Future of Photography in the age of Instagram

[Rufus]

I thought this was an interesting article with some useful references and links. It prompts a philosophical consideration of the many roles of photography.

https://www.theguardian.com/artandde...CMP=GTUK_email

[Donald]

Really thought provoking article.

[mugge]

A very interesting read. Thank you for the link.
Cheers Ole

[Manfred M]

Thanks for posting. It was an interesting read, but the author has really really just re-hashed things said many times before and really adds nothing new or interesting to the debate about the future direction of photography.

Yes there are millions of people adding to their images to the image pool every day and the vast majority are at best described as mediocre. But at least that's a start and some of these folks will start trying to create better images.

On the other hand, with that many people contributing to the genre, at the higher end, the field has become much better too. Just look at what we see posted here on CiC; many of the images we see posted here would have been feted as being amazing shots and the photographers would have been celebrated as being amazing photographers. Today, for a site like this, these are just more good images. Our standards have gone up too.

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), some of the tools that we use in creating our images definitely incorporate these, from the multi-point autofocus points in our cameras to some of the post processing tools (look at the "Content Aware" functionality in Photoshop), these are real-world outcomes from AI work. Let's face it, this and other technological improvements have let many more of us create strong images.

The one aspect that AI has not (yet) conquered is the ability to recognize and capture a scene that connects with the audience on an emotional level. To date, AI and technology has impacted the purely technical aspects of photography reasonably well. Nailing the colour, exposure and sharpness in image making have all become stronger. Arranging the photographic elements; composition, use of space and identifying are removing distractions still require the human touch. No element of AI that I am aware of addresses the mood or impact of an image. AI does not appear to have what we would call "imagination". These are all purely human abilities that (to date) have defied being turned into computer algorithms.

Perhaps I am more of an optimist than the writer; but encoding some of these human properties into algorithms are likely to remain elusive, so people will have to be part of the mix for a very long time when it comes to making high quality images.

[DanK]

An interesting article. Thanks for posting.

He included this:

Increasingly, though, contemporary photography is all about, to borrow a term beloved by academics and curators, “interrogating the medium”, which often means shifting it away from documentary towards other, more conceptually driven art forms – abstract painting, sculpture, performance, video installation. To this end, younger photographers such as Daisuke Yokota and Maya Rochat, both included in Tate Modern’s recent exhibition, Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, make work that is, on one level, a dynamic reflection of the dilemma of the contemporary photographer in an age of image overload. Yokota, for instance, has treated images with heat and iron powder, and subjected others to constant rephotographing, rescanning and reprinting. The results are closer to abstraction and make the idea of photography as a medium that simply records the world around us seem positively quaint.

Here's an example of Yokota's work.

IMHO, it looks like someone made a mistake in a wet darkroom. It seems that one of the things that happened to other visual arts is now happening in photography as well. It reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live skit from decades ago called "Bad Conceptual Art." My wife and I let our membership in a local modern art museum laps after we saw one exhibit that featured severed heads of plastic dolls glued to a board and a second that had seeming random collections of debris (e.g., a broken piece of venician blinds) from a renovation site glued to a board. One shows that one is a sophisticate by treating this as serious art.

Many years ago, a friend of mine recounted being in a gallery in a modern art museum in which people spent the appropriate time looking thoughtfully at whatever was in front of them. He then noticed someone whose progression along one wall brought him to a sign that said "cafeteria closed for repairs." the man stood there the required length of time, looking thoughtful, stroking his chin at one point.

For a wonderful (real) spoof of this, see this video, in which experts thoughtfully evaluate what is actually a cheap poster from IKEA.

[vishalthejigsaw]

Thanks for sharing the article with us. It was a great read and was very instructive. As pointed out in the article, with the rise of social media, false claims about the authority of a photo or video has increased substantially at the same time, it also explains how light has been shed on the popularity of a photographer or an artist who had previously been left out unrecognized.