Photography Over?

Is photography over?  Like many stated this question is very open to interpretation.  Photography in the most understood term of just taking pictures with a camera is far from being over, today millions of people have the ability to take pictures due to new digital technology and the fact that nearly every cell phone produced today has a camera increases this ability.  Might it then be this reason that one would feel the “Art” of photography to be over due to this accessibility?  This mass production is not that different from the introduction of the Kodak Brownie, similarly this technology has given formally trained photographers a barrier to over come and has also simultaneously given others the ability to produce work.  Today with the internet at our disposal artist are able to be found and work to be dispersed easier than ever imagined and even this fact has spawned ideas and work i.e. Penelope Umbricos series Suns. 
            

This, the ability that photography has to grow with technology is to me one of the most exhilarating things photography has to offer.  Since day one photography has been growing changing and mutating and since the medium itself has only been around for some 160 years it is still very young as a practice, as a medium, and especially as a art.  New technology will constantly give us new techniques and new rules to break and to this I say photography is over but merely only over its adolescent years.

Expanded Field

I found Bakers essay to be quite compelling and his thoughts on the changes within the medium gave me hope for the survival (or death) of photography.  Baker claims that the field of photography is expanding (hence the title) he states that "photography" no longer consists of just merely a photograph but can contain much more.  This is not only consisting of much more such as influence from film, painting etc. but can also contain these mediums.  He talks mentions similarly Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman as Fried did with the mention of the cinematic within their pictures but he also includes cinema itself.  Baker mentions Douglas Gordons work where he would slow down films so they would last for days or even years reducing the narrative version of the film.  Similarly Brian Enos "Thursday Afternoon" consisted of film slowed down which comes in and out of focus and transforms into essentially paintings done through cinema.

Cinema thinks photographically and photography thinks cinematically there is no need for a definitive separation between these mediums the lines can be blurred and this is the expanded field of photography these blurred lines.  Another artist thinking very photographically while working in film is Stan Douglas.  Coming from the Vancouver School (which includes the earlier mentioned Jeff Wall) Douglas plays very interestingly with the narrative qualities of cinema in his piece "Win, Place or Show".  The video is shot using two cameras and are projected together, the video was made to be able to consist of many different combinations of the narrative.  There are enough different combinations to play the film for 20,000 hours of the six minute clip before every combination was used. http://www.ubu.com/film/douglas_win.html

Realism

Ribalta and WJT Mitchell are both arguing against the death of realism due to digital photography, photoshop, digital alterations etc.  They both discuss that even though the process of altering a photograph has become easier in the digital age due to photoshop alterations within photographs have always occurred.  Ribalta states that the photographic activity of postmodernism had already denaturalized photography in the decades before and that now there needs to be a new critique for this new type of realism that has emerged "a new kind of molecular realism."WJT brings into his essay William J. Mitchells thoughts on the difference between analog and digital and that is analog being continuous and digital being discrete or separate.  He makes this comparison through the metaphor of rolling down a ramp and walking down stairs and a analog clock with a hand and a digital clock with merely just numbers displayed.

WJT easily destroys this comparison by pointing out that one you can in fact figure out how many rotations it takes for a ball to go down a ramp and two that for this metaphor to be consistent one would walk down the ramp.  By this WJT claims that though there is a difference between analog and digital it is not as rigid or binary as William J. makes it out to be but it is much more flexible the stairs can be given analog representation and the ramp can be digitalized.  WJT further discuss digital and analog through the work of Chuck Close.  He brings in Nelson Goodmans relation of digital and analog through numbers but explains that they do not need to be just numbers but any discrete set of things i.e color.  This is where he brings in Chuck Close as a example the paintings are arranged like a digital grid with pixels but each "pixel" is treated like a painting.