The End of Photography

There were entire albums made for each outing. Some were by the river, some were in a barn, some were in someone’s aunt’s nice house in the hills. Some were in the hills, all were authored by classmates who had digital cameras, not phones. The quality of which were tiny and pixilated in my own. I was too in the moment to put a camera between myself and an experience. When I looked at photographs of myself I felt like a deer in headlights, shocked and uncomfortable, and eyes like the eyes of deer in that traumatic moment, opaque in the flash, wondering how they got here. When of course I knew, I was just doing what my friends were doing. Deer infest the capital region, so the gaze was not new to anyone and no one was alarmed. 

There’s a photograph my dad took of me on an ice winter day in Minnesota a few years back. We were walking in a snowstorm, just for the adventure of it. Out on the lake, forceful prairie winds picked up speed along the slick ice making dunes of snow where it eddied. In the image my figure stands like a dark musical note in the blistering white landscape. The picture looks dramatic for a human body. Though I was about to tumble over from the weather, the stakes were low. I was on vacation, and a little struggle, about a mile away from my grandmother’s home was not going to push me over, I was not alone.

I think about this image in relation to the way images have grown like weeds all over the internet. And like weeds, they may hold another, an abundant, kind of medicine. To unlatch from the capitalist notion of value in scarcity, these images propogate all over the internet, get reshared, written over, filtered. Now the image has less to do with quality and composition but quantity and perspective. Recently I have been using social media to find out about actions and events from people and groups I follow.

The surplus of imagery, what craft there once was in photography has become, not the work of one image, but many that define a certain stance and location. It also has less to do with the subject and more to do with the connectedness the image has to others being made, to continually return to Susan Sontag’s On Photography. Is the scroll not just as important as the single image? 

Looking now at the image taken a few years back on the frozen lake in Minnesota, if you didn’t know any other form of the story you would think I was in an arctic storm far away from shelter. This was a singular event with an auteur, as it is described in cinema. It is as true as a live action movie is true, with an invisible narrator and a subject. 

The way the scrolling works, in fact lends to video, as one image follows the next with a certain speed. If the time consuming one image is sped up, multiple images by multiple hands take up that time now. 

In fact, selfies now, are not generally images, but videos. Often it is less about the image of the person, and more about their message. 

My father still works for the local newspaper. He gets paid for his images. He is a “professional” photographer, with all the issues that brings up. He always had this kind of power because he could take pictures of people who were having successes, but also, and was sometimes required to take pictures of people who didn’t want their images reproduced. He doesn’t have the same singular power for image making any more. 

And who is giving the assignments now? What are people speaking into the camera? What are the images flowing through the ether? Who is benefitting from them? Photography insists on its truth, it has started entire movements. It has changed the way our world is understood. Imagine what sense we would want to share with one another, if it was not vision.