On German Photography Today

How’s photography doing at the dawn of the 21st century? Who are its foremost German exponents? How does it relate to other arts? Is it still a separate art?

“Call it anything you like but never call it photography!” Grant B. Romer, director of the Conservation Department at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the world’s biggest photography museum, made this appeal at a conference on the conservation of photo-archives.

His aim was to draw a clear-cut distinction between all the processes used to create computer-generated images, on the one hand, and photography in its ur-physicochemical “analog” form. Later there was even a conference on “The Original in Photography”, which was deemed “a concept in dissolution” – in terms of both photographic artwork and everyday use of the medium. The picture collectors attending were shocked by the announcement that they should either lay up their pictures in dark cold storage or accept a shorter life expectancy for their cherished prints.

Reality is already a step further

As it turns out, reality is already a step further: the world’s leading camera manufacturers also make cellular phones, and the resultant ubiquity of snapshooting for rapid-consumption souvenirs is already permeating modern-day art and design. Whether it’s painting after snapshot motifs, a method championed in Leipzig and becoming an established German genre, or pictures of natural disasters shot with cell phones, which gives them a novel note of authenticity and will likewise find expression in action forms of art – digital imaging is ubiquitous, though it’s no longer really about an artistic product, but rapid and unpremeditated on-the-spot action. What this might mean for artistic practice in the long term has already become an issue in media art. Only the latter, and by and large rightly so, doesn’t view itself as photography any more.

Howsoever it may be created, the consensus in art markets and design forums is to call photography nowadays anything that has been captured by camera, undergone analog or digital processing and ends up in one form or another on paper. So, as in the fine arts, in the following we’ll call anything a “work” if it finds material expression through direct viewing, in other words as a photographic image. And whatever we call the modern-day processes that have their origins in photography, they’re all equally present in the public consciousness: photography has clearly become what might be called a “leading medium” in art and design. The upshot, though, is that the various works are no longer discussed within the medium, but beyond it. So one might venture to say that photography has been perfectly integrated into cultural life in Germany. For that very reason, though, it might cease to exist as a separate art form.