Is Photography Over?

“Is photography over?” SFMOMA has assembled a panel of 13 esteemed thinkers – curators, academics, and artists working in and around fine art photography or photography history and theory – and asked them to respond to the question before convening in San Francisco on April 22 and 23 for a public symposium and closed door discussions.

“The history of media is not a linear narrative following a neat progression. It is a chaos of possibilities that emerge and recede, back up and move forward, crisscrossing one another.”

This discussion echoes often sensationalist discourse about the demise of photojournalism and documentary photography communities. For both photojournalism and art photography, commerce and technology are implicated as shaping factors (though surprisingly few of the panelists really addresses the influence of technology on actual creative photographic practice in art). However, where photojournalism’s bogeyman is the transformation of the publishing industry, these critics and curators have pointed at their own industry – serving the photography art market – as one of the causes of constraints on photography’s vitality. And it not only echoes – it implicates: When documentary photography is drawn into the art world it gains a certain prestige but it also loses some of its connection with the world.

Read It In Full: Here

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 11:43 am. It is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.