By Plato Rivellis
When I started to seriously engage in photography (about forty years ago), its significance was on a decline, and those still involved were old faithfuls, possibly picturesque or even naively fanatical. Journalism and advertising had begun to turn their backs on it in favor of television imagery, while art had not yet engaged with it. Indeed, if someone asked an educated person to name some good photographers, they would find that such knowledge was not part of general education.
Over the years, much has changed. Whether for better or worse is not our concern. When the current flows in one direction, it is futile to try to go the other way. Instead, one should follow it, making continuous minor adjustments. In this note, I will attempt to identify the significant changes and outline some necessary corrective actions.
The revolutionary changes that touched and influenced photography were digital technology, social media, mobile phones, and the (almost suffocating) embrace of photography by the fine arts world. Worse, all these combined suddenly made photography "fashionable." And as is known, whatever is "in fashion" loses in substance and duration. However, let’s examine these changes and identify their positive aspects while also considering how to deal with their negative consequences.
I don't think artists ever sought technological changes. Directors in the silent film era were fine without sound. It's telling that in an old edition of the Encyclopaedia "Eleftheroudakis," an entry on cinema speculated the addition of sound, but then, it wouldn’t be about cinema anymore, meaning moving photography. And when Renaissance artists made their paints, they couldn't imagine ordering any color they wanted in a tube. Yet once a new technology appears, it's inevitable that artists will use it, but they should turn it to their advantage without succumbing to it. Great directors understood, for instance, that sound wasn't a step towards greater realism or a way to turn cinema into theater but an additional tool in creating their magic.
Moreover, technological revolutions also offer an additional opportunity to rethink the "why" of our actions. In trying to use digital technology photographically and not to submit photography to it, we must redefine, each from their side, what photography means as a medium and what the photographer seeks from it. Otherwise, we must accept that a new genre has emerged, necessarily called "digital photography." And this is the first mistake. There is no "analog photography" or "digital photography." There is only photography. Digital technology may have radically changed our photographic habits, but not the essence of photography. Of course, one could argue that there's no obligation to adopt digital technology and could stick to analog, but such a return (or obsession) is invariably marked by the quaint character of a restoration. In the end, when something changes so radically, resistance doesn’t bring back what was lost but something resembling a retro version of what one wished for. And this ideological commitment swallows up the photography one tries to make.
The digital age brought many good things to photography, which we have grown accustomed to and would not want to lose. To mention a few: much better cameras in the cheaper categories, infinitely easier and better processing and printing now within the reach of almost every photographer, strong options for organizing and searching photos, attractively quick and free communication, and much more.
However, these welcome features were usually accompanied by negative aspects. In these cases, those benefiting from the positives must not just resist the negatives but exploit them to reverse their effects. The first three words characterizing the negative side are "excess," "ease," and "verbosity." Now, without much effort, any photographer can produce infinite (and free) photos, which they can edit and present in endless ways. The only antidote to this deluge of abundance and ease is "choice." There is no reason to make the easy difficult, even if we could, but we must be stricter in our criteria and choices. However, this requires more knowledge than before and much more thought. Obviously, nothing is offered without requiring some counterbalance.
However, the ease and speed brought by digital technology were a poisoned gift, as they stole the sacredness of the process. Previously, shooting, developing, and printing required time, functioning as a specific ritual. Thus, the dimension of ceremony was lost. And to this, we must add the loss of veneration for various photographic tools and accessories, as one should not cling to something that will inevitably be replaced in the effort to keep up with technological advances. Yet there is an answer, more substantial than the given production process that accompanied analog photography. Now, every photographer is called to define their personal photographic process and through it to lend the photographic practice the dimension of a ritual process. But this too requires greater knowledge and thought than in the past.
But I must also add two more points for which I am grateful to digital technology. The general public believes in the truth of photographic representation. But anyone who knows how to look at photos simply believes in the verisimilitude of the depiction, because the truth cannot be exhausted in front of an arbitrarily cut small piece of a much broader reality and in a minimum percentage of unambiguous information, since a photographic image has no narrative capacity. However, the simple viewer, knowing that digital technology easily turns falsehood into truth, stops believing in the truth of the depiction and seeks the meaning of the image elsewhere. Thus, they become smarter and more sensitive. The second gift has to do with the ability of photography to be reproduced identically ad infinitum. Many tried to overturn this truth to lend an objective value to the printed paper. Today, photography is reproduced in an absolutely identical way in infinite copies, while it is also transmitted electronically, even with the simple sending of a file. In this way, its peculiarity (which always prevailed) is regained, and its quality as a trace rather than an object is highlighted. Just as it happens with written poetry.
Mobile phones do not pose a threat to photography if the photographer treats them (within the framework of their personal ritual) as a photographic camera. Usually, however, the opposite happens. The photographic camera is absorbed by the phone's function and turns into an instrument of the other great threat posed by social networks. Without needing to analyze the usefulness or threat of social networks, we can say that they are a curse on contemporary photography. They turn photography into a tool for neurotic communication. The only thing a photographer needs to think about is how to protect their photos from the pulp of social networks or how to adjust their use to the respect that must be given to their personal sacred photographic process.
Regarding the sudden embrace of photography by the visual arts space, I must clarify that I do not believe this space is the privileged place for photography. Photographers can benefit from this space, provided they again protect their work from extremes that would harm it. It is, therefore, again about balancing exercises between offering conveniences and possibilities and protecting the type of photography the photographer supports with their work.
Photography entered the visual arts space, one might say, through the window, not because the art world accepted and appreciated it, but because photography appeared as the suitable medium to cover the commercial gap created with the soaring prices of contemporary painting. However, people in the visual arts - who overwhelmingly did not know photography - never thought that photography is extremely simple because it is just as difficult (as is poetry), consequently not so easily marketable. It is true, however, that people in the visual arts never treated it as poetry, only as information and message. And it is a fact that the contact that the general public (and the people of the art market) had with photography was none other than that referred to in the most well-known applied forms of it (advertising and reportage). Therefore, messages. But art begins when the poetic word transcends the scope and meaning of information.
All this led to the production of a specific type of photography, characterized in English by the (somewhat comic) title "Fine Art Photography," a relatively broad term, while some famous dissenters, like Cornell Capa, named it "Gallery Art Photography," a much more restrictive term, implying, however, that this photography exists because galleries exist. It is a fact that this genre has received disproportionately large exposure compared to the number of photographers who follow it, aided by the inflated prices of photographs and oversized prints combined with the artificially limited number of copies, but mainly with the usually naive and immediately recognizable concept that necessarily characterizes this type of photography. In short, almost always the concept precedes the photography and does not emerge from it but is illustrated by it. The power of photography, however, is, conversely, its poverty, its simplicity, and, primarily, the abstract dimension that accompanies it. But if a concept is accompanied by abstraction, thus questioning - necessary in art - it ceases to function as a message.
We can easily define the areas of each applied photographic production and pass the responsibility to the one using it as an application, freeing the photographer or the casual viewer from any connection with it. We can almost equally easily define gallery photography by treating it as a specific product with some clear characteristics, found, promoted, or bought within a specific framework with its own rules. So, it is also a kind of applied photography. Made with a very specific goal.
But there is a type of photography from which everything started and which everyone accepts and understands, albeit not with corresponding respect. I am referring to commemorative photography. The photographs in which each of us condenses our life. The photographs that are equivalent to invested emotions. Those that make up the collection of our lives. For each of us, such a photograph, from the family album or the old shoebox where they were often stored, expresses much more than what it depicts. And the effort to translate into words what this photograph awakens in us meets with absolute inability.
The power of this commemorative photography was not dethroned by the (commemorative) video, nor by the plethora of neurotically repetitive mobile phone clicks, nor by the heaps of photographs uploaded daily on the internet. It is a fascinating mystery that a photograph of our deceased parent, or of the beloved person who left us, or of our wedding, or of the house of our childhood that no longer exists, is more important to us than a complete and detailed video recording of our life events. However, this mystery has at least a partial explanation. Video recording comes too close to the verisimilitude of the past, thereby making its inability to bring it back more evident. While photography serves as a prism of emotions and memory, giving us the opportunity, not to revise the past, but to revert to it emotionally through a specific but incomplete reference offered by the photograph.
The power that photographs of our past have for us was already infused into their photographs by some great photographers, from the mid-19th century, without these necessarily describing a specific past. They functioned, that is, abstractly and metaphorically as carriers of emotions. Just as great poetry so does significant photography have the power through the senses of the present, through verse or the still image, to awaken emotions connecting us with an abstract past of our own. This is the photography that interests me because it has the unique privilege of uniting the present of detailed but fragmentary recording with the vast past of our inner world. It comes out difficultly, succeeds rarely, and for this, I am grateful to technology that simplifies the process to force us to focus our interest on the essential "why" and the always open to attempts "how."
If someone focuses their interest on the information each photograph offers, they will quickly realize that the information is always incomplete and (willingly or unwillingly) supplemented by elements (real or arbitrary) that the viewer draws from outside it. Therefore, what is important is not what the photograph "shows," but what the photograph "is." Not what the photographer chose to show, but what they excluded from their frame. The photograph has no subject; it itself is the subject.
Let me repeat that the problem with photography is that it has many identities, and the most interesting (to me) is not only the most fleeting but also the most "useless." Therefore, if someone photographs, they need to think and prioritize their goals, which will help them select their subjects, judge the results of their work, be inspired by them, and gradually build a work in duration and without end.
Since my main occupation is teaching photography, allow me to offer some practical (though somewhat difficult) advice.
If someone treats photography as visual poetry, as I do, they must realize that the photographic act and result (as with commemorative photography) have no specific utility that defines and targets the goal. However, they have the power, while not stopping death and time, to speak of them. The core of this photography (but also the starting point and end) is the photographer themselves.
The photographer’s primary concern is to photograph with care and concentration. Not with thought, but with intense attention. Thought should precede photography (to guide the shot) and follow photography (to judge the result). And it should be temporarily set aside during shooting so as not to convey ideas and views. When we photograph, we see not photographs but life. We start seeing photographs after the shooting.
During shooting, we turn our camera to something that (very often for unknown reasons) we have chosen. This is the "What." We position our body in relation to the subject that caught our interest. This already begins to predetermine the frame, completed by our decision to exclude what we will not utilize. This is the "Space" part. Finally, we press the button. This is the "Time" part. The brief process described is the "How." When we return and look at our photograph, to select it we must feel that something new was born that wasn’t there in front of us when we took it. This is the "Metamorphosis." And it happens rarely. And sometime later, after a while, the photographs of the specific that were vindicated and preserved over time reveal (in the ideal version) an internal consistency. This is the personal "Work." And it is even rarer.
In the final analysis, a good photograph is a metamorphosis supported by abstraction, transcendence, and suggestion, and due to all that have over the years shaped the photographer, namely the obsessions, influences, experiences, and ultimately, the choices. But to utilize all these through photography requires thought, organization, prioritization of goals, and thought on the photographic work itself.
A great photographer, the American Paul Strand, said about the photographic portrait (but obviously it applies to every photograph), that "a portrait is the photograph of someone I do not know, whose photograph I will never forget." This means that the value of the photograph lies not in the actual event captured but in the photographic event that was born.
Plato Rivellis