Going digital has brought photography into a whole new realm, but Newsweek has release a story that has questioned the soul and integrity of the art since the advent of pixels and Photoshop.
Before digital, you were defined by your ability, but now with Photoshop, any photographer can manipulate their photos. This brings up an interesting conundrum.
Digitalization has made much of art photography’s vast variety possible. But it’s also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography’s artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we’ve witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It’s hard to say “gee whiz” anymore.
For the full story, Newsweek has the debate whether or not photography has lost its soul.
