What modern photography is "INNOVATIVE"?

snusmumriken · Jun 17, 2025

Arthurwg said:
How about your opinion of some fundamentally innovative photography?

OK. For example, the first person(s) to:

photograph strangers from the photographer’s own culture without prior acquaintance or conversation (what we call street photography today);
photograph moving subjects (Muybridge, Lartigue, early flash photography, …);
photograph unpleasant scenes (war, crime, etc);
capture humour in photographs;
document communities or social conditions, often for political motives;
photograph boring scenes for their own sake;
make photographs that intentionally say more about the photographer than about the items photographed;
etc

(I’ve listed only what one might call innovations in creativity, though in many cases they were consequent on technical innovation. I’m assuming the purely technical innovations, like micro-photography, polarised light, x-ray, electron, scanning electron, underwater, aerial, etc are not relevant to this thread.)

koraks · Jun 17, 2025

Innovation in photography can pertain to what's in the picture, how it's being pictured, how the image is composed, technical aspects of image-making, the meaning of the image, the context in which the image is made or presented and the societal role it plays and probably a couple more things I forget about. Plenty of museums and galleries feature shows of photography that's innovative in at least one and sometimes multiple ways. Examples range from major names to small-time artists who will probably remain mostly anonymous and are too plentiful to even start listing.

What occurs to me in reading this thread so far is that some people are really jaded about the innovative potential within photography (or perhaps any art form) and at the same time do not seem to be aware of how innovative it can be. I imagine that would be a depressing position to be in as a photographer, although I can see merit in the repetitive ritual of pressing the button and looking at the pretty colors regardless of the actual images as such. A bit like a zen pebble garden that's raked anew every day.

nikos79 · Jun 17, 2025

BrianShaw said:
... so "innovative photography" may be the new "eye" rather than the new "thing".

whatever those words mean...

Yes it is always like that. The new eye, the new perspective on same things, because we are all different and every artist offers us a glimpse into his own world

Don_ih · Jun 17, 2025

"Different" and "innovative" are not synonyms.

Scanning was innovative. Using a computer connected to a printer to print the photo was innovative. Photoshop (and similar) was innovative. Digital photography was innovative. Those are changes or adoptions that have enabled a lot of photography to be done differently.

Pointing the camera at your lunch is not innovative.

nikos79 · Jun 17, 2025

I think the two last innovations for photography was the digital and the invention of Internet (the latter had more to do with the exposure of your photography).
In the meantime I haven't seen anything I never saw before.

koraks · Jun 17, 2025

@Don_ih your comments are based on a restrictive view of innovation which is not representative of how the term is generally used in various contexts in which it plays a large role. Radical technological innovation is a tiny subset of the larger domain and it's barely relevant to photography, and it has nothing to do with the remark I made that sparked off this thread.

It's fine if you want to understand innovation for yourself as radical and technological by definition, but it renders your views on the matter irrelevant to the topic that's being discussed here.

It would be sad if this in principle interesting discussion would continue to be bogged down by a few people into a matter of semantics. You should know better. Now please carry on with the good stuff.

nikos79 · Jun 17, 2025

koraks said:
@Don_ih your comments are based on a restrictive view of innovation which is not representative of how the term is generally used in various contexts in which it plays a large role. Radical technological innovation is a tiny subset of the larger domain and it's barely relevant to photography, and it has nothing to do with the remark I made that sparked off this thread.

It's fine if you want to understand innovation for yourself as radical and technological by definition, but it renders your views on the matter irrelevant to the topic that's being discussed here.

It would be sad if this in principle interesting discussion would continue to be bogged down by a few people into a matter of semantics. You should know better. Now please carry on with the good stuff.

My biggest objection to this is that most "innovation" has tried to put things into photography that have nothing to do with photography to justify it, e.g. large texts to justify(?) a photography, extreme conceptualism, impressed visual settings e.g. combining photography installations with paintings, music, dance or whatever other nonsense you might think of, making all the trees red (I see it in so many artists), etc.
I feel all that very undermining to the actual pure (and poor) photography and feel sorry for all these artists that need the term innovation to stand out.
In the end I totally agree with @Don_ih that in the core of it nothing has changed, you see something, you react, you frame, and hope for the best.
All others are just gimmicks in my very humble opinion.
Or maybe I am getting old and stubborn and don't get easily impressed

koraks · Jun 17, 2025

nikos79 said:
I feel all that very undermining to the actual pure (and poor) photography and feel sorry for all these artists that need the term innovation to stand out.

Innovation and staunch conservatism have never been very productive partners.

By the way, the question was not normative. Neither was my comment from which it originated.

snusmumriken · Jun 17, 2025

koraks said:
It's fine if you want to understand innovation for yourself as radical and technological by definition, but it renders your views on the matter irrelevant to the topic that's being discussed here.

But in the AI thread you said that photography hasn't been very innovative for the last 80 years. Did you mean 'not very innovative' with respect to the things you list above, ie:

koraks said:
what's in the picture, how it's being pictured, how the image is composed, technical aspects of image-making, the meaning of the image, the context in which the image is made or presented and the societal role it plays and probably a couple more things I forget about

Is that what you think?

koraks · Jun 17, 2025

snusmumriken said:
you said that photography hasn't been very innovative for the last 80 years.

No, I didn't.
But the way you summarized what I said is in fact an apt illustration of what's going on. Thanks for that!

koraks · Jun 17, 2025

BrianShaw said:
Are there any examples that anyone can suggest?

As I argued before, there's lots. Three examples I'd like to highlight just because I've seen their work fairly recently and I feel they illustrate some aspects of innovativeness as I understand it:
https://www.instagram.com/ilonaplaum/ (contemporary); this is photography that breaks out of its box all the time and plays with how shapes and space interact. As a viewer, you're constantly left wondering what you're exactly looking at until you just let go.
https://www.vivianesassen.com (contemporary) the concept of 'visual language' I find is illustrated well with her work; while the subject matter is hard to make sense of, form, shape and color make perfect sense. I find this contrast between a chaotic content and a super logical and consistent form very witty.
And also this: https://snmngpn.com/ (who has posted here a few times) - I want to include this because of the technical aspect to innovation which strongly features in (some of) her work, which for me is not a necessary element to innovation, but at the same time also doesn't have to be excluded. Particularly appealing to me personally is that her work is predominantly made on color silver halide paper, which by today's standards is 'old hat' material, but like several other photographers she's exploring new ways to use it.

I realize now that the 3 examples I included happen to be women. It's honestly entirely accidental, but it's a coincidence I appreciate.

nikos79 · Jun 17, 2025

koraks said:
As I argued before, there's lots. Three examples I'd like to highlight just because I've seen their work fairly recently and I feel they illustrate some aspects of innovativeness as I understand it:
https://www.instagram.com/ilonaplaum/ (contemporary); this is photography that breaks out of its box all the time and plays with how shapes and space interact. As a viewer, you're constantly left wondering what you're exactly looking at until you just let go.
https://www.vivianesassen.com (contemporary) the concept of 'visual language' I find is illustrated well with her work; while the subject matter is hard to make sense of, form, shape and color make perfect sense. I find this contrast between a chaotic content and a super logical and consistent form very witty.
And also this: https://snmngpn.com/ (who has posted here a few times) - I want to include this because of the technical aspect to innovation which strongly features in (some of) her work, which for me is not a necessary element to innovation, but at the same time also doesn't have to be excluded. Particularly appealing to me personally is that her work is predominantly made on color silver halide paper, which by today's standards is 'old hat' material, but like several other photographers she's exploring new ways to use it.

I realize now that the 3 examples I included happen to be women. It's honestly entirely accidental, but it's a coincidence I appreciate.

I went through all these three. Nothing of them is photography in my definition. Visual arts, fine arts, "gallery photography" perhaps yes.
But not for me sorry. When I speak photography I search for the eye and sensitivity of the new Kertesz, Sudek, Ronis.
This is something else.

Alex Benjamin · Jun 17, 2025

Milpool said:
Every artform (every pursuit, really) eventually reaches a stage when the leaps and bounds have all happened.

Only seems that way when you're in between leaps and bounds. What art history actually tells us is that these relatively stable "in-between" periods can last a few years, decades, a century or more. But leaps and bounds eventually happen.

nikos79 said:
Everything has be done. Nothing is innovative. The only innovative is the artist's view which on the same things is every time different

Someone has said this very same thing in every era in the history of mankind since mankind began being creative. The only thing the sentence "Everything has been done" really points to is our lack of imagination and our impossibility to tell the future.

Alex Benjamin · Jun 17, 2025

...should add that it's also a sign of an era's arrogance to believe it represents the summum of all human creativity and that nothing new will come after it.

Après moi le déluge, as they say...

nikos79 · Jun 17, 2025

Alex Benjamin said:
Only seems that way when you're in between leaps and bounds. What art history actually tells us is that these relatively stable "in-between" periods can last a few years, decades, a century or more. But leaps and bounds eventually happen.

Someone has said this very same thing in every era in the history of mankind since mankind began being creative. The only thing the sentence "Everything has been done" really points to is our lack of imagination and our impossibility to tell the future.

It might be a new Euripides, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Fellini, Kertesz to name a few but it will be very rare

BrianShaw · Jun 17, 2025

nikos79 said:
I went through all these three. Nothing of them is photography in my definition. Visual arts, fine arts, "gallery photography" perhaps yes.
But not for me sorry. When I speak photography I search for the eye and sensitivity of the new Kertesz, Sudek, Ronis.
This is something else.

... and not especially "innovative" IMHO.

Milpool · Jun 17, 2025

Alex Benjamin said:
Only seems that way when you're in between leaps and bounds. What art history actually tells us is that these relatively stable "in-between" periods can last a few years, decades, a century or more. But leaps and bounds eventually happen.

I don't think so. Artforms first have histories during which there is a lot of development (and some relatively stable periods), throughout which eras, schools, movements etc. are reasonably well delineated. Eventually this slows as the artform matures, the rules and new ground have all been broken, etc. and there is a sort of "crisis" phase during which people need to come to terms with how to proceed. Often newcomers are in a better position because they have less baggage but it can be a real struggle for people who participated pre-crisis. There are ways forward though - the lack of rules is an open field of sorts for artistic expression and great art continues to be made, it's just not revolutionary or innovative in the same ways it was during development. Things are less monolithic, less homogeneous. It's harder to do something truly "new" that isn't just new for the sake of new, and of course many more people are participating so it might also be more difficult to cut through.

warden · Jun 17, 2025

nikos79 said:
I went through all these three. Nothing of them is photography in my definition. Visual arts, fine arts, "gallery photography" perhaps yes.
But not for me sorry. When I speak photography I search for the eye and sensitivity of the new Kertesz, Sudek, Ronis.
This is something else.

So it's not photography, it's "gallery photography"?

Perhaps one facet of innovation in photography is challenging the audience to move from their rigid definitions of what photography is, or has to be. (Or painting, music, architecture, and so on.)

nikos79 · Jun 17, 2025

warden said:
So it's not photography, it's "gallery photography"?

Perhaps one facet of innovation in photography is challenging the audience to move from their rigid definitions of what photography is, or has to be. (Or painting, music, architecture, and so on.)

Yes gallery photography has only one reason to exist, to sell.
And in order to do so it has to adopt terms that can make it "easy" and "approachable" to a potential buyer e.g. impressive colours, long texts to conceptualise the "meaning" of the photograph, its originality, etc.
I am not condemning it, it is very nice that it exists, it just doesn't interest me

koraks · Jun 17, 2025

Milpool said:
Artforms first have histories during which there is a lot of development (and some relatively stable periods), throughout which eras, schools, movements etc. are reasonably well delineated. Eventually this slows as the artform matures, the rules and new ground have all been broken, etc. and there is a sort of "crisis" phase during which people need to come to terms with how to proceed. Often newcomers are in a better position because they have less baggage but it can be a real struggle for people who participated pre-crisis.

Ah yes, the comfort of hindsight. I think if you open any book on art history (or history in general), there's a disclaimer either at the introductory or conclusion chapter (or both) to this extent. Things look less messy the further away they are.

nikos79 said:
Nothing of them is photography in my definition.

You define photography retrospectively, and as a result, it becomes inherently past perfect. Photography in your definition cannot be innovative by definition. If it threatens to become innovative, it must not be photography. Gatekeepers gotta keep the gates, eh!

nikos79 said:
I am not condemning it

Well, you say that, but it doesn't sound like it to me. You're willing to go so far as to redefine photography in such a way that it excludes anything that's too different to your taste. Conservatism to the point of exclusiveness. "Photography" literally means "writing with light" as we all know. That gives it an inherently broad scope. Merriam Webster defines it as follows:

the art or process of producing images by the action of radiant energy and especially light on a sensitive surface (such as film or an optical sensor)

The work of the artists I linked to all has the above at its core, or is even the exclusive means by which they work. It is photography, factually, but you don't want it to be.

Anyway, again, I did not mean my remark that sparked off this thread in a normative way. I'm not necessarily surprised some can only approach it that way, but wouldn't it be nice if we skipped over the question what something should be, and first try to understand what something is in the first place?

CMoore · Jun 17, 2025

koraks said:
It would be sad if this in principle interesting discussion would continue to be bogged down by a few people into a matter of semantics. You should know better. Now please carry on with the good stuff.

Moderators should not be allowed to moderate a thread they are participating in.
.
His opinion on Innovation is just as valid as yours.

koraks · Jun 17, 2025

CMoore said:
Moderators should not be allowed to moderate a thread they are participating in.

I'm expressing my opinion. I'm as free as anyone else to do that. If you feel that's not OK, report my post and the other mods will decide if they want to take action on it.

CMoore said:
His opinion on Innovation is just as valid as yours.

The thread started with a comment I made in which I used the term innovation. I know in what way and context I used that term and that's what I've clarified.

Milpool · Jun 17, 2025

koraks said:
Ah yes, the comfort of hindsight. I think if you open any book on art history (or history in general), there's a disclaimer either at the introductory or conclusion chapter (or both) to this extent. Things look less messy the further away they are.

I have opened many, many books on the history of music and visual artforms, but thanks for playing.

I have opened many books on the history of music and visual artforms, but if ah yes the comfort of condescension helps you that's a-ok.

koraks · Jun 17, 2025

Milpool said:
I have opened many books on the history of music and visual artforms, but if ah yes the comfort of condescension helps you that's a-ok.

It's not condescension, although I apologize if you perceived it that way. My comment referred to the apparent linear view you took on art history, which I think is kind of problematic due to the inherent challenges in writing a history of anything. If memory serves, Gombrich for instance admits that any attempt to structure art history necessarily forces linearity onto an inherently messy reality that is perhaps more indicative of the author's view than the reality he tries to describe. The whole construct of 'schools' for instance too often breaks down if you try to draw lines around these supposed schools, and on closer scrutiny, in many cases what stands is a weak set of associations-through-inspiration and very permeable, elastic boundaries instead of actual schools in the more literal sense of the word and as based on more formal educational and employment ties in the instances of successful artists with closely related followers.

What @Alex Benjamin describes makes me think of the concept of a punctuated equilibrium, which is associated with innovation and industrial evolution. If you're critical, you might argue that sort of thinking still suffers from the same problem of ex-post imposed linearity. And in that sense, your and his position may not even be so very different. The main difference appears to be the acknowledgement that after one stable plateau, another one might be on the horizon. Whether that's an accurate portrayal...I really don't know. Generalizations are always so difficult to sustain.

@BrianShaw thanks for clarifying and that's how we (insofar as I can speak for anyone else) approach this as moderators in general. As to the 'nullifying of opinions', I'd like to point out that in any discussion, especially if the discussants feel strongly about their position, attempts to prove the other party wrong (and thereby 'nullify' their opinions) is inherent. In reading my post #31, one should keep in mind that it's really just my opinion. I would genuinely find it sad if the discussion would get stuck in a long back & forth on definitions of innovation. If that's what happens - well, there's not much I could do about it except being annoyed, which I might express once or twice before moving on. And that's that. As you said, things that people believe to violate forum rules can and should be reported. It doesn't matter who says or does them.

Arthurwg · Jun 17, 2025

nikos79 said:
I went through all these three. Nothing of them is photography in my definition. Visual arts, fine arts, "gallery photography" perhaps yes.
But not for me sorry. When I speak photography I search for the eye and sensitivity of the new Kertesz, Sudek, Ronis.
This is something else.

I have to agree. Although I found these three examples very interesting, I see them more as graphic arts than my idea of photography. More like "photography in the service of art." What about "The New Topographics"? Yes, it's old hat from 1975 and now fully digested, but when I first saw this I thought I was seeing something new and important.

What modern photography is "INNOVATIVE"?

Moderator

Moderator

Moderator

Moderator

Moderator

Moderator

Moderator

Moderator

Privacy & Transparency

Privacy & Transparency