Photography’s Third Act
dcurt.is
dcurt.is
So we have it that communication is better when it's easier and we are no longer shackled by the editorial desire to not produce a bunch of junk. Now, Mr. Curtis says, we can communicate that we like the hit television show Breaking Bad by taking a photo of our screen with a thumbs up! What a glorious age we live in.
Seriously? Curtis lauds people writing a comment on a scrap of paper, taking a photo of it as a means to circumvent the lack of a commenting system on a website and hails it as "Photography's Third Act"? Wow, just... wow.
The first non-commercial uses of photography were for experimentation and artistic portraiture. I don't understand why you disagree with me.
I'm not saying there's no future for artistic photography; I'm saying that there are new use cases that haven't yet been fully developed.
[1]"nadar raising photography to the height of art" by Honoré Daumier http://bit.ly/12qOL4Z
I have. Hence my reaction to the article's unqualified introductory move "when photography was first popular it was used for x." We don't know how the author measures 'popular' or exactly what time frame he's referring to by 'when.' It's the sort of statement that needs to be framed, explained and supported, not one that can easily be taken for granted.
You say the author is incorrect in implying that artistic expression may inhibit us, yet in his context, artistic expressions or attempts thereof do inhibit the users, because they're attempting to communicate artistically, rather than directly and immediately as the author wishes.
No. I didn't say any such thing. Please don't misquote me. It's not that I don't think that trying to make better content is inhibitive, it's that it's worth it. Quantity, populist or not, does not automatically usurp quality.
So I have no idea either.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/24/forget-todays-drama-dustin-...
The site that he originally published articles through (http://www.dustincurtis.com) is worth a look just for the quality of the design. Probably his most effective post (the one that most people will have experienced the effects of) is this: http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter....
You can see his submissions over time on HN to get an idea of how he's known in this community. http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=dus...
Have we considered it's a joke? A simple joke a first, but over time grown sentient. Maybe there are multiple people in the cabal of Dustin Curtis: designer, over-generalizing pontificator, and website engineer. Elite trolling for people who already think they are better than everybody else. A Fox News commentator of startups, except most people are in so deep they can't see the deranged minds behind the narrative.
Does Dustin Curtis interact on any platforms beside twitter and his own website? nickb taken to a whole other level?
And this is the high point of design apparently...
No, it was mostly used for portraiture and things you could generalize as journalism. Photography as an accepted fine art is a pretty recent thing.
Photography was used, among other things, for demonstrating medical conditions, for mugshots (and compositing many photos to capture a “scientific” “type” of different sorts of criminals or members of particular social classes), for scientific imagery, for understanding movement (Muybridge & al.), for propaganda (well beyond “journalism”), for faddish semi-scams (like the famous “spirit” photographs), for documentation of people and places (with types of photos it would be quite a stretch to call either “journalism” or “portraiture”), for making reproductions of other types of art, and yes, for fine art in itself (there were huge debates about whether photography counted as “art” going right back to the beginning, with the pictorialists e.g. famously making their images out of focus or otherwise blurry, scratched, etc. so that it could be “art” instead of a purely mechanical process). Indeed, nearly all of the uses of photography date back to the 19th century, they just weren’t as widespread as today.
First, the truth status of this sweeping statement is hard to assess, but I think it's more wrong than right. If you had to complete your sentence "The most important...", I think you'd better put installation, or perhaps conceptual art, rather than photography.
It would be better not to make such statements at all -- doing so combines two notoriously slippery concepts, "art" and "most important". (If we can't define art, and good luck doing it, then defining most important art is well out of reach.)
Anyway, you and the comment above you are talking across each other. You're saying that photography is important to contemporary art. jberryman is saying that the most common use cases of photography are not art, and tend to be documentary, not aesthetic. Both of you can be right.
It would be better not to make such statements at all...
-- As you said.
http://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/hyman-writing.jp...
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[1] Citations for context, if you need them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_photogra...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhein_II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Topographics
Non-topographic 19th Century art with 20th C influence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cameron_julia_jackson.jpg
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Is "Photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art"?
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Photography-Matters-Never-Before/d...
_________
Does art exist?
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Objective_Eye.html?i...
__________
I didn't say photography was unimportant. I said that it's hard to defend your statement that photography is the most important of the arts. I don't see you defending that statement.
I do see you putting words in my mouth, with quotes as if I wrote them ("at the cutting edge"). It's a tautology that photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art. So is painting. So is multimedia installation.
Your last note ("does art exist") is puzzling, because nobody here said art did not exist. I did say it's hard to define, and lots of artists are working to keep it that way. Is a sculpture made of fingernail clippings art (http://strose.lunaimaging.com:8180/luna/servlet/detail/StRos...)?
This is an exhibition catalog excerpt. The artist (from the 1850's) is being exhibited because of his links to XYZ (the guy with the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, linked above, in 2011). The Guy XYZ is a student of Becher (==New Topographics), the former a Pioneer of the original aesthetic now called Topographic/s. That, in a nutshell is the point I was making. Interesting stuff was happening in the 1800's. In Art. With Photography.
I didn't say photography was unimportant. I said that it's hard to defend your statement that photography is the most important of the arts. I don't see you defending that statement.
== I don't need to. Its not critical to the point.
If you have a true interest in the subject matter, its worth looking into further. I would encourage other HN readers to do the same, if they have an interest in it. The interesting stuff in contemporary photography is well-beyond what you've listed. I'd take that as an opportunity to learn more about the subject, rather than taking it personally. For the most part, it is German and Japanese leading the way. Books are your friend, and an increasingly good investment.
http://www.amazon.com/Photobook-History-2-Martin-Parr/dp/071...
Myself, and a quick survey in the room, of a bunch of various tech, and for that matter photography types - not one had heard of, let alone used Snapchat...
Still, I love that feeling of playing with a truly novel technology for the first time with a few friends, especially when it's presented in the raw with few extraneous features. There's a feeling of excitement and exploration that seems to decay in a year's time at best.