Wall" - all about his lightbox transparencies and their deterioration. The program Wall refers to is to create a supply of transparencies that can be used to provide replacements for the ones in existing lightboxes when the time comes to do so. A transparency (printed on Ilfochrome or Fujitrans) is only expected to survive up to 12 years. Apparently, at the time of that thesis (2014), his Destroyed Room lightbox still contained the original transparencies, in spite of being the most displayed of all lightboxes.

Some interesting ideas about what constitutes an "original" artwork are briefly mentioned in there, since the lightboxes themselves have undergone modification over time that actually has some impact on the final appearance or experience of the art. So, it's more than just these lightboxes no longer contain the actual photographic element that was originally in them, but the lighting elements have been altered which changes the temperature or brightness of the colours. The main interesting idea is, if the "original" is whatever the source is (a film transparency or a digital file, in the case of digitally produced images), then what is it that the galleries are buying?

Wall maintains complete control over his artwork, including the rights to determine if and when a transparency should be replaced and also whether or not a work should be withheld from public display.
 
MattKing said:
Typo fixed.
The magazine is behind a partial paywall - limits on the numbers of articles per month - but here is the link to the article itself: https://www.artforum.com/features/photography-roundtable-1234736996/
Click to expand...
Online search turns up this page: https://www.artforum.com/issue/2025/november-2025-1234736604/
I don't know which, how many and for how long any of the articles are readable, but I opened one and it seems I can read at least part of it.
Either way, the link above gives the full table of contents.
 
Scanning chromes and displaying them on a 4K or 8K smart TV is sort of like backlit transparencies. They'll never go bad as they're digitized. You can calibrate the color to match the original or just use your own gut.
 
Many in the discussion in the roundtable you shared Arthur, seem eager to prove that photography has a real, physical presence. They talk about prints on copper, fading dyes, paper quality, and patina (?), as if giving photographs the weight of paintings or sculptures. But that obsession reveals a kind of insecurity. This "material thing" feels less like photography finding itself and more like it borrowing prestige from other established arts. This is very far from my view of photography which I like to define as merely a trace of time and space, not an object in the traditional sense.

Therefore, although I find the discussion pretty interesting I have to share my point that I fundamentally disagree with all of them and this disagreement comes from a deeper stance towards photography as many of you have already understood from my other posts. And in order to prevent any rage this is just a personal view on photography and what kind of photography I am attracted to not a dismissal to any other types of photography art
 
I don't follow your reasoning and in particular I find the observation about 'insecurity' far-fetched, illogical, not supported by any reasonable argument and quite frankly weird.
 
koraks said:
I don't follow your reasoning and in particular I find the observation about 'insecurity' far-fetched, illogical, not supported by any reasonable argument and quite frankly weird.
Click to expand...
Ok... maybe "insecurity" sounded harsher than I meant. What I was getting at is that this strong emphasis on paper, patina, or metal often feels like an attempt to give photography the kind of physical presence that painting or sculpture naturally has. It’s as if the medium is still negotiating its own identity, I thought this has settled but perhaps not, or perhaps it is still reinventing itself constantly (I still remember your new style of photos you shared with us once in another thread and caused some stir).

I don’t see it as a flaw at all. Maybe, more as a symptom of photography’s hybrid nature, which is part image, part thing, but never entirely either. Its real substance, to me, is still a trace of light and time, which can be stored and shown anywhere, not copper or matte paper or silk cotton.
 
People like physical objects that they can touch, hold, walk around etc. It's part of human nature. I don't see why that's odd or mysterious, or somehow a deficiency or a distraction from what photography is about. I also don't see signs of an argument in the direction of wanting to piggy-back on other art forms. Maybe that part is in your head, not so much in the heads of photographers. AFAIK most photographers were done trying to push against painting by about 1910 or so, and moved on.
 

I think my trigger was when I saw in the roundtable Jeff Wall saying:
"Once photographs began to be appreciated in a way that only paintings or sculptures had been, the issue of stability became much more central."
And I can't help but thinking of his own photography. Monumental, meticulously staged, technically perfect. But also embodying the very thing I’m skeptical about: the push to make photographs behave like paintings or sculptures.
So when I see him saying that then this is definitely for me a piggy-back on other art forms.
 
Btw I also like physical stuff my best thing about photography is to hold and see it in a book but this is personal
 
There's no need to piggy back on other art forms. Photography is itself a visual art form. What Wall was referring to was when people began to value photos as art objects and not just records of people, places, things, and events. It was even after that that photographic prints began to be considered valuable in themselves.

@nikos79 -- perhaps you should spend some time making enlargements. Part of the point of the whole "Let's All Print the Same Negative" activity you participated in was to see what different photos resulted from the same negative. The photo isn't just what's depicted. It's also how it's finally presented. That's one of the reasons so many people wish we would've actually bundled all the resultant physical prints together to see them in person. So many different prints resulting from (essentially) the same negative, it shows the interpretation and actual work that goes into making a print matters as much as the negative itself.
 

Ok got it now good example
 
Alan Edward Klein said:
Scanning chromes and displaying them on a 4K or 8K smart TV is sort of like backlit transparencies. They'll never go bad as they're digitized. You can calibrate the color to match the original or just use your own gut.
Click to expand...

I'm looking forward to the Sotheby's auction, where your photograph, shown on your living room TV, is one of the lots.
Somehow that brings the NE Thing Co. to mind.
The linked article is about the tension between photography as a performative Art, and photography as an Art that creates individual, collectable pieces of Art.
 
nikos79 said:
This is very far from my view of photography which I like to define as merely a trace of time and space, not an object in the traditional sense.
Click to expand...

Yes, some folks think of photography as ephemera, but collectors and museums don't seem to think that way. And BTW, I have a Baldus print from 1856 that still looks pretty good.
 
MattKing said:
I'm looking forward to the Sotheby's auction, where your photograph, shown on your living room TV, is one of the lots.
Click to expand...

I was at the McMichael Art Gallery a few months ago and there was an installation that was a ~30 year old tv and vcr playing a video over and over. I imagine they don't break it out very often. But it's a single complete work and how it looks is part of what it is. So, Alan's tv had to go with the digital photos, along with whatever is feeding the photos to the tv. Then, ideologically, it's not much different from one of Jeff Wall's lightboxes.

You could pull the transparencies out of Wall's lightbox and shove in a KFC poster. It has a practical application that is similar to Alan's tv.

Photography is interesting because it has the appearance of unlimited instances of the same photo. The reality is more often that there are few genuine instances of a particular photo and many copies. When you look up Pepper 30 you find this:


which I just copied from the Wikipedia page. That is itself a digitization of print that was made by Brett Weston and sold at Sotheby's (next to Alan's tv). So, negative shot by Edward, printed by Brett (following the instructions Edward left behind). You can say that the print was authenticated (sort of) but what about the digitization of the print? What about my copy of that copy? We see way way way more copies than originals. Photo books may or may not be approved by the photographer. Scans that end up online are almost certainly not. Anyway, it's interesting. Well, I have a personal interest in copying, anyway.

These digital copies will likely float around long after the paper in the original prints has turned to dust. Well, in some form or other. The likelihood is that, ultimately, there will be no original of any of these things, anymore. Just copies. But who decides when a copy is as good as an original? In Jeff Wall's instance, Jeff Wall does. In Cindy Sherman's instance, Cindy Sherman does. But Edward Weston is dead.

True to form, the first 6 Google image results:

 
Since the 'birth' of the medium, a date that itself is a matter of debate, there have always been multiple Photographies, and that's part of the interest. The idea of distilling or essentialising Photography into one thing is an ahistorical fools errand - a thinking borrowed from very different fields. Barthes "Camera Lucida" is a sort of essentialising project, but its ultimate achievement is to point to the very elusiveness of photographs. They are never quite what they are meant to be.

I see the point about Photography and Fine Art criteria - including the focus on 'materiality' that is central to a lot of Fine Art thinking, whilst irrelevant to other Photographies. That's Artforum & Jeff Wall's context - so hardly a surprise that they express such concerns. But Wall is well aware of other forms of photography (he's written about them) as well as other forms of Art.
 
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