I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.
There is no inherent virtue to instantaneity.
First you study photography, then you practice photography, then you serve photography, and finally one becomes photography.
If instantaneity is what we want, television cannot compete with cyberspace.
Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.
Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.
What's happened is that the digital age has made photography more accessible to people. Everyone is a photographer. But to do it [photography] at a certain level, well, there's a skill to it. Still, it's a good time for photography now.
To know whether photography is or is not an art matters little. What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography. By good is meant that photography which accepts all the limitations inherent in photographic technique and takes advantage of the possibilities and characteristics the medium offers. By bad photography is mean that which is done, one may say, with a kind of inferiority complex, with no appreciation of what photography itself offers: but on the contrary, recurring to all sorts of imitations.
In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.
The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography.
The thing with my workshops is, photography is a thoughtful process. In an atmosphere of fast photography, and generally thoughtless, quick, automatic photography, I think that there is an interest in the slowed down, thoughtful approach.
Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.
Anthropology... has always been highly dependent upon photography... As the use of still photography - and moving pictures - has become increasingly essential as a part of anthropological methods, the need for photographers with a disciplined knowledge of anthropology and for anthropologists with training in photography has increased. We expect that in the near future sophisticated training in photography will be a requirement for all anthropologists. (1962)
There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It's getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn't tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.
Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for real powers that always originate elsewhere.
I collect art on a very modest scale. Most of what I have is photography because I just love it and it makes me happy and it looks good in my home. I also have a pretty big collection of art books mainly, again, on photography. A lot of photography monographs, which is great because with photography, the art itself can be reproduced quite well in book form.