A historical post with two large format photos of wetlands in South Australia from the archives.
Traditionally art photography has been foundationally tied to the fine print as this provided the aesthetic criteria that enabled photography for find a place in an art gallery/museum. Tying photography foundationally to the fine print was especially important for the large format photographers in Australia from the 1970s onward, especially so for the photography circles around The Photography Gallery at 344 Punt Road in South Yarra, Melbourne.
This foundation was historically significant as it ensured that photography became part of art's traditional value system that was centred around authenticity and originality. Photography's entry was an event of the new that then required a readjustment and re-evaluation of the boundaries of art's traditional value system.
If history is all there is then we belong to this tradition, which holds that art is something that challenges and breaks with our usual comportment towards things. We cannot disregard this tradition, simply leave it behind, overturn it, or dismiss it as an error. We can, however, reinterpret this tradition as distorted, or as having its legitimacy reduced, in the sense that the photographic print was but one of photography's reproductive forms.
(Wetlands, Hindmarsh River, Victor Harbor. Cambo 5x7 monorail, Schneider-Kreuznach 210mm, Kodak Portra 160)
Photography's multiple reproductive forms historically included slide and video projection and, currently there are different technological forms of monitor display. Today, with the emergence of the networked digital image, the print is but one of photography reproductive forms. So the photographic tradition's foundational emphasis on the print is a distorted one. Perhaps photography no longer needs foundations to justify its status as art?
Multiple reproductive forms of photography in our contemporary digital culture suggests that, if that the photographic image need no longer be foundationally tied to the reproductive form of the print, then we need shift to thinking about the photographic image as image instead of the photographic image as print.
This is an important shift given the massive circulation of images associated with the emergence of the digital image associated with the host media technologies such as computers, internet, video games mobile devices. Our world is saturated with moving or circulating images of all kinds including prints. We are moving towards a world where everyday life and digital technology seamlessly blur. It appears that with immersive video the internet is moving off our screens and into the world around us as spatial computing given that Vision Pro and other “passthrough” headsets brings VR content into our real-world surrounding so we see what’s around us while using the device.
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