I. Is Photography Over?

By TREVOR PAGLEN

A few years ago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a conference about
photography for a photo conference, it had the odd title Is Photography Over?. Curators
Sandra Phillips and Dominic Wilsdon posed the question as a challenge to panelists,
audience members and the world at large. The two-day symposium was an attempt to shake
up conventional institutionalized discourses about photography and to be an opportunity to
think about what, if anything, has changed about photography over the last decade or so.
From my point of view, the fact that the worlds leading photo-curators would even pose
such a question turned out to be more illuminating than most of the symposiums content.
Wilsdon and Phillips provocation reflects a deep-seated uneasiness among photo-theorists
and practitioners about the state of their field.
To me, traditional approaches to doing-photography and thinking-about-photography feel
increasingly anachronistic. Looking out at the photographic landscape that surrounds us
the world of images and image-making that we inhabit it seems obvious that photography
has undergone dramatic changes in its technical, cultural, and critical composition. These
changes are difficult to make sense of within photo theorys existing critical and practical
framework; hence the question is photographer over?
In the first instance, the rise of digital photography and image-processing software has
fundamentally altered the craft. Digital cameras are cheap and ubiquitous; image-
processing software (whether on-camera firmware or applications like Photoshop and
Instagram) has made it extraordinarily easy to produce an image-quality that was
previously only possible with years of specialized training in equipment, shooting
technique, and printing methods. The de-specialization of photography is an area of much
concern among curators responsible for sorting out whats worth paying attention to, and to
practitioners whove seen their ability to make a living get much, much harder (witness the
near collapse of photo-journalism as a profession). In this sense, perhaps the advent of
digital photography and automated image-processing means that the traditional craft of
photography is largely over.
On the cultural side, the digital revolution has meant an upheaval in the photographic
landscape. What is the place of photography in society when there are now well
over 250 billion photographs on Facebook (with an additional 350 million added daily),
where the average person sees over 5,000 advertisements a day, and where photography has
come to inhabit the very core of our technological a priori. Photography has become so
fundamental to the way we see that photography and seeing are becoming more and
more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to
curators, practitioners, and critics. Why look at any particular image, when they are literally
everywhere? Perhaps photography has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes
sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps
photography, as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.
The landscape of traditional photography theory and criticism is in a similarly contorted
shape. On one hand, the digital revolution and landscape of ubiquitous image-making has
created a situation where curators and critics specializing in photography have to define the
field exceedingly narrowly in order to have an object of discourse at all. In order to have
anything to curate, critique, or discuss, a very small slice of the photographic landscape has
to be carved out and isolated for discussion, such as fine-art photography, documentary
photography, historical photography, even analog photography. As a consequence of
narrowing the objects of inquiry so dramatically, the critical discussion around photography
ends up inevitably admitting only a very small range of photographic practices into its
purview. Consequently, critical discussions take shape around a small range of photographic
images and practices which are extreme exceptions to the rule. Photography theory and
criticism has less and less to do with the way photography is actually practicedby most
people (and as we will see, most machines) most of the time. The corollary to this narrowing
of the field is that traditional conversations and problems of photo theory have become
largely exhausted. Simply put, there is probably not much more to say about such problems
as indexicality, truth claims, the rhetoric of the image, and other touchstones of
classical photography theory. And what remains to be said about these photographic
problems seems increasingly extraneous to the larger photographic landscape that we
inhabit.
As a matter-of-course, the state-of-the-field that Ive described in a few hundred words here
is blunt, without nuance, and bombastic. There are, of course, numerous exceptions to the
broad outlines above. My point in doing this is to simply sketch out some possible reasons
for photographys leading thinkers and practitioners to ask whether photography is over.
Given the dramatic changes that have taken place in the photographic landscape over the
last decade or so, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask whether a traditional notion of
photography is over.
But if a traditional understanding of photography is ill-suited to making sense of the
21
st
Centurys photographic landscape, then how do we begin to think about what
photography has become and is becoming?
Over the next few weeks, I want to begin thinking about how to begin thinking through the
21
st
Centurys emerging photographic landscape, and the ways both photographic practices
and photographs themselves are changing. To do that, I want to start from the beginning by
developing an expanded definition of photography, and exploring the implications of that
expanded definition.
Ill start by introducing the idea of photography as seeing machines and explore questions
such as: How do we see the world with machines? What happens if we think about
photography in terms of imaging systems instead of images? How can we think about
images made by machines for other machines? What are the implications of a world in
which photography is both ubiquitous and, curiously, largely invisible?
Without question, the 21
st
Century will be a photographic century. Photography will play a
more fundamental role in the functioning of 21
st
Century societies than 20
th
Century
practitioners working with light-sensitive emulsions and photographic papers could have
ever dreamed. So while in one sense photography might be over, in another, its barely
gotten going. And we havent seen anything yet.
Stay tuned.