This week I have two texts to look at, the first is The camera as an afterthought: defining post-photograph, written by Allison Meier. The text is written by Andreia Alves De Oliveira, called post-photography, or are we past photography?
The first text is a range of photographs supporting the idea of photography being in an altered state, whether these images are staged or found. Post photography is seen to be a moment and not a movement. Meier talks about a book (Post-Photography: The artist with a camera) written about post-photography written by Robert Shore, how pre-existing visual material in a over documented world, it is unsurprising that there is an increasing amount of photographic art, but of which mostly start with someone else’s images. Images are found for research etc. but then still manipulated.
The second text explains the term post photography is often seen in todays practices, by being transformed by technology. Photographs can instantly be shared with the world via media, whereas photographic prints are now becoming a rare piece of publishing. As technology progresses, so does the way we share photographs. As mentioned within The reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the post-photography era, by William J. Mitchell, ‘150 years after it was born, ‘photography was dead… as was painting 150 years before”. Painting use to be the only way to capture self portraits, now as technology grows and progresses, digital ways have now been invented to capture portraits easier and quicker, achieved by cameras. However, as technology keeps growing, photographers to be hired are not needed as much and therefore everyone is able to take their own images, in a way professional photography maybe dying but photography is only progressing.