Photography is dead. Long live photography

It might just be a symptom of accelerating culture, but it seems the lifespan of technologies shrinks ever more. Painting lasted a few thousand years before being ‘obsoleted’ by photography. Photography has only just made it into the Museum of Modern Art, and been declared dead.

The main threats being:

  • Digital manipulation
  • Automated image capture by machines
  • AI-generated images

I feel like photography has been able to assimilate the first two (think Gursky and Paglen), but the menace of AI still threatens us.

Let’s see how it pans out. I reckon it offers some exciting new creative opportunities, even as it does disrupt existing creative practice and business models.

The post below (from which the image is taken) is nominally about drawing, but the same process could be called photography, or be part of a photographic practice:

Watching a vibrant Seattle sunset the other day, my imagination started running. The otherworldly hue of the sky evoked something from science fiction. The hazy orange-purple was mesmerizing. I envisioned a massive, alien object hovering over a long-abandoned Seattle, with a burning orange sky, and buildings overgrown as nature reclaimed the city.

Andy, xor Andrew – 4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything

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