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Post-photography

"The job of the photographer in the 21st century has become increasingly challenging as the practice is an overwhelmingly populist business. Anyone who has access to a camera has the power to become an artist, leaving a plethora of cached evidence on the internet for public consumption.
This “found” internet content serves as a vast laboratory for major experimentation, underpinning the concept of post-photography, with endless possibilities for artists to recreate original works using avant-garde techniques drawn from both the digital and analogue eras."

Fiona Martin
(short presentation of the book Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera by Robert Shore)
http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/post-photography/

Perhaps there is less novelty here, regarding the context of photography transformed by the new image technologies developed in the late 20th century, in the particular sense that the early impact of photography itself transformed the regimes of vision and impacted the aesthetic (and professional) system of the visual arts in general in the 19th century. Since then, we can perhaps say that “instability” has been the status of both art and photography, and of their relationships.

Following the logic of digital processes - modularity and the reworking of given data - and with the internet, a vast library of already re-mediated images from a variety of historical and contemporary sources, the logic of the endless transformation of digital images presents itself as the appropriate scene of the (post) photographic enterprise today.  Needless to say that with the “social media” explosion, generalized “populism” marks the cultural landscape of the time, for better and for worse.

 “Post-photography” is, in common usage, that practice, object, perspective, which comes after photography. However, our present context could be also or better designated as “trans-photographic” in the historical sense that a new medium does not simply “overcome” or “negates” previous media but extend or liberates some of the inner impulses and goals at the basis of previous production and processes taken as “models” and horizon.

Marcelo Guimarães Lima

Comments

Unknown said…
Wow…….enormous blog. Thank you for sharing. centex photos

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