Is Photography Over? -> SFMOMA →

Is photography over? To anyone who spends time looking at photographs in galleries, museums, art fairs, flea markets, books, and magazines, the question seems absurd, unthinkable. When photography seems to pervade, if not dominate, every aspect of our culture, what could it possibly mean? Sure, there’s been some anxiety about the continued survival of the medium at its most traditional — the modestly scaled, handmade, black-and-white print that once defined photography as art. Vintage work is fetishized, but does the black-and-white print have a place in contemporary practice? Ask Lee Friedlander, Judith Joy Ross, Robert Adams, and Sally Mann. The regular disappearance of favorite photographic papers, the recent dismantling of darkrooms, and the relentless rise of digital capture and output would seem to signal the end of a long, vital chapter in the medium’s history. But when virtually every antique process — daguerreotype, tintype, and cyanotype; albumen, salt, platinum-palladium, and wet-plate collodion printing — has been revived over the past few decades, there’s no reason to think gelatin silver will disappear totally anytime soon. There’s never been just one kind of photography, and now there are many.

 -Vince Aletti

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