Yes, photography is dead.

I hadn't planned to post about this since it's on just about every other photography blog around - Newsweek's article "Is Photography Dead?" But now, having read (skimmed, really) the article, I'll throw in a few thoughts. First, the article's punchline:

Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers--if there are to be any--will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way.

This issue has been bothering me for a couple of years now, the fact that as digital manipulation moves closer to center stage in art photography, photography moves closer to the rest of the arts and risks losing its connection to the everyday world. Yes, you can go on about how from the very beginning of the form, photography has been about deception, manipulation, alteration of reality. Still, it all starts with light on an object, it starts with the real. The farther the form departs from that starting point, the greater the temptation to become inwardly focused to examine only the structures and strictures of the form. The great thing about photography is its outward focus (puns and semi-puns are so hard to avoid) on the world around us, not the art itself.

Is photography dead? Some of it, yeah. All of it, if we're not careful.