‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality/society but a hammer with which to shape it.’ Unknown, but often attributed to Bertolt Brecht There is no shortage of people who decry the state of photography today, and to a great extent they have a valid argument. More broadly, such criticism has always existed against any form of art: in its time it has faced critics who want either a re-orientation in future or, more probably, a return to the good old days. Nobody can quite agree on what period these mythical ‘good’ days spanned, unless of course they never read the history of that art, in which case it is whatever time they happen to like. To whom it was good is an entirely different question. At the moment, for photography, the ‘good’ days happen to be the ’80s and ’90s when 35mm film was everywhere and everyone carried a point-and-shoot camera. Except, for anyone who lived in the ’90s, this rose-tinted version of history will immediately appear suspect: people who could get their hands on it were, in fact, really excited about digital media. Film had started on its way out and everyone saw the benefits of digital. If they could afford it, they had every reason to buy into the new technology. We often forget, when putting the past on a pedestal, that the things we speak of as vintage or old-school now were cutting-edge then. They were not artefacts, but commonalities of life. Today’s film cameras are not the equivalents of ’90s film cameras; they are to us what ’60s Polaroids were to people in the ’90s. For them, the good old days of photography had passed a few decades ago, before consumer-oriented film cameras dropped into everyone’s laps and ColorPluses and Golds and Superias ruled the markets. And the digicams everyone did use in the ’90s are the DJI Osmos of today. When we picture Mark Twain typing ‘Life on the Mississippi’ we will do well to remember that he was not romanticising a vintage gadget but adopting a modern one, adapting to change. Art is change. I. What prompted my thoughts on this topic was a video essay by a young – and rather brilliant – photographer named Jared Thomas Tapy. The video essay is titled ‘The disease of aesthetic photography (and why it’s ruining the medium)’ and starts with these flowing words: There’s a specific kind of sickness that has infected photography. It’s a kind of visual Botox, if you will. You know it when you see it. Let me paint the scene for you. It’s perfectly diffused lighting, the subject centred just so, and a cinematic sort of color grade that screams, ‘I used a recipe to make this image.’ It’s all technically correct and yet it feels as alive as a taxidermied [sic] bird. Beautiful, sure, but undeniably dead. The rest of the video is similarly literarily meritorious, but I found myself lingering on this statement a lot longer than I had expected. I think we all know the kind of photograph Jared is talking about. It reminds me of Instagram over the past several years and of 500px from a decade ago. I agree with Jared’s claim that such photographs feel ‘dead’, but I find it hard to agree with his criticisms of using a ‘recipe’ – so what? – or, more broadly, his definition of ‘beauty’ later in the video. We have ‘stopped exploring the world and started curating it’ he says, and that ‘there was a time in photography when beauty had context’. He suggests beauty must serve the truth, offering Gordon Parks as an example where the ‘images are beautiful, lighting gorgeous, but the moment in the photograph was real. It wasn’t constructed, it was witnessed.’ These are powerful words. But they also paint with brushstrokes so broad they undermine their own argument. For every Gordon Parks there is a William Eggleston or Stephen Shore or Saul Leiter. None of their photographs were staged, yet they all prized aesthetics above ‘the truth’. They were true because they were not set up from scratch, and that was enough. Everything else was about aesthetics. They saw beauty in everyday life, in the mundanity, in that part of our world we take for granted. They did not always scour the streets for their work or seek to always convey emotions through human subjects. The same questions can be asked of every painter in history. Are any of their works the truth? When a portraitist decided to pose their subject five inches further left of a window to ensure a more flattering beam of light hit their nose, were they not making an aesthetic choice? When a glimpse of war was painted on a large canvas, were the cavalry not positioned just so? It hardly took away from the truth when painters paid heed to aesthetics. Did the light glint off the water in the way the painting shows, or did the painter, aware of how beautiful it looks when the evening sun hits the water, actively decide to employ it in their work? And then you have Salvador Dalí or Jackson Pollock. Aesthetics are a legitimate motivation for pursuing art. Restricting it to ‘the truth’ makes art unreasonably, needlessly utilitarian. Jared’s focus on Gordon Parks or Lewis Hine or Dorothea Lange or Nick Ut or Robert Frank or Daido Moriyama to make his point serves to position street, documentary and journalistic photography as a dogmatically purer form of photography because somehow ‘the truth’ they capture is categorically more important than aesthetics and beauty. This should be no surprise given these are the genres within which Jared himself works. But how much of an untruth is there in the works of Harry Gruyaert, Luigi Ghirri or Ernst Haas just because they show the world aesthetically or comment on it purely visually? Their work is as much the truth, just not established around events. Similarly, how untrue are the works of modern-day photographers following in their footsteps, such as Todd Hido or Courtney Victoria or Craig Whitehead? Clockwise from top-left: Photographs by Saul Leiter, Luigi Ghirri, Ernst Haas and Harry Gruyaert, courtesy of Saul Leiter Foundation, Matthew Marks Gallery, Ernst Haas Estate and Magnum PhotosFrom top to bottom: Photographs by Saul Leiter, Luigi Ghirri, Harry Gruyaert and Ernst Haas, courtesy of Saul Leiter Foundation, Matthew Marks Gallery, Magnum Photos and Ernst Haas Estate respectively. II. I agree with much of what Jared says, especially that a line has to be drawn somewhere to separate good photographs from photographs. But I find myself questioning whether we should be drawing the line where Jared does. In doing so we risk becoming overly dogmatic and remaining blind to the fact that our artistic and ethical sensibilities as an evolving (or devolving?) civilisation change over time, and as old artists die and new ones dabble with their brushes. When someone criticises photography today for having lost its emotion, it is very tempting to nod in agreement. Yet I cannot help but wonder what this person would have said about 35mm film had they lived in the ’90s, or about slide film, or about large format film, or indeed about digital cameras. Art reflects the sensibilities of its time, and those sensibilities are inevitably shaped by the masses or – in the rarest of cases – by outstanding individuals. We might then be in the minority if we disagree with whatever current sensibilities manifest as art. But we are not wrong, and neither are those modern sensibilities that we disagree with. Everything just is. The suggestion that today we have turned photography into meaningless exhibitions of technical perfection rather than the technically imperfect but deeply meaningful and arresting, emotional pieces they used to be is both overly simplistic and banal. Nobody saw Cartier-Bresson’s work in the 1940s and immediately understood what the ‘decisive moment’ was. Long after he published his book with that very title people still assumed it referred to pressing the shutter at just the right moment. I have met some who still think that is what it means. People who cannot admire art have existed for a long time; they have existed through all ages, they exist now and they will continue to exist in the future. Their existence is just as legitimate as that of artists and admirers of art, not least because they form the masses that dictate contemporary sensibilities. This is especially true today because of how easily someone without any care for art can still, even if inadvertently, throw their weight behind or against it: post a photograph by any accomplished photographer on a pseudonymous account on Instagram and how many ‘likes’ might it garner? Stuart Franklin’s famous photograph of ‘the tank man’ did not involve the photographer walking up to a scene and clicking the perfect shot. The process of photography can be messy and its outputs varied, not all of which may appeal to all of us. Today, people might zoom into this photo to look at the man and the tank closely; what is this if not a shift in how we see the world? For more examples of contact sheets visit Magnum Photos. Now what if photographs were staged? Would it somehow lessen their beauty or, more importantly, their truth? Jared’s example of Dorothea Lange is an interesting one in this regard: her famous photograph ‘Migrant mother’ was, by all accounts, staged. It was not staged to the point where it was fully set-up, but things were moved around and people directed so that Lange could capture an emotion she wished to capture. On top of all this, photographs are developed – whether in a darkroom or digitally – with some aspects highlighted and others nudged into the darkness to better balance elements as the photographer wishes them to be. This photograph was no exception. And that does not take away from its truth. Beauty and reality need not be mutually exclusive. Complaining about how many photographs are being made today – and therefore, purely statistically, how many ‘bad’ photographs exist – is not new. Susan Sontag’s words from her 1977 book ‘On photography’ come to mind. But in the sea of images Sontag swims in I think she notices what Jared seems to miss: …there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in [Plato’s] cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. With a demographic shift in participation, sensibilities shift too. Some nuances are lost, and there is no guarantee that others are born. A picture of an interesting object will simply be more recognisable than an interesting, thoughtful or evocative picture of something mundane. Emotions are stripped from viewers’ examination of a photograph and all that is left is an exercise in object recognition. However, it is worth noting that this is quite a fundamental behaviour amidst a crowd. It is not new. We never lost the ability to see a photograph, perhaps most people never had it in the first place. The only difference is that such people would never have walked into an art gallery in the ’40s to see Henri Cartier-Bresson’s works let alone take the time to write letters rejecting them. They do not walk into art galleries now either, but photographs from art galleries make their way into people’s phones anyway only to face what is in hindsight a perfectly predictable response and a loud rejection. The documentary photographs Jared talks about – and indeed this is all he talks about, not landscapes or still life or portraiture – were also toying with aesthetics and beauty and by the mid–20th century had forced themselves into the definition of ‘art’ following the long era of pictorialism. People were asked to look at what would otherwise have been journalistic or ‘everyday’ photographs as a form of art, to notice not a scene or a fact, not a protest or an inequality, but to look at what bold claim a photograph makes about society by choosing what to show, how to show it and what to leave out, how to paint with light and shadow, how to focus hard or soft. Paintings have long done this and words have long painted this; and so we asked why photography of this genre has any weaker a claim to be just as much an art? Even ‘straight photography’, the erstwhile counterpart to pictorialism, saw ample darkroom techniques employed to bend photographs to an artist’s will. Landscape photography was art because it most closely resembled objects – paintings mainly – that we had already determined were ‘art’. Then still life and plenty of photographs that were set up to be just so. These are the very photographs that Jared criticises for manufacturing an emotion rather than capturing what already exists out there. But I have to ask why. Why is it that when it comes to photography, suddenly, art cannot be allowed to evoke an emotion by producing fiction. Why is only a paintbrush or a pen afforded this privilege? We are bound to find bastardisations of any definition when we democratise it. Such is the way of democracy. But we are also bound to find new meaning and novel ways of looking at art – a new ‘visual code’ or ‘grammar’ or ‘ethics’ as Sontag calls them. Why are we protecting the status quo that kept Vivian Maier hidden just because we have to wade through rubbish to find a diamond. The alternative is a race towards uniformity, and I find that distasteful. The other, perhaps less frequently discussed, aspect of wading through rubbish is being able to identify rubbish. Jared has done this in some way, and put it to beautiful words too: …the irony is that the obsession of aesthetics is killing the very thing that it claims to serve, which is attention. The more polished the image, the faster it disappears. The digital age rewarded immediacy and it punished nuance. We’ve become so conditioned to scrolling that anything demanding contemplation feels like a chore. And the result is that photographers have started chasing what is algorithmically approved and not what challenges the audience. Now this is a good argument for identifying rubbish and I agree with it completely. When photographs are beholden not to the artist’s vision but to an algorithm, photography becomes a dying practice. It then falls upon the custodians of photography as an art to ensure that the artistic elements of it remain. Put simply, disincentivise bad photography and reward good photography. But make sure the line between good and bad photography is one you draw for yourself, and do not mistake it for a universal and objective distinction. One approach would be to identify when an artist pursues their intents for the sake of their work rather than relinquishing their vision to an algorithm. To me, rewarding any hint of the latter would amount to incentivising what I would consider bad work. Many photographers leaving Instagram following its pivot to video and reels a few years ago is an example of such positive action, albeit passively. There are some photographers still on Instagram because that is where the eyes are – an undeniable truth, for now – but also because they are perhaps not bold enough to take their work elsewhere, or to pay a price to make a point. Of course I do not hold this against them; to each their own, and everyone surely does what they can. But there are also those making photographs in specific ways because they have ‘figured out’ the algorithm. Such practice risks invading the territory of mechanical practice rather than emotional, aesthetically-informed practice. Jared is on Substack, for example, and I have my own views about that platform as do several other people. But he is on Substack because it works for him; so are several others posting algorithmically approved photos to Instagram because it works for them. Those of us well-meaning photographers who want to engage with photography on a more artistic level should probably take our views, efforts and, well, art, elsewhere. Say Glass or Foto or Flashes or a variant that undoubtedly lives on Mastodon. By this I do not mean we should suppress ‘popular’ photography; rather, it can live alongside purely artistic photography in the same way that operas did not die out when pop music entered the scene. The pie got redistributed, and some may continue to wish it got distributed differently, but things do co-exist. Even here, when discussing art that is subservient to a platform, it is worth paying attention to nuances. There is no better way to avoid exclusion. What is the difference between working by an algorithm’s dictation and making photographs that adhere to contemporary sensibilities? In the former case the artist surrenders agency; in the latter case, the artist retains it and tries to push cultural sensibilities in new directions. Because algorithms are detached from the art they dictate, they do not respond to being pushed by art in the same way that a group of individuals discovering a new piece of work might immediately embrace or reject or consider it. III. The meaning of art persists and evolves amongst artists: the same group of people moving through the same circuit of events and galleries and exhibitions, building upon one another’s work. This is true of any other field, so why not art? But then elitism is frowned upon, and democratic tastes decried. We cannot have it both ways. The artist must then create for the sake of their art, their vision and their beliefs; and they must be content to see their work torn to shreds by the masses or even celebrated by them. Make your evocative photographs, let others make their deadpan ones. Everything that exists is history. Meaningless perfection is just as much history as meaningful imperfection. That stunning picture of a circular cresting wave with a surfer perfectly framed within its curves (no doubt a composite image) that received ten-thousand ‘likes’ on Instagram is just as valid as the ‘appreciations’ awarded to that blurry, black-and-white picture of two dogs growling at each other (captioned ‘division’) on Glass. If this is mediocrity, then that is not new either. Indeed it may well be the oldest of all things we have talked about, certainly older than photography itself. As Antonio Salieri, the self-declared patron saint of mediocrity, reminded us in the famous play and film, ‘My music is correct, it is balanced, it is professional—and it is utterly dead.’ As William Eggleston would remind us, ‘People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they’re right there, whatever they are.’ Photographs courtesy of Eggleston Art Foundation. If an artist – I use this word knowing anyone can be one or call themselves one – wants to change what we talk about when we talk about photographs, if they want us to look past the object of a picture to the subject of it, then all they need to do is pay no heed to the waxing and waning trends of time. Stick to the fundamentals. Tell stories even when nobody understands them; capture emotions people can feel but not verbalise; make more pictures of what excites you rather than what sells. Have the courage to forego popularity and stick to your convictions. If enough people do that, art will persist until after the masses re-assess what warrants their appreciation, after perfection turns into monotony and emotions become a novelty. There is simply no other way. Perhaps the struggling artist is as much a glimpse into the future as a reminiscence of the past. Struggle is a shapeshifter, but it need not be synonymous with hopelessness. In thinking of all this, one cannot help but return to Eggleston – one of those outstanding individuals who changed the way we see photographs – who famously opposed our habit of looking at objects in a photograph, picking it apart or trying to make sense of it. He declared that a photograph ‘is what it is and I’ve never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn’t make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they’re right there, whatever they are.’ Such is art. It is what is in front of you, whatever it is. How does it make you feel? Curious? Do you feel an indescribable emotion? Do you ask a question? Do you wonder? Do you simply like it for reasons you cannot explain? That is good enough. Everything else will come and go. Everything else is left to the artist and their decision-making. Not reasoning, just the act of taking a decision. The little things are not our concern as we look at the finished product. At that point we ought not zoom in or pixel-peep or even focus on the emotions and whether a photograph was being truthful to reality, whatever that means. All that is left is for us to reward what we think of as good photography and disregard algorithmic servitude. It takes a bit of effort, but when was this sort of thing ever easy? There are then two forks in the road: pluralism and resistance. Photography, like any art, must allow pluralism with no objective definition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’; and at the same time photography must resist incentives from sources that have no legitimate response to that art, primarily algorithms, recognising that not every system that helps art spread has in fact earned our participation. There is no universally binding definition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ photography besides whatever standards individuals and communities of artists may develop and defend. There should certainly be no place for algorithmic decisions here. What we talk about when we talk about photographs should not be the minutiae – that is for the photographer to worry about – but the picture as it exists in its entirety, as the photographer intended, and as we feel it, however that may be. Subscribe to my newsletter • Reply by e-mail • Support with just £1 • Sign my guestbook • Send a webmention