notesonphotography

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Echoes XXVI

Instagram @notesonphotography

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Marilyn Monroe/ Richard Avedon

Heath Ledger / Stephanie Pfriender Stylander

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Susan Sontag, On Photography

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“….I don’t have a fixed idea of photography, I don’t have a theory of photography, I don’t think there is “one” […] and that itself is something that’s fascinating about it […] it seems to elude definition […] and that’s a source of constant renewal.”

"Photography really becomes accepted as an art precisely at the point where art is questioning itself."

"It’s actually a tiny fragment of photographs that get made [as] and in the name of art […] so the arguing for photography’s artistic merit misses the fact that the energy in photography and the significance of photography for art, I think comes from the fact that it can’t entirely belong to art."

"…I think always part of the problem when discussing photography is, we in the present always want to think that our problems are bigger and more original and more specific to our time, and more rooted in the very latest technologies - or mutations in culture - than at any time before - and I think that amnesia is a problem...so I am always interested in the history of the anxieties and also the excitements and the challenges we feel about photography"

"…those patterns that we now think as somehow rooted in algorithms, that’s just ideology, that’s the conformism of ideology […] I think of Ai as the perfecting of ideology"

"I do think about photography having this easy - sometimes too easy - relation to whatever context it's in; If you see a painting in a book, you know that the PAINTING is somewhere else; You are looking at a reproduction […] You’re not thinking where are those PHOTOGRAPHS; they just inhabit the page, the belong to the page… in the same way that they belong to a billboard or they belong to a screen […] I am fascinated in the idea that photographs can live in different ways"

"...he (Jeff Wall) said ' something interesting happened with cultural institutions around the turn of the millennium; they went from thinking that art can be for anyone, to thinking that they must be for everyone ‘ […] It was well intended; cultural institutions should be inclusive, they shouldn’t be high-minded […] but within that was a kind of drive towards populism, and populism often means oversimplifying things - not allowing people the space of ambiguity that is one of the gifts of art […] I don’t mean by ambiguity; obscurity or difficulty, but the fact that different people are going to have different responses to it and that all of those responses are important. […] The kind of mental and cultural movement that happens with ambiguity is the only way that culture moves. Otherwise it’s just a curator or an institution saying ’I think this is what the public wants at this point in time - let's give it to them.' That looks like it’s responsive and inclusive, but it’s also patronising and it’s limiting at precisely the point where it thinks it's opening things up. All of this is a very very delicate balance […] and i think about these questions…all the time […] this is complicated and its one of the most pressing points in culture."

"People think of creativity being attached to ego, and it's why society has turned the word CREATIVE into a noun."

“Protect your curiosity at all costs. it’s a very fragile thing. When you’re feeling like you’re not making headway, or you’re down a kind of dead-end, curiosity is the first thing to die and you can get very existential very very quickly […] Curiosity needs feeding […] It needs protecting.”

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When I think back On all the crap I learned in high school It’s a wonder I can think at all And though my lack of education Hasn’t hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world’s A sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew When I was single And brought them all together For one night I know they’d never match My sweet imagination Everything looks worse In black and white

Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world’s A sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera I love to a photograph So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

© 1973 Words and Music by Paul Simon

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My favorite picture of you

Is the one where you′re staring

Straight into the lens

It's just a Polaroid shot

Someone took on the spot

No beginning, no end

It′s just a moment in time

You can't have back

You never left but your bags were packed

Just in case

My favorite picture of you

Is bent and faded

And it's pinned to my wall

Oh, and you were so angry

It′s hard to believe

We were lovers at all

There′s a fire in your eyes

You've got your heart on your sleeve

A curse on your lips, but all I can see

Is beautiful

My favorite picture of you

Is the one where

Your wings are showing

Oh, and your arms are crossed

Your fists are clenched

Not gone but going

Just a stand up angel

Who won′t back down

Nobody's fool, nobody′s clown

You were smarter than that

My favorite picture of you

Is the one where

It hasn't rained yet

Oh and as I recall

Came a winter squall

And we got soaking wet

It′s a thousand words

In the blink of an eye

The camera loves you

And so do I

Click

My favorite picture of you

Is the one where you're staring

Straight into the lens

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True Stories (David Byrne, 1986)

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Echoes XXV

Instagram @notesonphotography

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Thomas Hoepker/ September 11, 2001

Spencer Platt/ Lebanon, 2006

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Echoes XXIV

Instagram @notesonphotography

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Ruth Orkin

Mario De Biasi

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Echoes XXIII

Instagram @notesonphotography

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Letizia Battaglia

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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Echoes XXII

Instagram @notesonphotography

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Mario Giacomelli

Rosalind Fox Solomon

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"The contingency of photographs confirms that everything is perishable; the arbitrariness of photographic evidence indicates that reality is fundamentally unclassifiable. Reality is summed up in an array of casual fragments - an endlessly alluring, poignantly reductive way of dealing with the world."

- Susan Sontag

We seem to barely hold on to the technologies we create. The moment we unleash it, it runs away and tells US how we should behave instead of the other way around.

Now that we find ourselves face to face with the unreality of Ai and all that it will potentially disrupt, it is even more important to be aware of how powerful images can be.

We are still trying to make sense of photography - the Point Zero - the building blocks that thicken our modern environment.

We are still reeling from the introduction of the internet that has fundamentally changed how the world operates.

Now we are facing the next evolution which will exponentially raise the stakes.

And we seem poorly prepared - it’s shocking to see how people take images that one would think are OBVIOUSLY fake - as reality....gawk over Ai art that is vacuous, saccharine and sentimental.

And I'm a Concept Artist, we specialise in a lot of that. 😅 The Ai is not coming up with this by itself! We created the beast. 😬

But at the very least WE were/are responsible for it, and unable to pass blame to a nebulous algorithm...

Or maybe it's going to free us to do more meaningful things…

Maybe visual literacy courses should start being mandatory in schools.

Lots of maybes…

There are many great writings on images and how we have been dealing with the “crisis of photography” in the age of mechanical and now digital reproduction.

The preface to Guy Debord's "Society of Spectacle" is a quote by Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach - from 1841 - that hits the perfect note.

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."

I've been, for a while now, slowly trying to pick out the nuggets from books and share it as part of learning and understanding myself.

@notesonphotography (Instagram)

I plan to continue this as long as I can, and if I do stop, it will not be for the lack of material, as the amount of literature on this subject is overwhelming, increasing exponentially as we try to make sense of a world that slowly reconstructs itself into its doppelgänger - that of one vast mirage.

I can’t say it better than the descriptor by Roland Barthes “I am trying to render the special quality of this hallucination”

IMAGE: Stephen Shore

#photography #images #technology #ai #art #Stephen Shore #Susan Sontag

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Puddle Jumpers

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Stefano Robino/Raymond Depardon/David Seymour (Chim)

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Rineke Dijkstra

Mary Frey

Angela Strassheim

Alana Celii

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Echoes XXI

Instagram @notesonphotography

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Pawel Jaszczuk High Fashion

Robert Longo Men in the Cities