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The Death of Photography

The death of photography is rapidly becoming a weekly pronouncement, it seems. Earlier this Fall, I interviewed Bill Jay for PDN online magazine (to be published soon!) at his home in San Diego where he mentioned being misquoted about the “death of photography” and just last week, critic Peter Plagens published a piece for Newsweek magazine, titled “Is Photography Dead?”

Well, the answer is Yes. Or at least, this is what Stephen Bulger indicated to me when he announced his first exhibition of 2008, The Death of Photography. Stephen asked me to contribute a short essay for the catalogue which is forthcoming (and will be available for purchase directly from the gallery).

What I’m posting here is the twice-as-long text of the essay which I wrote for the catalogue. In order to read the finished piece you’ll have to buy the catalogue!

Cheers, darius

THE DEATH OF PHOTOGRAPHY
An exhibition at Stephen Bulger Gallery. An essay by Darius Himes.

I still vividly remember my first summer home from college when I discovered the family cat sitting quietly under a bush in the back yard, its face gaunt and breathing shallow. Death was hovering around her, and the care with which the vet euthanized her and placed her curled body in a box has stuck with me. But that was Iowa farm country, and death was everywhere, as was life, both preceding and following death as naturally as dawn follows the night.

That was the summer of ‘89. I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest on vinyl, REM on cd, and Morrisey on cassette. I wasn’t wearing parachute pants any more, but I was growing my hair out. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Spanish author Camilo Jose Cela that year, Lee Friedlander (who hadn’t yet appeared on my radar screen) had just published Like a One-Eyed Cat, and the freshmen who entered Photo 101 classes this past Fall had just been born.

That school year, I had been studying photography with Bill Jay, William Jenkins, and Mary Anne Redding at Arizona State University. They awakened me to a life in photography, and thankfully, they are all still alive themselves.

But photography is not. It has since died. Or at least, that’s what Bill Jay told me the other day when we were working on an interview together about a new book of photographs he has just published.

“This past summer,” Bill related over a diner breakfast, “a British magazine did a profile of my photographic life in England, which ended really when I left in 1972. They quoted me as saying that “I was very disappointed not to be at the birth of photography but I am pleased that I was present at its end.” Bill chuckled at the absurdity of the thought. “I don’t remember saying that at all! But now that I’ve been quoted, I want to write a piece about why I must have said it. I think the “end of photography” has been happening over the last 30 years…”

“What do you mean by “photography”, Bill?” I asked, and he came around to the changes in the family-like aspect of the community. “It is the end of the medium as an international fraternity of like-minded people who appreciate the unique characteristics of photography. That has almost disappeared. There is a sense that there are no masters, no standards by which to judge the merit of a photograph. I am not disparaging that, but I think it is interesting. People running the galleries and museums are not practitioners, like they once were. And I am saying that photography as a unique enterprise is over.”

***

The history of technology from the mid-19th century forward is, as we all know, a litany of birth and death. It is rumored that the US patent office infamously toyed with closing in the early 1840s, stating that “everything that was going to be invented already had.”

Shortly thereafter, photography was born to a handful of scientists and intellectuals”a group of “men of letters” that indubitably included women as well. By the time William Henry Fox Talbot (b. 1800) and Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (b. 1787)—the two best known of the founders—had passed away, it was the 1880s, and over a hundred distinct photographic techniques had already come into existence. Photographers were producing calotypes, collotypes, woodburytypes and, of course, daguerreotypes, along with brown, blue, purple, and gold-toned prints. Egg whites, gun cotton, piss, glass, paper and metals of all sorts found their way into the pantheon of materials that made up the photographic arsenal. Into the 20th century, that list only continued to swell. As the number of photographer’s studios and expeditionary surveys to remote locations of the world flourished—and the public’s appetite for views of themselves and their surroundings grew—so did the businesses catering to and providing photographic equipment and materials.

And as with any business enterprise, it was inevitable that, one by one, some would begin to die off.

***

Over the last decade, Alison Rossiter has been collecting unprocessed samples of photographic material—including both films and papers—from each decade of the 20th century. She processes (or has others process) these materials as they were intended, but she does so without exposing them to either an image or light of any kind.

This would have been an inconceivable artistic task in the late 1980s. What would have been the point when Azo, Kodabromide, and graded gelatin silver papers of every variety were still widely available and the norm? But at this point in our history, as news of the folding of company after company arrives in my inbox on a weekly basis, the sheer subtlety and variety of photographic surfaces and materials is lovely to behold. It both honors the material support of the medium and makes one aware of what has passed before, and now, sadly, has passed away.

A certain type of photography has definitely died.

Michel Campeau’s elegant, color photographs of darkrooms are a memento mori to the physical spaces in which these extinct photographic materials were used. The thoughtfulness that photographers put into their darkrooms—and which comes across in Campeau’s photographs—reminds me of the One Picture Press book by Bill Jay about Bill Brandt, the great British photographer. When visiting Brandt in his home, Jay asked to visit his darkroom, to which Brandt “sternly refused.” “What is it?” Jay asked, “The holy of holies?” Brandt simply answered, “Yes.”