A couple of weeks ago two different friends from two different parts of the country wrote to me drawing my attention to a Newsweek article in which the author asks whether photography is really dead. In a post on my website I pointed out this article and asked for responses. Since then, I have had the opportunity to discuss and reflect. This then, after thinking about it, is my response, not so much a point by point response to the article, but more an attempt to provide a global response that in some way outlines how I feel.

Is photography dead? In his article, Peter Plagens postulates that photography has lost its way. In his words “you can’t help but wonder if the entire medium hasn’t fractured itself beyond all recognition”. Later on he goes on to say ” film photography’s artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph the picture was, as its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a PhotoShop fairytale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality.” In other words, recent developments in photographic technology now make it possible to fabricate a reality that may bear no resemblance whatsoever to what we take as the norm. It seems to me that this statement calls into question the common sense of the viewer, to reinforce H.L. Mencken’s famous adage” no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”. I would beg to differ. It seems to me that there are a number of factors at play here and a number of ways in which it can be seen that in fact photography has not lost its way, rather that it is broadening the range of options it has to offer.

It is photography dead? Just ask that of the majority of the photographic public, for whom photography is a means of snap-freezing time, breaking it up into small slices which can be treasured for years to come. I recently sat through a funeral, (a very sad one, I hasten to add). While we were waiting for the ceremony to begin, we looked through a rather lovely printed program, laying out the ritual that would be followed and including a whole series of photographs from the deceased’s life. Although I hadn’t had much time to get to know him, by looking at the photographs I got a clear picture of the path his life had taken. I saw his childhood holidays, I saw him in an Army uniform, one of the last soldiers to be conscripted in this country, I saw him playing with his children, I saw him in 70s post-hippie garb, and I got a clear sense of him as a family man, as somebody who loved to be around people and who had lived a long, proud and full life. It was the photographs that allowed me to see this. I felt honoured to be able to look back through the photographic record of his life and to imagine myself in those times and in those places, many of which referenced my own experience. In those a few brief moments, I could identify with him and his life , even though it was now too late to do it directly.

Each year humanity takes something in the order of six to 700 billion photographs, an enormous amount when you think about it. There is a huge industry built around people’s need to document their lives and the lives of those around them, the lives of those they hold dear.

And where did this begin? Blame it on George Eastman, the founder of the Kodak photographic company, when he first released the Box Brownie. For the first time in humankind’s history people were able to easily and relatively inexpensively document their own lives. For over a hundred years now, as the technology has progressed, people have taken photographs of their own lives; birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, weddings, holidays and celebrations. In the process we have built up a glorious record of our individual and collective lives. A quick analysis of camera sales will show that more than 90% of all photographs made in a given year are of this type. The majority of the people who do so are not that interested in the technology, not that enthusiastic about which aperture or shutter speed was used, or the nuances of luminance, saturation and tone. To them what is important is that they can recognize the moment, recognise their friends and family and relive it in the years to come(at, for example, funerals). They have taken a three-dimensional moment and imprinted it on a two-dimensional medium. Therein lies the power of photography.

In the end, as the medium progressed technologically, the Box Brownie gave way to to such stalwarts as the Leica, the Olympus Trip, the disk camera, the ubiquitous Instamatic, and now the current crop of digital point and shoots. While the technology may have changed substantially, the ease of capture has improved beyond all recognition. The one thing they all have in common is that they enable us to document those moments in our lives that we consider important. Individually each photograph taken is quite insignificant, a grain of sand upon the beach of human history, but collectively they form a vast and potent record of our journey over the last century or so. In her seminal book, On Photography, the American fine art critic Susan Sontag talked of photography as a form of appropriation. As I read her essay, I could not help feeling that there was a trace of sneer in her comments, the faintest trace of hubris. While I agreed with her (and still do) that this type of photography is a form of appropriation (to take is to appropriate), nevertheless the power of photography to document remains the key raison d’etre for most of the world’s photographers. For the person who laboriously scrapbooks her family’s photographs, to the person who stores them faithfully in shoe boxes at the bottom of the wardrobe, the photographs are not reality per se, but rather markers, reference points which enable viewers to look back through their memories at a place and time of their choosing.

Anyone heard has studied literature will be well aware of the phrase” the willing suspension of disbelief”. An audience at a play will happily suspend their built-in reality checking mechanism for the purposes of enjoying what is before them. When 16th century audiences turned up to Shakespeare’s Globe theatre to watch a performance of Henry V, where the battle of Agincourt as enacted, they knew that it was impossible for the theatre company to produce an actual army. Three to six actors, dressed in the livery of their respective countries would then act out the battle scene. In no way could this be considered reality, yet the audience was happy to go along with the symbolism and metaphor, to suspend their disbelief for the purposes of entertainment. The human psyche is able to do this. In cinema’s early days, when the technology was limited, one of the very first movies was a western, and the director wanted to show a chase on horseback. Because nobody had yet invented the dolly, he ordered a carousel to be built, on which pictures of the desert were painted. The actors on horseback got on to this carousel and galloped around it. The illusion of them passing through a landscape was created. No doubt the audience could see through it, but because it was novel, and because they wanted to participate in it, they were happy to go along with the illusion. In recent times, with the advent of CGI, the illusion has been extended. In the animated epic Beowulf, CGI is used to a great extent. The landscape is an artificial one, and the characters, though increasingly lifelike, are still animations. As an audience we know this, we suspend our disbelief, because we are still willing play our part in the illusion. Were we to watch a film adaptation of Henry V, we would no doubt see a cast of thousands, too plagiarise Cecil B. DeMille, and while this might look realistic, yet we would know that it was not reality. Therein lies, I believe, the essential paradox of the modern medium, either still or moving. Realism and reality are two different beasts, quite some distance apart.

There is of course a line in the sand, and each of us has to find his/her own position for that line. For the fine art photographer, more concerned with content than context, with message than medium, anything may well indeed go. If the artist’s intention is to question the nature of reality then it is entirely appropriate to create visual conundrums, to introduce landscape A to sky B. There is plenty of evidence of this kind of approach, not just within the current digital medium, but well back into photography’s film history. Photographers have been working this idea for many years. Joan Fontcuberta’s Cercopithecus Icarocurnu (made in the late 1990s from a composite of 17 negatives) appears at first glance to be a monkey with owl’s wings and a unicorn’s head, shot under direct flash in the middle of the night. The fact that it has been shot in black and white only adds to the illusion, to the sense of disbelief willingly suspended. How often have you heard someone say that black and white photography seems more real? And yet, once the initial glances are over, the artist’s sly sense of humour becomes apparent. He appears to be toying with us, the viewers. Further thought will make us realise that in effect, his serious intention is to question the nature of the reality of the photographic image. Less immediately visually credible, but interesting for all of that is the work of the American fine art photographer, Jerry Uelsmann. His surreal images, with floating trees and distorted perspectives, presents us with a world at once realistic, at once surrealistic. We know the elements and the image to be realistic, but the context in which they are presented is anything but. For these two photographers the line is obviously a little further out.

Some years ago I was having a discussion with the head of the Art Department at the school in which I taught. The conversation turned to the nature of photography. Almost as an aside she commented “of course photography is at its strongest when it documents reality.” I never forgot that comment, and three years afterwards I thought about it. At the time I was going through a phase of producing staged images, in other words fabricating my own realities. It was quite a common thing to be doing in the late 1980s. Some three years later I passed through that phase and began to seriously think about the nature of photography, about how I could see my picture-making in the context of the archaeology of photography. I began to spend time with my nose buried in photographic history books, learning everything I could about the history of the medium, about its practitioners, about the technologies, and how the one influenced the other. It is probably worth at this point taking the time to look at photography’s roots, at why the medium came into being, and the reason for its successful uptake.

Photography, like all technologies, came about as the result of a perceived need. Like the firearm before it, and the motor car after it, it was the response to a need, to a desire to accomplish something with greater accuracy and efficiency. The European empire (not just the British) was spreading across the world, exploring, discovering, recording, and wherever possible appropriating. Scientists and artists (sometimes they were the same person, for example Sir Joseph Banks) would accompany voyages of discovery, analysing, comparing and documenting. In every case, they used draughting techniques to record their findings. Paper, pen and ink were the order of the day. Then in the early 1830s, a need was expressed to come up with some technique that was both more accurate, more efficient and which required less artistic skill. Within two years photography as we know it had been born. From then on the technology of the medium advanced at a rapid pace. Technologies such as egg albumen and cyanotype soon gave way to silver halide processes. In its early days however, the perceived purpose of photography was to provide an accurate record of the world around. Photographers like Roger Fenton and Carleton Watkins produced an extraordinary record of a place and time, and a place in time. Because of them we can easily see the geographical and social landscapes of places like Egypt and the American West. Photographers like Matthew Brady documented the horrors of the American civil war. But even they dallied to a degree in a little creative interaction with their work. Fenton has been accused of moving the cannon balls in photographs he took during the Crimean War to better balance the picture. Watkins was starting to use creative darkroom techniques in some of those purportedly realistic landscapes. Brady too has been accused of a little manipulation of the elements of some of his battlefield still lives. Looking back through the telescope of the past ,it is easy to accept that what we are seeing is a concrete reality, that what we are seeing is realistic. Of course it is not. It is merely a representation, a visual representation, of the photographer’s perception of that place and time. To suddenly say that PhotoShop is producing a fairytale, that it is destroying the fundament of photography, that it is lying to us, seems to me rather naïve and simplistic.

A day or two ago I was listening to a discussion on a radio station about the article to which I am responding. The host was questioning a so-called expert on the subject. Naturally all the old clichés were trotted out, including the famous one” the camera never lies.” Outrage at what PhotoShop could do, at the fact we were being lied to, that we could no longer trust the photographic imag,e was expressed by the announcer. I cannot help wondering if this was not a deliberate ploy on her part, a way to tease out the conversation. One example stuck in my mind: that PhotoShop was regularly used to get rid of wrinkles, skin blemish and signs of ageing, as if it was something new and radically different. Photography has always done this, and portraiture greats like George Hurrell, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn have regularly used modification techniques to deal with these issues. The glamour photographers of the Hollywood era in the 1930s used Vaseline on a filter to improve the quality of the actresses’ skin. The effect is so obvious an apologist would question how an audience could be taken in. Once again we come back to the audience’s (read: viewer’s) willingness to suspend their disbelief. Similarly, commercial photographers use these techniques willingly, with the collusion of their clients. Ask any successful portrait photographer and they will tell you that without them, they would sell very little work. These same photographers well know that the client does not want to be shown how they really look, rather how they see themselves. And yet nobody gets worried. The client willingly suspends disbelief.

I am regularly asked when I show my landscape work: is that is how it really was when I made the photograph? That’s how I saw it, I explain, and then spend a couple of moments qualifying that. Generally the comments involve the degree of saturation present in my landscape work. For some people, the colours seem hyper-realistic, for others they are quite acceptable. I point out that in early 2006, I had the cataracts in both eyes operated upon. When the patches were removed from each eye, I was stunned at what I saw. The world around me had, literally overnight, become sharper, more intense, more saturated, and more clearly defined. The French painter Claude Monet, in a letter to a friend not long after he had the same operation in 1923, makes a similar comment. He wrote that the” distortion and exaggerated colours I am seeing are absolutely terrifying.” He had got so used to desaturated colour, that the hues in his paintings were compensations for that. Where then is reality? Is it in the sharp clear focus of childhood or in the muddied vision of the cataract-inflicted? The answer, of course, is that both have equal validity. What we see is a composite of all the information that our eyes present to our brain and what we choose to see. The English painter David Hockney, in his seminal 1980s joiner series ,explored this idea, looking at the way in which we consciously and unconsciously go through a process of visual selection. Does the camera lie? I would venture to suggest that it lies no more than our brains do to each and every one of us, every day of our lives. Successful photographers have of course realised this, and grow past the myth that the camera sees as we do. Of course it does not. To be successful photographers we have to learn to see like our camera does, to see through the eyes of our machine, to learn its quirks and idiosyncrasies, and bend the abilities of our camera to our own vision. For my own photography I make no apology. It is how I see the world. Is it realistic in some absolute sense? Of course not. It is a process of selection and expression of my particular vision of the world. It is my personal style.

Without doubt there is a fear out there. Where I think this arises is in the area of news and or documentary photography. We have this need to trust, to believe that what we are seeing is an accurate depiction of the scene as the photographer saw it.. The dis-ease comes when we cannot be sure that what we are seeing is the way it was. We are willing to accept the manipulation of picture space by artifices such as choice of focal length or angle of view. What we want, however, is to be certain that what is within the picture frame is all that the photographer saw. There are some celebrated examples in recent times of news photographers being fired because they removed one or two people, or exaggerated the size of clouds surrounding the collapsing Twin Towers in 9-11. The fear of manipulation of truth has been around since digital photography’s earliest days (and here I include scanned film). Again there is the example taken at an Olympics in the early 90s, when the American runner, Mary Decker, tripped and fell. The photographer (or an image editor) removed a person in the background so the picture would have more drama, would appear more visually tidy. There was an outcry at the time, but I have no memory of the photographer being fired. Now, of course, as the issue becomes one of greater concern, there is every likelihood that photographers following this road can expect to be very swiftly looking for an alternative source of employment. It would seem that accurate representation is demanded of some and not of others, that some genres within the medium are open to manipulation while others are not, that it is acceptable for some photographers to tinker with realism (indeed encouraged) while others are required to exhibit an almost puritanical adherence to some form of truth.

Is photography dead? To my mind it is blatantly obvious that it is anything but. Has the medium fractured itself beyond recognition? I would suggest not. From its beginnings it was heading in different directions. There is room within the medium for all. If you consider photography to be a priest in the Temple of Absolute Truth, of objective reality, with a narrow mission to represent, then without a doubt it has prostituted itself. If however you accept objective reality is an elusive goal at best, then perhaps it has not.

And in the final analysis, for the 90-something percent of photographers who each year record what is important to them, their lives of families and special events, perhaps the whole thing really is a non-issue.

© Tony Bridge, 2007.