Photography is constantly changing and hard to define. Its discursive
and somewhat promiscuous nature has tended to confuse many people as to
its status and value as an art form. The trouble is that it lends itself
to many varied uses. We see photography in newspapers, surveillance,
advertising campaigns and art galleries, and as fashion shots or family
snaps. Meaning can slip and slide depending on context, and the fact
that photography lacks any kind of unity and seems to have no intrinsic
character makes the insistent cry of 'but is it art?' a constant refrain
throughout its relatively short but complex history. Susan Bright 2005
'Art Photography Now', p. 7.
It is popular belief that the photograph was something to be believed,
it was a moment frozen in time, an unquestionable product of
authenticity. Photographs have never been evidence of absolute visual
truth; double exposure and splicing, amongst other techniques, have been
photographic processes used to manipulate perception as early as the
19th Century.
Bright follows on by saying that the early reservations about
photography has been exacerbated by the invention of digital technology,
and now the question is not 'is it art?', but 'is it photography?' "One
reason why digitization makes many observers uncomfortable is that it
takes us away from reality and into the realm of fantasy, an area which
at first seems at odds with a seemingly objective and descriptive
medium. However, the photograph's role as a conveyer of 'truth' or as a
trace of reality has long been contested; and photographs have always
been manipulated" (ibid, p. 9).
Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(1936) discusses the affect of modernity on the art making process, in
particular the invention of photography, and how that has changed
perception. He talks about the loss of the aura in art work that is
reproducible, where authenticity and originality of a work of art cannot
be reproduced with the image.
The Work of Art had an immense influence on artists working in
the 1960s and 70s, such as Andy Warhol, Dan Graham and Robert
Rauschenberg, who questioned photography's supposed evidence of reality;
and as a result challenged aesthetic conventions.
Postmodernism "exposed how photography was used and understood as a
medium, as a material and as a message; ... a work was no longer seen as
the creation of a single 'author' who retained the monopoly on its
meaning but as the product of a certain context with a multiplicity of
meanings" (ibid p. 13).
Further Reading:
Bright, S. 2005, Art Photography Now, Thames and Hudson, UK.
la Grange, A. 2005 Basic Critical Theory for Photographers, Elsevier, Burlington. (electronic resource available from VU library)
Australian Photography and Photographers: Contemporary Australian Photography By Anne Marsh
Photography Reborn: Image Making in the Digital Era by Jonathan Lipkin
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