Imagine your own renaissance
Fred Ritchin's book "Bending The Frame" (2013, Aperture, Kindle Edition) in chapter 3 "Making Pictures Matter" develops a topic to which the photography community is very sensitive: what will become of photography after the advent of digital and when will digital photography definitely take over analogue photography (which I think has already happened)?
Honestly, this is the question that many of us photographers, those who rely on the camera in the strict sense of the term, ask themselves over and over again.
Even more often today, every time a friend of ours proudly shows us a photo of him taken with a latest-generation smartphone, with four fixed lenses and a resolution of an unlikely size, post edited with powerful apps directly on the mobile, and asks us for a technical/aesthetical opinion.
Beyond the frustration of seeing an image from a mobile phone juxtaposed to one of any specialized camera and realizing that the study of photography is considered a snobbish waste of time, Ritchin's considerations are precious in order to rationalize this umpteenth change of scenery in the context of visual representation.
Ritchin compares this story to what happened in the nineteenth century, after the advent of photography: many thought that painting (and painters together with it) would succumb to a more precise, faster, cheaper technique in related services, therefore socially more accessible by the less affluent classes.
This alleged attack on the very existence of painting and painters was feared in particular for portraiture, but it was thought that it would soon extend to landscape painting as well.
"Many of the most talented artists, now considering themselves freed from the task of direct representation, chose newer, more explicitly subjective ways of seeing the world—Impressionism, Cubism, Pointillism, Expressionism...."
(Ritchin, Fred. Bending the Frame (p.66). Aperture. Kindle ed.)
From this juxtaposition begins Ritchin's reflection/proposal on the opportunity/duty, for every professional of photography, to conceive their own renaissance.
Photographers today are also losing clients to non-professionals making their own wedding albums, doing their own portraits, covering their own revolutions, as well as taking on all the other functions that are lumped under the rubric of “citizen journalism.” And some photographers, partially as a result, are also looking for their own renaissance so as to transform and amplify their reach".
"....the introduction of expanding digital media challenges photography—now the elder medium—to transform itself."
(Ritchin, Fred. Bending the Frame (p.66/67). Aperture. Kindle ed.)
Ritchin, beyond the efforts he solicits, and which have already been underway for years (the book is from 2013), fears the lack of singularity of mass photography and reinforces this concept with the help of Benjamin and his concept of Aura, and with the contemptuous phrases of Baudelaire which, a twist of fate, referred to photography versus painting.
Just as photography and its power to replicate itself may be the weak point in lacking the soul of the author, so the mass photo would lack the soul of the photographer.
If the act of existing in a single copy could induce Aura2s persistence for any visual work, then I am reminded of Jeff Wall's single-copy photographic works and the practice of engraving artists to destroy the matrix once it is printed a fixed number of copies of one artwork.
Ritchin covertly suggests that the professional photographer has spontaneously put himself on the same level as the amateur, or rather, the occasional photographer and that he has just as spontaneously devalued those skills and knowledge that make him a professional, such as blurring techniques and conscious composition planning.
The more he reinforces the concept with the suggestion of a photograph with an open narrative.
"A photograph that strives to provide a single answer intimates its own manipulation; one that provokes questions, whether intentionally or not, better allows the viewer to engage with the subject and become, in a sense, the photographer’s collaborator in his or her inquiry........What new approaches are conceivable in an era many now call “postphotographic”—when the image output from a camera is no longer thought of as being, or needing to be, above all a recording?"
(Ritchin, Fred. Bending the Frame (p.68). Aperture. Kindle ed.)