So it appears that I’m not alone in noticing the edge of hysteria that has crept into recent discussions about what the future might be for how we think about and make photographs. Perhaps this is nothing that new, but much of it seems misplaced, wrong answers to the wrong questions. We’re not at the “death” of photography as we have known it – rather the beginning. Hasn’t the most significant, pulse-quickening thing about the form always been its slipperiness, a refusal of neat categories? There is not one way for photography, but multiple streams running together and we shouldn’t so easily undermine what might be possible given a willingness to consider it differently. We need instead a photography without conceptual limits.
As the technology changes (in the way it always has) so too does our understanding of what photography can be and we must deal with these shifts as they occur or the value of what might be achieved photographically will remain static. What matters is not just to fix some shadowy “essence” for the medium and so lose what gives it the ability to really move us. Regardless of how it might be achieved the measure of photography as art is how it can pierce the eye and the mind with a subtle intensity of feeling to show me something I would not have otherwise known or been able to express. It is a degree of sensitivity, of observation, that doesn’t reduce the potential of the medium to one uncertain thing.
Of course some of the trouble is with photographic criticism and how it has been written. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of my few sketchy thoughts here, but the preference for a meaningless half-language of jargon has indeed damaged its general credibility. What’s more it often does no real justice to how thrilling photography can be, and how strange. I suppose it offers a kind of false authority, but mostly it seems better to risk contradiction, or a different, albeit more private, obscurity, just to write directly. The best criticism is perhaps right on the edge of failure and that’s not an excuse – or at least only in part – for my own efforts. A meaningful, accurate criticism demands the same risk as the best art, photographic or otherwise.
Perhaps we can now approach photography (and its criticism) as something beside an either/ or kind of problem.
For more, try this and this.
