Is Photography Dead? (Cont.)

 

Recently I saw a photo contest whose criteria for a winning image was "the number of likes, loves, and wows".

To make the criteria for a good image by the number of Likes is just astonishing, and highlights the problem we have with social media in general: that anyone can bot or buy likes to gynn up ratings. It is clear that Facebook's (as well as other social media sites) business model relies on this.

At large art exhibitions, such as EXPO Chicago there is very little photography, partially because there is little profit in prints unless it is a well-known artist. The large prints by Thomas Struth or Jeff Wall or Edward Burtynsky are the usual exceptions. At the Aperture booth at this year's show was a table of photography books. When I flipped through a book on Stephen Shore, of mostly banal photos of vacant streets, I realized these photos could get few Likes on social media. They work only as a concept, in a larger framework or narrative.

Someone recently posed the question: "What qualifies as excellent photography?" It's not up to us individually (beyond what we think is a 'finished' image) and it's not up to the crowd-at-large either. Thousands of pieces of art in history, if shown on social media, may get no engagement whatsoever. Many pieces by Picasso might potentially be ignored, or people would say "what's that--that's not art!" People still say that about Warhol, but with him, it makes perfect sense, because it's all about the anonymity of the crowd: (A Coke is a Coke if enjoyed by an anybody or Queen Elizabeth). But there was one Warhol, not a world of them.

Warhol would have approved of social photography, but he would have riffed on it, which is where the real Art is. Art is both banal and profound, but the challenge is to show both in equal parts. This is more difficult than it sounds because the process from capture to a resolved image takes a long time to get to a condition of Art.

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[9/17/2024: If Warhol was immortally 35 he’d be using AI, but it wouldn’t have changed his way of working. It wouldn’t be that he would never use paint again. Conversely, John Balsassari, who once “cremated” his paintings for a tabula rasa, probably would not have embraced AI. He probably would make send-ups and appropriations of it. I haven’t been to an EXPO since COVID. I would imagine galleries are exhibiting AI-generated art because there’s money in it at the moment.]