Photography is "over"

removed account4 · Oct 13, 2017

when people filled photo albums with photographs, or got the folders of prints and negatives back
often times they were never looked at much again, its the same thing with the digital them, except
now they can be accessed easily from anywhere from their cloud account or fb page and other people
get to see them... the photo-taker doesn't have to mail someone the photograph have it get creased or bent up
via the postal system and attach a note that says " if the post office creased the photo just iron it or put it under something heavy to flatten it"
( those were the words of fox talbot to john hershel around 1840 ) if he was a modernist, he would have just emailed him
the url and no iron would have been needed ...

mshchem · Oct 13, 2017

Bluto: Over? Did you say “over”? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

Otter: Bluto’s right. Psychotic, but absolutely right.... No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.

Bluto: We’re just the guys to do it.

BOTTOM LINE Film is fun, it's also somewhat of a heroic (maybe futile) act. There will always be passionate NUTS out there making photos! And we're just the people to do it!
Best Mike

Gerald C Koch · Oct 13, 2017

If photography is dead then why is there a new exhibition of a 'dead' technology. The writer of the Guardian article contradicts itself. The polaroid has been replaced by the image on the cell phone..j

blockend · Oct 14, 2017

TheRook said:
Furthermore, many of those thousands of pictures that only exist in the digital realm will likely be permanently lost 20 years from now. The only way to preserve a digital image long term is to copy and backup them up regularly, which most people simply don't take the time do. In contrast, prints require very little maintenance for long term preservation.

I'm sure you're right.

My introduction to photographs was the large box my mother took out when I was a child. It contained pictures from pre-WW1 to the 1960s when I first looked at them. She'd get the box out and sift through them, wiping away a rear or laughing quietly to herself. Then someone would join her and ask who the faces were. Then more would gather round and we'd spend an hour or two learning who the people were and what our relationship was to them and what became of them. Then they'd be put away and the process begun again a few months later.

I think that kind of intimacy and social bonding through photographs is probably dead. The idea of an image worn through touch and creased at the corners but still important, is not something modern sensibilities would understand.

removed account4 · Oct 14, 2017

TheRook said:
Furthermore, many of those thousands of pictures that only exist in the digital realm will likely be permanently lost 20 years from now. The only way to preserve a digital image long term is to copy and backup them up regularly, which most people simply don't take the time do. In contrast, prints require very little maintenance for long term preservation.

cloud storage and websites are being backed up endlessly. phones often times have their image backed up without people knowing it
if you lost everything in a house fire/tornado/flood/earthquake, and all your negatives and prints were gone, you could access photrio
through your "mind loop-inplant " whatever you had in the gallery would still be there. you'd just have to update your spinal sim card
and have them again.

c41 · Oct 14, 2017

With digital photography its not necessarily the preservation of the images but the findability of them.
I’d suggest its akin to having a physical book or music collection vs a digital one. Yes, the digital may be preserved but even if it can be ‘found’ by someone later, its stripped of a lot of deeper meaning a physical object has, its ‘story’ as a thing is missing.

adelorenzo · Oct 14, 2017

Surprised so many people here do not seem to know Wim Wenders. He isn't just some random guy he's a highly regarded film director as well as a published photographer. I own and very much enjoy his photo book Places Strange and Quiet.

He's not just talking about his we take photos but also how we look at them. Billions of photos whose life span consists of a brief glance in people's Facebook or Instagram feeds as they scroll by. Is photography over? Maybe not but hard to deny that it has changed dramatically in the past decade or so.

faberryman · Oct 14, 2017

Is taking a picture of your lunch and posting it to Facebook really photography?

c41 · Oct 14, 2017

adelorenzo said:
Surprised so many people here do not seem to know Wim Wenders. He isn't just some random guy he's a highly regarded film director as well as a published photographer. I own and very much enjoy his photo book Places Strange and Quiet.

He's not just talking about his we take photos but also how we look at them. Billions of photos whose life span consists of a brief glance in people's Facebook or Instagram feeds as they scroll by. Is photography over? Maybe not but hard to deny that it has changed dramatically in the past decade or so.

I watched his documentary about Salgado, The Salt of the Earth, just the other night. Wings of Desire is the only film he directed i really loved.

He’s of course entitled to his opinion and comes from a position of relative authority on the subject. FWIW i don’t agree with him, i prefer a more optimistic outlook,

Photography 2.0 is over and the next iteration is only just beginning?

People are always going to see the world and want to share how they see it, its part of the human condition.

Wim Wenders, like Salgado, feels like someone at the end of their journey, someone younger might i hope feel like Photography has never had more possibility?

1 million plus people instantly seeing your photograph has to be something new even if it has a shallowness about it.

I get where he is coming from in the original article of course, the world is forever changed from 1978.

awty · Oct 14, 2017

Its OK, it still lives, you can get a Polaroid app now.

MartinCrabtree · Oct 14, 2017

Why bother with an App? You can buy a Polaroid.

Helios 1984 · Oct 14, 2017

faberryman said:
Is taking a picture of your lunch and posting it to Facebook really photography?

Snapography.

ME Super · Oct 15, 2017

As someone who works in IT, I can tell you that copying and backing digital files that represent images up regularly is something that a personal computer user can automate quite easily. Dare I say that the software to do this can be had for free, and hard drive storage is cheap these days. Cloud storage is a different beast, and generally has a monthly cost.

Having said all that, there's a reason why I still do film photography. I like it. Plain and simple.

eddie · Oct 15, 2017

I don’t think it’s “over”. I do think the democratization of photography has both positives and negatives. On the plus side, it now allows people to document, and communicate, more easily. On the minus side ( and, perhaps, most important to those of us who hang out here) is how it has changed the way most people view photographs. The constant barrage of images has caused people to look at them much quicker, before going on to the next one. We, as a group, put more effort into our image making, with the hope/ expectation that viewers will invest a commensurate amount of time into viewing what we’ve created. It’s not over, but it’s more difficult to be seen as making “serious” photographs, as that requires a longer attention span than most viewers now have.

Craig75 · Oct 15, 2017

adelorenzo said:
Surprised so many people here do not seem to know Wim Wenders. He isn't just some random guy he's a highly regarded film director as well as a published photographer. I own and very much enjoy his photo book Places Strange and Quiet.

He's not just talking about his we take photos but also how we look at them. Billions of photos whose life span consists of a brief glance in people's Facebook or Instagram feeds as they scroll by. Is photography over? Maybe not but hard to deny that it has changed dramatically in the past decade or so.

this... he's hardly "Yet another journalist" and I'm pretty sure he's aware he has an exhibition while making his claims!

1L6E6VHF · Oct 15, 2017

BrianVS said:
Hopefully peel-apart Polaroid Film will make a comeback. Looks like he uses a Model 240 with the Zeiss viewfinder in place of the original. I have one just like it, also modified it to use 3 AAA batteries. And a Model 250.
I still have a few packs of 690 in the Fridge, so it is not over for me.

Polaroid 250 and 240+ by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr

Interesting to see that 240 refitted with the Zeiss finder.

In my experience, the 240 seems to be among the rarest of the breed, the 250 being far more common.

The 240 is identical to the 100 in all features.

JensH · Oct 15, 2017

mshchem said:
Bluto: Over? Did you say “over”? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Best Mike

Not even when the Japanese did so... ;-)

Jens

faberryman · Oct 15, 2017

“It’s not just the meaning of the image that has changed – the act of looking does not have the same meaning. Now, it’s about showing, sending and maybe remembering. It is no longer essentially about the image. The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone.”

This is an absurd conclusion. Photography is still all about the image. What has changed is Wim Wenders. He lost his innocence along the way.

wiltw · Oct 15, 2017

Photography is EVOLVED -- yet again. The process, the chemistry of the process have evolved MULTIPLE times over the past, the equipment used to capture the image and the form of the image capture itself have evolved MULTIPLE times over the past. Orthochromatic evolved to panchromatic, Kodachrome evolved to Ektachrome, some have disappeared forever (Kodachrome, Cibachroime), some have come back (Polaroid). Some have emerged more recently and are continuing to evolve (CCD-based has evolved to CMOS-based and now EXMOR is the best of the technologies).

Through it all, elements of good composition and 'proper exposure' has prevailed in common with all of them.
'Photography' means 'writing with light', and as long as that remains, Photography lives.

eddie · Oct 15, 2017

faberryman said:
“It’s not just the meaning of the image that has changed – the act of looking does not have the same meaning. Now, it’s about showing, sending and maybe remembering. It is no longer essentially about the image. The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone.”

This is an absurd conclusion. Photography is still all about the image. What has changed is Wim Wenders. He lost his innocence along the way.

I think it’s still about the image to people like us. For the vast majority of people it has become disposable. Take a quick glance at someone’s posted taco lunch, then move on to someone else’s selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower, then on to something else. Those of us interested in the power of a single photograph are in the minority. Recently someone posted about being in a museum, watching as people walked by, snapping phone pics of the artwork.
It’s no longer about having the experience. It’s about sharing the experience. I think that’s what Wenders is getting at.

faberryman · Oct 15, 2017

eddie said:
I think it’s still about the image to people like us. For the vast majority of people it has become disposable.

It has always been thus.

eddie · Oct 15, 2017

faberryman said:
It has always been thus.

Not really. There was an interaction which required effort, even thumbing through family photo albums. Now, moving on is as simple as scrolling to the next image. I don’t think this is unique to photography, or art in general. The advances in technology were meant to make us more productive and efficient. We can now do more in much less time. The problem is, that efficiency has infiltrated itself into our private lives. No one will “stop to smell the roses” anymore. Soon, though, there will be an app for that...

faberryman · Oct 15, 2017

People for ages took photographs of daily life and birthdays and vacations, and after looking at them once, threw them in a shoebox where they might not be looked at for years. If they mounted them in an album they frequently had 4-6 to a page, so instead of leafing through them one at a time on your iPhone, you could leaf though them even more efficiently 4-6 at a time. The Norman Rockwell myth of families sitting together regularly to look though their photo albums is just that. Billions of photographs went from drugstore to shoebox to landfill, and nobody particularly cared. But of course some people want to romanticize the past. It's called nostalgia.

eddie · Oct 15, 2017

My experience was different. Slide shows, perusing albums, and even the occasional movie were regular occurrences during family gatherings.

TheRook · Oct 15, 2017

jnanian said:
cloud storage and websites are being backed up endlessly. phones often times have their image backed up without people knowing it
if you lost everything in a house fire/tornado/flood/earthquake, and all your negatives and prints were gone, you could access photrio
through your "mind loop-inplant " whatever you had in the gallery would still be there. you'd just have to update your spinal sim card
and have them again.

I'm not so confident the companies hosting those websites and cloud storage facilities will still be there 30 years from now. Or that the uploaded files will still exist and be accessible after all that time has passed. Digital storage has limitations. Although not obvious now, I think this will present a problem down the road... resulting in an entire generation of image taking lost. Except for the prints, that is.

Photography is "over"

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