Stanton Champion

In the December 10th issue of Newsweek, writer Peter Plagens asks the question Is Photography Dead? Many might be taken aback by this question wondering how that could possibly be true especially when cameras are found on more devices than ever. However, Plagens argues that with the advent of technologies like Photoshop, photography has become too fanciful and the public will eventually tire of its lack of reality. To quote:

Film photography’s artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera.

Readers of Suan Sontag, especially her book On Photography, will rightfully cringe at that quote. Plagens falls into the very trap that a serious photo critic shouldn’t: the belief that photos are somehow recordings of reality. Photography has long seduced the viewer into this trap by its very nature of recording a scene on film, but in actuality reality was never something film could truly capture. A photographer makes choices about the framing of a photo, the focal length of the lens, the exposure, and the final editing that can profoundly alter what was captured and what actually happened. Plagens thinks that the loss of realism in photography is to be mourned, but quite honestly realism never existed to begin with. Sontag was quite correct when she described photography as a form of “surrealism” in the 1970s. Photoshop is a continuation of that truth rather than the beginning of it.

The article concludes with:

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.

No photographer who is any good has ever expected a level of realism in their works. The next generation will be no different, only perhaps more skilled at deceiving the viewer into thinking a photo is truly an accurate representation of an event. The far greater danger is the one Sontag elaborated upon in Regarding the Pain of Others - that our weariness of so much imagery combined with the propaganda value inherent to photography’s lack of realism will discourage us from connecting with others, especially when it comes to wars, death, and human destruction. As wealthy Americans, she feared that we would no longer see the misery of others and that we would ignore photography entirely. There’s nothing new in that - she said the same thing for almost 30 years. Plagens, on the other hand, is late to the party with the wrong costume.