Photography Collection

Peter Plagens compares contemporary photography in an article "Is Photography Dead?" in Newsweek with painting. The early esthetic of photography to document nature has vanished by the means of digital technology. Manipulating an image to look like a perfect landscape or to change faces into something very artifical is a dominating trend. "Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. 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."