photography- beyond the millions and billions - the instant that endures

The digital duniya of the latest avatars of photography is a deluge that is drowning out the photography that I grew up with. I am fascinated by the future that the latest forms are opening up. A future that is not easy to look into. One can only gaze with wonder of million dollar price tags and  think about what  the billions of 'photographs' in virtual existence are doing to our society. 

At present, the three most expensive photographs in the world are by living conceptual artists: Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman and, at the top of the league, Gursky, whose print Rhein II (1999) fetched £2.7m in auction at Christie's New York in November 2011 (below). It is, for the time being, the most expensive photograph ever. It is also, sceptics might say, one of the most uninteresting photographs ever: a large-format landscape in which the river Rhine sits between two swaths of green grass under a grey sky. Like several of Gursky's works, Rhein II is a digitally manipulated image – a factory building and some dog walkers were removed from the original photograph by a high-end version of Adobe Photoshop. When asked to comment on this, Gursky said: "Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained in situ, a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river."

Make of that what you will, but the fact remains that the most expensive landscape photograph in the world right now is of a scene that never existed.

What, then, of photography that is not primarily concerned with the photographic or the conceptual? What of documentary, reportage, portraiture and street photography? These more traditional forms are thriving too, and being constantly reinvented in response to the relentlessly mediated world we inhabit. Increasingly, the lines between genres are becoming blurred, though. Is Paul Graham, winner of the 2009 Deutsche Börse prize and the 2012 Hasselblad award, a documentary photographer or an art photographer? Or is he neither? Or both? Are the large-format, inordinately detailed works by Mitch Epstein in his American Power series, or Edward Burtynsky in his Oil series, part of the landscape tradition or the documentary tradition? Is the term "street photography" an adequate description of the urban lightscapes captured by Trent Parke?

Whatever upheavals it has witnessed, photography has endured. It continues to do so, even as we drown in a sea of uploaded images whose sheer quantity mediates against their meaning. Photography, in more ways than one, thrives on a crisis. The instant endures.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/nov/16/sean-ohagan-photography-art-form