The very future of fine art photography is in doubt. It has unfortunately in recent years gone in directions which all lead nowhere.
False direction 1: Earth Moving Projects Ten Thousand Miles Away
Following the misguided globalist power agenda, the fine art photographers have seen themselves as the documentarians of the development of far off places 10s of 1000s of miles away being brought into the mass culture, homogenous, depersonalized Globalist world. Images of vast factories in the Third World, huge outdoor gatherings, odd beaches blighted by modernity, sports crowds lacking individuation: these works make the viewer doubt the very significance or even existence of the individual as a vital being. Where they should artistically resist at a creative level such homogeneity these photographers instead celebrate it or merely passively portray it. And since this work reflects, of course, a global, depersonalized world why shouldn’t it be sold to party bosses’ kids in deluxe condominiums in far off cities getting the money into safe havens or outsourcing venture capitalists by the yard. All those beautiful small prints by earlier great artists thrown aside by the new worshipers of scale, of mere megapixels themselves as anonymous as the images depicted.
False Direction 2: DEI
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of great African American and Asian American and White American and Hispanic American, and every nationality and ethnicity and sexual preference fine art photographers whose work is deserving. But the artist should want to be known as a great artist, not a type. Again, we are in the land of depersonalization. How many shows in recent years at major museums and galleries have been about such categories of work not the artist understood on their own terms as artist? Group identity and art identity have never been the same. When the artist lets their work be understood in this one dimensional, superficial way as representative of the group without a fight or acknowledging this contradiction, the work loses its power.
Irony of ironies, that what began as either a strategy of pure power manipulation or a well meaning gesture towards equality ends up in practice as it always has of disempowering the actual artist in reality. Another path leading nowhere.
False Direction 3: Revolutionary Art
And now we come to the worst culprit of all destroying fine art photography, the attempt to make it revolutionary and the horrible influence of Marxist ideology on the field. The artist, instead of trying to make fine art photography have a serious autonomous space where the deepest and most important artistic and conceptual questions can be pursued, fully seeks only to be a bit player cadre member in someone else’s revolution. Lots of luck with that one longer term. Ask the radical Constructivists in an earlier era how that worked out for them when the expropriated factories in the end couldn’t have cared less about their projects, or Wordsworth who had to abandon the French Revolution but returned to England cynical, yet still an artist. Ask the WPA artists, who whatever their personal politics, grew tired of painting endless worker murals, or Jackson Pollock and Aaron Siskind why they abandoned their earlier more revolutionary “documentary” work. This false Marxist path will also ruin fine art photography. Where does Marx say the artists should lead the revolution? He didn’t and for powerful reasons later Marxists incorrectly ignore. Now, the fine art photographer can have whatever politics they like and there have always been plenty of radical artists, but no serious fine art photography can in terms of the art itself march in line as such with any political movement which always in every case regardless of the specific politics has premises of power antithetical to serious art.
False Direction 4: Death by a Thousand Cuts
Another vacuous but dangerous path for fine art photography. The field populated by, to paraphrase a famous writer, endless fine art photographers who are experts because they can simply spit over a railroad car. A million fake gimmicks masquerading as serious art. In a relativist world on the opposite side of depersonalization, individuation without meaning. Every photographer just “doing their thing” without any deeper conceptual or spiritual purpose. All power to the gatekeepers who can pick anyone at all to make famous for 15 minutes. Salvador Dali impersonators this week, exploration to a small island by a two man catamaran tricycle documentary photos the next, worshipers of cricket in the desert of Chile on Tuesday, self-portrait photos of a naked photographer playing Backgammon on Wednesday, and images critiquing July 4th celebrations on Route 66 on the weekend. Photography as side show entertainment pretending to be art.
False Direction 5: Fine Art Photography as Popular Culture
In a world of Instagram and endless narcissistic mirrors rather than the fine art photographer standing up to the spectacle, they merely facilitate it. They take the easy path. They abandon even the pretense of art and like the endless consumer goods filling landfills everywhere their art lasts for a mere season at best.
Such art does not last. How could it given the fact that it mimics that which was designed to be disposable and disempowering. Like porn stars they celebrate that which they know is fake and antithetical to any deeper purpose and prostitute their work and help the superficial to maintain itself. They abandon their crucial part as artists restoring a sense of wonder in the world and in so doing ruin fine art photography.
This is true especially of kitsch photography celebrating the mundane. Despite what certain art critics and curators may have the public believe this work expresses a disdain for both the ideal and real and the settings considered, which relegates the artist and art to always a second class status no matter how famous they may become.
False Direction 6: Fine Art Photography as Sustainable Ecology
Once more, the problem of fine art photography abandoning its deeper artistic purpose for ideology and a political cause ruins the field. Nature art has always had an important place in the works of fine art photographers, and there are few more spiritual realms. But when nature art is reduced to political propaganda, it fails at its mission.
Plus, there is a dilemma. AI needs energy and as always happens the ecology ideology like any ideology is already being redefined as the elite moves on to new schemes. If the art requires the ideology for its power lots of luck with that one longer term. The politicians always use the artists and then discard them. The photographer to paraphrase and contradict an early philosopher does not need to be the valet to some politician somewhere.
But at one of fine art photography’s darkest hours after years and even decades of these flawed paths taking their toll on the field or even no path at all reigning supreme and leading nowhere ultimately, there is still a slight glimmer of light that remains on the horizon in the form of a question.
What if fine art photography could revitalize itself and return to the deeper promise of modernism?
Not as a post-modernist superficial return, all surface and no depth and mere gamesmanship, but in terms of the lost principles themselves that stand at the foundation of fine art photography taken further once more. What if fine photography could claim for itself an artistic power not even fully recognized by its current practitioners lost on these false paths. If it could regain that upward and progressive spiritual pursuit spoken of so profoundly by Kandinsky for art as a whole. The style Creative Abstract Design discussed on this site is the effort to start such a new path for the field and reclaim this lost light. A tentative beginning of a long project to get fine art photography back on course and to give it a future once more where it can fully realize its deeper potential.
If you are interested in these kinds of issues be sure to read the newly released work on Kindle, Creative Abstract Design: Towards a New Modernist Photography for the 21st Century, available on Amazon.