The Future of Photography

In an article on TIME entitled The Future of Photography, Kate Pickert writes:

Even if film photography lives on in the fine art world, its limitations make it significantly less interesting than the possibilities offered by digital technology. Ritchin is no digital virgin. The pioneering director of the Web site PixelPress, he was teaching the New York Times how to present photography on the Internet as early as 1994. He views digital photography as a natural evolution of the form, paralleling the evolution of science itself, using cloning and DNA manipulation as examples of how, “Cause and effect, even life and death, flicker nostalgically in the rearview mirror that is now the twentieth century.”

The article is a review of After Photography, a book by Fred Ritchin, photography professor at New York University. If nothing else, it’s an interesting read. The article, I mean. Apparently, the book is really only interesting enough to skim.

It’s easy to agree that film is a dead medium, but for art. It’s interesting to talk to photographers who grew up shooting film and proceeded to shoot professionally with film. Once they went digital, there was no looking back – their film cameras are locked up in the closet, and so they shall remain. Then you’ve got the new-age photographers, so to speak, like myself, who grew up on digital everything. I shoot digital every day. Almost everything I do, for work or for play, involves computers in some form or another. So shooting film becomes different. Just the feel of something mechanical, something manual… it just feels different – which is really great once in a while. And there’s no arguing that film has a special something that digital doesn’t. I’m not talking about overall quality, but the feel. Just as it is in my hands, it just feels different when you look at prints from film.