The State of Photography: A Retrospective

In a world of verbosity and visual saturation, where cleverness defines intellect, and over-enhancement claims beauty; where the glow of television is company and YouTube creates global news; where half-finished books and half-finished thoughts inform our conversations; and what is old is bound to recycle and become new yet again, how do we interpret the state of photography?

Defining the state of any one thing, person or enterprise is nothing if not about the retrospective—about honoring the spirit of Umberto Eco’s novel title The Island of the Day Before. What was it that used to define the visual moments of our lives and what does now? And is the vitality of those things isolated and irretrievable  or still very much present? Whether or not industry is on the path to pointed, continental progress, or shipwrecked and treading water, there’s always the notion of how yesterday became today, how much of understanding finds itself bedded in a salute to the past.  

Like the rest of trade and craftsmanship in our country, the state of professional photography is in flux. That said, the timing of this exploration is precarious when it comes to making definitive conclusions about the aggregate life that colors-in the art/discipline/profession of imaging. Dating back to the 5th century B.C., when the Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti is said to have created and used the first darkroom, or to Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce’s first permanent photograph—a landscape over an eight-hour exposure in 1826—photography has always defined itself as a spectacularly evolving art form.

Photographic capture, on its way to the common man, found advancement when Kodak introduced the first commercially successful box camera for rollfilm in 1888. Then, in a long and nonspecific timeline of progression, Leica introduced the 35mm format to still in 1925; Kodak trademarked Kodachrome in 1935, before originating the first print film in 1942; the Hasselblad was introduced in 1948; the first digital image was produced on a computer in 1957; and the crew of the Apollo 17 took the first photo showing a fully lit Earth from space in 1972. In 1981, after a few earlier models had been patented by other companies, Sony released the first commercial electronic still camera, jump-starting the digital revolution, which would eventually lead to Photoshop, cameras that shoot video and the advent of Facebook—in effect, the largest photo album and visual directory to date.  

That is perhaps the quickest timeline one might associate with photography. After all, this isn’t a history course; it’s a retrospective, more about nostalgia and memory than dates, more personal than official.

For me, its beginning lies in the 3 x 5 capture of me holding my newborn baby brother in our Kansas home: my mouth agape at newfound sisterhood, the print now with dog-eared edges and 23 years gone by. It then moves to me digging through my dad’s vinyl records at age 9, in search of John Cougar’s picture on American Fool—the image tinged with yellow lighting, the crooner’s collar popped and eyes sultry—so I could dance around the living room with bare, summer feet to “Jack and Diane.” Then there’s my introduction to love—hanging the December 1980 image of John Lennon on my wall, him naked and curled into Yoko Ono. Annie Leibovitz shot the pair on the day of Lennon’s death for Rolling Stone.

It was in high school and college that I collided with a collective life bigger than my own in seeing some of the world’s most legendary photographs: Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 Pulitzer Prize-winning image of U.S. Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima; Malcom Browne’s image of Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who stoically self-immolated on the busy streets of Saigon during the Vietnam War in 1963; the Stuart Franklin picture of the young Chinese student standing in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square just before the bloodshed began in 1989.

It was these images that introduced me to the golden age of photojournalism and the narrative of photographs associated with magazines like Life and Look. Their discovery is what heralded me into the library archives, on late university nights, to resurrect other photos reproduced on over-size 11 x 14-inch pages, with high-quality inks on rich paper. These publications are the standard by which photography and journalism are judged, they are the keepers of history from a time I had not seen.
When Henry Luce’s Life publication went out of print in 1972, we all lost a little something. Gone was a little bit of our tactile understanding of visuality and the pages dedicated to it. And yet what was once old became new again when, just this past March, Life and Getty Images joined in venture to launch Life.com, resurrecting their combined collections of imagery on the Web in modern, tributary fashion.

And now today, as I write this at 26, there are my friends and their little-girl wedding dreams, catapulting themselves onto the spreads of magazines like Grace Ormonde’s Wedding Style, launched nationally in 2003, In Style Weddings and even editorial fashion rags like Vogue and Vanity Fair. Weddings have gone from intimate affairs with traditional photographs to contemporary accoutrement occasions marked and remembered by candid images of the day’s events, coupled with sophisticated posing inspired by high-fashion photo shoots. Weddings now have personality like never before—brides and grooms give life and vibrancy to their love, and the photography of the day often lends them the mirror to see that vision reflected back into reality.

So, here we are, at 26 or 46 or 86, all part of a long and still unfolding medium. What is the state of photography? Sure, there are statistics about the photography industry: average salaries and numbers of photographers working (though not many of these figures are accurate). More pointedly, in an age of digital compositing and computer deftness, there are ethical debates raging about what really even defines a photograph anymore.
Photography is not in stasis—it never has been. The fact that imagery continues to defy verbal definition is perhaps the only consistent and obvious value associated with its evolution. In my mind, photographs do stand in memory as a string of separate islands, holding the significant days that have come before now, chronicling our lives.

But while pictures may stand alone in time, the industry does no such thing. It continues to move forward and back, carrying with it the collective acumen it takes to recognize beauty even when something’s not pretty, the wherewithal to see news happening before it’s even called that, the ability to withdraw true presence from those in front of the camera’s lens and the visual capture that stuns and silences our memories for a time, only to unspool this and other conversations years into the future.

Abigail Ronck graduated from Brown University in 2005 with a degree in English. She is currently the managing editor of Rangefinder and AfterCapture. Contact her via email at [email protected].