Theory: July 2007 Archives
Wow, talk about getting a bee in your bonnet. Alec Soth has been on a Tod Papageorge kick all week. Honestly, it seemed a little odd to be shining so much high power light on a living photographer with the aura of Papagoerge. But it has culminated this morning in a fascinating interview with Papageorge himself.
It has become popular to post links to "photographs that changed the world", often accompanied by such uncritical commentary as "When you look through these, you're reminded of how truly powerful a single still image can be - how it can capture and convey an idea and tell a story."
On the contrary, in almost every case, these pictures hold very little story content. We only know the story because of the surrounding text, captions, larger news context. Were that context to be lost, say some far-future archaeologist finds this data cache, its difficult to imagine how anyone would be able to tease out much more than broad generalizations, mostly negative. about humanity from such images.
This is a great danger today, when people increasingly learn their news only through visuals, never acquiring the greater context of events. We are easily and happily duped through the manipulation of visual language. Without understanding root causes of such events, how can we possibly be equipped to find lasting solutions?
The Ryan McGinley hype machine has been operating full tilt over the past weeks, so it was only a matter of time before the backlash began. Metropolitan Museum of Art research associate Mia Fineman has written an essay for Slate (another one of their annoying slide show essays) that questions the longitudinal value of McGinley's work and whether the commercial nature of this work devalues it as art.
This line, to me, is as imaginary as a national boundary. It's there in our minds, but you can't actually see it even when you walk right up to it. Film, for instance, is considered to be art, despite its commercial aspects. So why not commercial photography? It's not as if there is not a monetary component attached to photographs created purely for the gallery market.
(via muse-ings)
