Newspaper Article

Weekend: MOVERS AND FAKERS: How can the new generation of art photographers make their mark when almost anyone with the latest equipment can take excellent pictures? Judge for yourself. And William A Ewing , who has been seeking stars of the future across the world, identifies the new directions

Ewing, William A

2005

Overview

There were common threads, but also strong individual voices that confound generalisation. European and North American photographers did dominate (we refused to adhere to a quota system, and hid the photographer's name, nationality and school during the process). Digital photography was fast becoming a fundamental tool, but the embrace wasn't uncritical - far from it: photographers used film where appropriate, and the computer when necessary to achieve certain effects. By and large, these photographers considered themselves artists, although there were a few strong photojournalists and documentary photographers. Their heroes turned out to be theorists rather than photographers: Sontag, Barthes and Derrida were cited far more often than Man Ray, Friedlander or Arbus. Colour photography is by far the preferred medium. Again, this is partly the influence of contemporary art, in which black-and-white photography has always been suspect, a peripheral practice like etching or engraving. But partly it is a necessary correction in the evolution of photography: for decades, \"serious\" photographers disdained colour photography which, because it was expensive and required laboratory processing, was considered the domain of commerce. Curators excluded colour prints from their collections because of their impermanence. But by 1980 the situation was beginning to change; various ways of making prints permanent had won grudging acceptance, and seminal exhibitions such as William Eggleston's Guide at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1976 (the first all-colour one-man show) demonstrated that colour was not just about capturing sunsets and the primary hues of quaint Greek villages. For the current generation, black-and-white photography seems an anachronism. The traditional genres that have dominated art photography for a century are now largely passe. The nude, the classical portrait, the sublime natural landscape - all have been largely dismissed, or are fading away as meaningful categories. The nude - traditionally almost always female, youthful and inert - was entirely absent from the portfolios we looked at, and portraits in the classic sense (claiming to reveal the soul, or otherwise valorising the individual) have given way to studies of types: faces have been replaced by facades. As for landscape, young photographers see only degradation and menace - the brutal hand of man. Edward Weston's nudes, Ansel Adams' mountain ranges and Yousuf Karsh's portraits are aeons away from the concerns of the young.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Ewing, William A