COMMENTS ON “AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY”

COMMENTS ON “AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY” BY FRED RITCHIN

Professor of Photography, NYU

(W.W. Norton, 2009)

I don’t know if there are many books devoted to post-photography but of the two I’ve read, this is the better one.  I found the other book, The Digital Evolution by A.D. Coleman, to be nearly unreadable and despite a publication date of 1998 it contained no useful information.  After Photography addresses the digitalization of photography but still fails to meaningfully address just exactly what is ‘after photography.’

The 185-page book begins well enough but by the midway point becomes mired in journalistic photography (to the omission of most all other aspects of the photographic arts) and other non-photographic concepts like HTML and never really gets to what’s ‘after photography’.  A more apt title might be After Film Photography.

Early in the book Ritchin’s observation that we’re all “users” instead of artists or photographers is informative and well-put.  He goes on to write, “The direct observation of visible phenomena gives way to a tele-observation in which the observer has no immediate contact with observed reality.”  That statement reminds me of busloads of Japanese tourists I’ve seen at the Grand Canyon that drive from overlook to overlook, briefly pop out of the bus, take a photo of the canyon, and then pile back into the bus.  It’s like they are unable to experience the Grand Canyon firsthand, instead preferring to capture images that only later are experienced in the comfort of their homes.  I have to laugh at the tourists who insist on shooting video, motion pictures, of the immobile Grand Canyon, as if the experience can only be validated by observing it on a television screen.  This doesn’t strike me as a result of the changes in photography so much as the change in technology. 

The author accurately states that, “All emergent media borrow heavily from previous media at first…”  On that he’s absolutely correct except that he puts it in the perspective of web pages that mimic the pages of a newspaper (previous media).  However what I think he misses is what’s really after photography (the previous media) is digital art.  Right now, because digital art is a new media without its own history it is still considered to be ‘photography’ because that’s the nearest reference-point.  But Ritchin is an academic and most professors of photography that I know keep photography firmly locked in its realistic, documentary and journalistic box.  Ritchin, like his academic-contemporaries, does not see digital as a creative process much differently than photography.  He spends more time dissecting the viewer’s relationship to the final image and not the artist’s relationship with an ever more electronic creative process that might involve a camera. 

I disagree with the author’s declaration that “The digital era in photography can be said to have begun with this manipulated 1982 cover.”  (The February 1982 cover of National Geographic where the pyramids were digitally moved illustrates his point.)  If memory serves, that cover photo was manipulated with a Scitex prepress computer which was not available to photographers.  More accurately I’d place the beginning of the digital era at 1990, the year Adobe Photoshop became available to most photographers via the personal computer.  Prior to Photoshop, computers were not really available to many photographers as image-making devices.

Stuck in his documentary rut, he states that, “…documentary photographs cannot be trusted…” without mentioning that no photograph can be trusted.  Photographs have been manipulated since the invention of photography, just because digital image processing makes it easier, and more widespread, does not mean that clever photo-manipulators and retouchers haven’t been with us since day one. 

He states that, “…much of the photographic process will occur after the shutter is released…” but fails to mention such purveyors of pre-digital post-processing such as Mitchell Funk, Pete Turner and the author of the Postvisualization Manifesto, Jerry Uelsmann.  None of these artists were journalists and I suspect that within Ritchin’s narrow context of documentary photojournalism, they didn’t merit mention.

He writes about keywords but keywords are an image search-method and not a part of visual expression.  He quoted a gallery owner (from 2000, 12 years ago) who complained, “…haven’t seen anybody who has taken photography to a different level with it [Photoshop].”  I know for a fact that by 2000 numerous digital Uelsmann’s were creating new works that went far beyond the straight photograph.  I think that particular gallerist needed to get out of her gallery and find some new works, or at least contemplate a style of photographic art that was not documentary. 

On page 63 he called for some kind of device or mark that could signal that an image has been manipulated.  I called for the very same thing in a magazine article I wrote back in 1995 a full fourteen years before Ritchin’s book.  Forget it, Fred, it ain’t gonna happen, I’ve already been there, and I thought of it first!

By the midway point of the book, the only type of photography mentioned by the author was documentary, to the exclusion of most every other style or subject.  This seems to be a trend in modern photographic academia.  Perhaps as a result of digital there’s just not enough of photography left to teach?  Taking pictures is now too easy.  Does digital art creation and production differ so much from photography that it’s outside the comfort-zone of photography teachers?  Not all photography is documentation or a representation of the real, but the author doesn’t address it.  I suspect he doesn’t address the non-journalistic uses of photography because the tools of computers and software takes him away from the comfort and familiarity of the photography department and pushes him into the Art Department. 

Towards the end of the book he makes a couple of statements where I firmly disagree.  The first sentence of chapter eight is, “Eventually, digital photography’s relationship to space, to time, to light, to authorship, to other media will make it clear that it represents an essentially different approach than does analog photography.”  I can’t agree with that, in my view, using a CMOS sensor or film makes no difference whatsoever to time, space, light or authorship.  One sixtieth of a second is the same fraction of time to a sensor or film, there is no such thing as a digital photon, and the spaces we photograph with digital cameras are no different than the ones we photographed on film.  And if you shot the photo, you are the author.  There’s no difference.  As a result of the digital dissemination of photographs, photography may have a different approach to other media, but that’s other media and does not fundamentally alter what a photograph is.

Finally he aggressively ignores all other aspects of the photographic arts when he states, “The older mechanical photography will, to a certain extent, falter.  It will be valued as historical documentation and for its singularity as object that will more and more resemble that of painting.”  Maybe within his narrow definition of photography-as-documentation his statement rings true but in terms of what’s really after photography, i.e. digital art he’s wrong.  As a result of the digital print, the handmade, silver-gelatin darkroom print will increase in value.  Perhaps one could construe that that the chemical process of the darkroom print is like painting but that’s a linguistic stretch.  There will be purists who only use film and chemistry and eschew digital photography.  And there will be others, like me that fully embrace the capabilities and freedom of digital and no longer even consider ourselves photographers although we create images that are photographic.  And I can tell you from personal experience, analog photography was nothing like painting but I do find producing digital art to be very much like painting.  The only difference is that I’m covering a blank screen with pixels whereas a painter covers a blank canvas with paint.  Pigment or pixels, you’re still making a mark and to me digital art is much more like painting than photography ever was.

I enjoyed the first half of After Photography.  Although somewhat academic in tone, Ritchin avoids overt artspeak and is clear.  It’s just that he ignores every aspect of photography except documentary and that leads to a rather limited point of view.  He makes some valuable observations within the context of photojournalism and the dissemination of digital images but I can’t agree that we’ve come to a time after photography.  I don’t think photography has changed that much.  Sure we use sensors and electronics instead of film and chemistry but we can still pretty much agree on what a photograph is and is not.

It’s not that we’ve reached a time after photography but rather, we’ve come to a time where there is a new medium that’s a lot like photography, is related to photography, but is something new: digital art.  I think it’s time to recognize that digital art created using cameras or not, is something altogether new.  And we need a new vernacular to describe it instead of using old, outmoded photographic terminology.

I liked Fred Ritchin’s After Photography; it’s one of the few books that looks at the future of photography; but photography remains photography.  It’s an informative book within the context of modern photojournalism.  But he still hasn’t answered the question I’ve been asking now for a decade and a half:  How much work does one have to do to a photograph before it becomes something other than a photograph?  This question must be answered before we can truly arrive someplace ‘after photography.’

I realize this ‘review’ is mostly irrelevant, no one reads this blog & even fewer are interested in my opinion.

Dale O’Dell

March 13, 2012