Still they come, the claims of the death of photography. I nearly flew off the handle anew reading Peter Plagens’ cranky refusal to evolve in a recent Newsweek article titled … wait for it … “Is Photography Dead?” (December 10, 2007). Plagens gets it all wrong and sounds 1,000,000 years old in the process; much of his article reads better if you imagine it voiced by Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” character:

I’m oooooold! And I’m not happy! And I don’t like things now compared to the way they used to be. All this progress — phooey! Nowadays … We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corporeal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such “performance animation” films as “Beowulf,” overwhelmed by them. … Even sculpture has adopted digital “rapid prototyping” technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Progress?! Flobble-de-flee! (Carvey in plain text, Plagens quote links to his article).

Instead of reaching for balance (the list of popular contemporary photographers whose work eschews heavy – or any – digital tinkering is long, Peter, but here are a few to get you started: Alec Soth, Laura Letinsky, Jason Fulford, Todd Hido, Elinor Carucci, Mike Slack, Tim Davis), Plagens spends his word count whimpering about the medium’s further detachment from “reality” and how, way back when, the people in photographs were “really doing what they looked like they were doing.” The key part of that phrase is “looks like” – since when is reality “like” anything? To Plagens, “reality” is an undeniable truth, but no matter how deep a photographer’s commitment to veracity, photography has always been about what we (both the photographer and the later viewer) think we see happening, not what’s actually taking place.

Fortunately, the responses to Plagens article echo some of my initial sentiments. The majority of comments rebuke Plagens for his narrow view, many taking the “even unaltered photographs are just an interpretation of a slice of time” (fom a comment by Scott Collins) side of the debate. Bravo!

Does there exist a list of artforms that have completely and irretrievably “died”? I doubt it, and it’s because artforms are really only capable of birth and evolution. They ebb and flow, meshing with one another and taking mapless journeys guided by the intuition of a few trailblazing individuals and the spirit of the era. As it happens we live in a time of rapid technological advance and art responds in kind. Onward and upward. It’s time for the ballyhoo to subside. The “death of photography” must die.