Is Photography Dead?

OK, not photography per se, but photography as an art? We are deluged with images left and right, on the street, in the elevator, on our banana stickers... everywhere.

Check out what the smart folks had to say about this topic at a recent SFMOMA talk:

Curator and New Yorker contributor Vince Aletti had the best - at least, the most direct - answer in his written statement. "What is over is the narrow view of photography - the idea that the camera is a recording device, not a creative tool, and that its product is strictly representational - not manipulated, not fabricated, not abstract ..."

Aletti anticipated several other contributors' remarks, such as Joel Snyder's and Philip-Lorca diCorcia's, when he wrote "photography isn't merely a window on the world, it's a portal into the unconscious, wide open to fantasies, nightmares, obsessions and the purest abstraction."

What I took out of these notes is that Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", which I literally read six times in grad school, just WILL NOT DIE:

Trevor Paglen, an artist who teaches geography at UC Berkeley, took a detached view from a very different angle. " 'Photography' for me," he wrote, "denotes a wide range of imaging practices ... dialectically enmeshed with the construction of practical reality. ... This includes everything from 'art' photography to iPhone snapshots, from MRI scans to the infrared eyes of CIA predator drones, and from surveillance cameras attached to facial-recognition software to minoritarian documentary practices from Rodney King to Abu Ghraib."

"We can't divorce imaging technologies from uses of power," Paglen said during the Thursday evening session, echoing his written reference to Paul Virilio's coinage of the term "sight machine" for the coalescence of imaging devices and their data that digital technology has permitted.

Or, to rip off Benjamin, the more copies you make, the more your image is a tool of social control.

See, Ma. I did learn something in grad school!