Ways out of Confusion

Total confusion is the notion to use after the new continent called „internet“ has been added to photography and the world in general. Technology has accelerated and will keep on creating new road maps for creating (photographic) images., simply because technological innovation never stops.

My disturbing experience from teaching and conversations with young photographers or „artists using photography“ (as they like to call themselves) is that there are too many choices from which they can choose: torture of choice.

In today’s world the young students are confronted with so many ways how to create works that – in my personal view – the smartest of them have started to realize how important the reduction of complexity of an almost endless offer of technological possibilities is. While the older generation still wonders what happened in the last ten years, since the hitting success of „the digital“, the very young artists and photographers take the world wide web and all it offers as a given, as a commodity, just like bred and butter on their table.

So, where to turn, what to do, which works to create? Many fall into the trap of technical and aesthetic „convergence“ in the sense that still and moving images are at any given time easily at hand, ready to be used. Exaggerating a bit, once could say: Show me a young photographer or artist who consciously contents him- or herself creating still images. only Technical devices seducing her or him to create shorter or longer films are lying just too close on the table of the studio. Once the saying „after Warhol“ went: Everybody can be a star for five minutes. Now everybody can be a film maker for ten. The results, however, are only too often films that in no way have the quality of earlier experimental artist’s movies or well-made TV-documentaries of today.

Fortunately there is a trend amongst young creators that moves into a different direction. For them the magic word is: „No thank you! I am aware of all the hipstamatic possibilities in my Apps, of my HD-camera, of photoshop’s calactical number of choices. But I am not interested. Let me try another way.“

Personally I must confess that I have begun to be much more interested in this group of young creative persons. One very interesting trend is the re-discovery of traditional techniques, the creation of photography-based images using old craft, thus creating images that might have originally been taken digitally, but have then been transerred into works using the hands, „the gesture of the artists“ in its most immediate sense.

Young artist Andrea Ebener – she was born in 1987 in Zurich/Switzerland – has created of group of self-portraits that she first took with her digital camera. At the same time she has started to discover for herself old techniques like photogelatine printing or bying the necessary chemical components to create cyanoprints. She produces them herself on watercolor papers. Each of the image that literally „goes through“ her hands is unique, no other person is involved. This way the notion of the often abused declaration „vintage print“ comes back to life, as each print is created by the artist herself shortly after the original image was taken digitally.

I am very interested and magically taken by her images, which are the result of combining technologcal innovation („the digital“) and traditional craftmanship. And I believe that this combination will be a way out for some of the young creative photographers who are sitting in front of their screen asking themselves: „What can I add to the creation of photographic art that has not been done yet? How can I develop my very own, distinctive handwriting?“

And, there is one thing to add: Images like those created by Andrea Ebener can only be made photographically, not through any other technique. Which is – apart from the always given criteria of artistic quality – another very important aspect when judging fine art photography: Could the images have been done better than by using photography? In the case of Ebner’s cyanoprints and photogelatine prints the answer fortunately is a clear „no“, they could not have.

So, there a r e ways out of confusion. Maybe the key after a century of photography is: Stay simple. And genuinly photographic.

Walter Keller
March 2012