Box Props (from “Illuminations”)
© Tim Davis
Over on Words Without Pictures there’s an article by Jason Evans titled Online Photographic Thinking.
This essay addresses the context of the web for photography. It’s a new frontier that, from the standpoint of an independent practitioner, doesn’t seem to have fulfilled its potential, given photography’s phenomenal recent expansion as a contemporary art form as well as its over 150-year-old track record for multiple expansions. I want to ruminate on why that might be – on what conditions might have led to an underwhelming response by serious and independent photographers to the potential of the Internet.
I’m curious what people think of Evans’ assertion that the “potential of the Internet” has had “an underwhelming response by serious and independent photographers.” Has it?
Imagine if the Internet had emerged in the early twentieth century. The majority of those “-ists” would have had a field day – and imagine Warhol and the Internet. I guess it is simply a matter of time before a generation not weaned on paper and chemicals sees the manufactured bubble of “art photography” for what it is, and begins to explore the potential of an inclusive, affordable distribution network and its inherently interesting formal qualities.
And about his conclusion. Is Evans is foreshadowing an inevitable evolution in contemporary photographic production (for the Internet)?
Read the entire essay here. Also see my favorite of Evans’ own online projects, The Daily Nice and The New Scent.
I encourage readers to offer their thoughts on this thread.
5 Comments
January 11, 2008 – 1:39 pm
Well, first thoughts are… interesting, but where has Jason Evans been? Apart from Useful Photography, which is designed for print, almost all the sites he links to in his essay have quite basic, minimalist ways of presenting photographic imagery online, including his own sites. What about Jonathan Harris’ ‘The Whale Hunt’? – a very recent example of a photographer using a web based form of presentation that seems designed specifically for the timelined concept of his project. Or an older piece like Simon H√∏gsberg’s ‘The Thought Project’ (http://www.simonhoegsberg.com/thethoughtproject.html) which marries the photographable (portraits) and the unphotographable (people’s thoughts)?
Blogs and portfolio websites aside, unless photographers are aware of the graphic potentials of the web (and what percentage of designers are either?) it’s difficult to imagine how it might be used as an arena for imagery. Given that I personally only really started using computors in 1997 (for word processing) and accessed the internet for the first time in 1999, I’m amazed at how digital comms have progressed and become widely accessible in such a short space of time, and this without becoming overly gimmicky.
If the internet had emerged in the early 20th century, as Jason Evans imagines at the end of his piece, it would now be about a century old, in which time he would be right to wonder why the medium hadn’t shaken things up a bit. But as it stands, it’s only about a decade old? which is no time really, and yet look!
January 11, 2008 – 2:43 pm
Everyone has heard the slogan “You can’t stop progress”
But, year after year I keep wondering more and more what it is that “progress” truly desires.
January 11, 2008 – 4:13 pm
I think the problem with this sort of academic challenge is that it assumes that there must be some great validating sea change with each new medium. The internet has countless uses and certainly main of them are under-explored for artistic, editorial, and entertainment practices. But I don’t think that it’s *necessary* for there to be “internet photography” to make still images on the web vital.
Part of what’s at the heart of this discourse is the art market’s tie to photography as a print driven commodity. Like other forms of ephemeral art, photos on the internet (or that exist purely in digital form) can never be treated as objects. In a sense, purely digital works get relegated to the level of stock images because their reproduction is not fixed in an edition Äì how can something be valued if it’s infinitely reproducible or if it never exists outside of its digital format?
I suppose to some the photographic image is more closely tied to moving pictures and to the evolution of the multiple mediums that provide for that motion. Unlike painting, for instance, with photography there is a basic assumption that it needs to reinvent itself because it is married to the technical means of its production. But that assumes that the technicalities of the medium are what’s important and therefore that photos on the internet must be some more evolved form of image purely because they are presented alternately.
There’s tons to be said about the digital display, manipulation, and context of images that need not assume that we are falling behind or missing some new chance at fostering a truly vital version of photography. But too often the questions seem to simply be either critics decrying a lack of critical language surrounding changes in artistic practice or simply market forces that don’t know how to make money off the “new.”
January 11, 2008 – 11:13 pm
I think Evans argument has less to do with the progress that photography has gained or raised within the Internet, and more to do with the large compulsion assess images against ideas. Exhibit B is valuable because it falls within a rubric of exhibit AÄôs contemporary infatuation, hate, and rhetoric with intelligence. The whole rusty mess forces one to pose irreverent questions like, how valuable is the Internet in its infinite ability to create when all it produces is copies of a dull clown show that is our culture? Come on! We have always been morons and it takes time! I think if Warhol were to use the Internet today his legacy on it would be a creative MySpace page choc full of ÄúdirtstyleÄù graphics. If anything the Internet has made it a little easier for an amateur to realize that art is an avenue worth traveling, and that cannot be a bad thing. So yes, in a sense the Internet has in fact been very beneficial for photography and has been used (so far) to its best abilities in some unusual and exciting ways.
However, it is very difficult to determine photographyÄôs place in a mass cultural level such as the Internet, it has to be much more individual and subjective. These arguments are problematic due to their ability to present a non-physical reality as something understood and even wholly intrinsic to our current technological understanding of being connected.
As for Evans declaration that photography will eventually be a mode that is solely imbedded inside the Internet, the claim is a bit exaggerated. There is something to holding a photography book, to gazing on a physical print, a sort comfort or familiarity. I think if photography does come to the point of a sole Internet experience we will have already lost something between ourselves as human beings, a kind of connection. An emoticon and MSN Messenger nudge can never replace a smile and a handshake.
I say that these questions, as valid as they are and with good reason, need a couple more decades to be fully weighed. It is as if we have just discovered the wheel and we continue to fool ourselves that we are now able to fly, but heyĶ weÄôre only human.
January 13, 2008 – 12:07 am
i guess i’m not entirely sure what Evans is suggesting. the internet is, without a doubt, still evolving, and the extent to which photographers can utilize the web is at this point relatively finite. i personally disagree with his populist take on the goals and expectations of photography; i have no desire to see every art photographer selling inexpensive digital editions, nor do i want to be inundated with mediocre (or just plain crappy) online portfolios. the extreme breadth and coverage the internet affords can just as quickly become a pit of amateurish quicksand as it can be a blank canvas for new media and presentation.