After reading Stephen Mayes’ TIME essay on the end of photography I couldn’t help but respond. To begin with, his main proposition is that “in the future there will be no such thing as a ‘straight photograph’” to which I’d add that I’m not sure there ever really has been much of a ‘straight photograph’ although in recent decades the public has become increasingly aware of this. Ed Weston, photographic pioneer of American Modernism, referred to the photograph (in 1932) as a “willful distortion of fact,” and this was long before Photoshop… and the debate as to whether photography was a mechanical reproduction of the real world or whether it was a medium for artists is as old as the technology itself. Photography has always been enmeshed with technology, but it has never been about it. The changes that Mayes is noticing are nothing new, even if they are dramatic and represent some amazing shifts in what photography can be and who can use it. Photography has also always been a very democratic medium, particularly after 1900. It’s one of the beautiful things about it…..

Source: petapixel.com
 

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