The Way of the Buffalo

Fay Godwin, Bison at Chalk Farm, 1982

When last I checked, the scene at The Online Photographer resembled nothing so much as the villagers' first encounter with the monster - the pundits in full cry, pitchforks at the ready. And the source of the sound and fury, God help me, was an essay by Michael Johnston proclaiming the death of photography at the hands of "digital imaging." Now, I can't tell you how many times I've promised myself never to become involved in that conversation, but there's something about this particular instance I just can't resist.

Johnston's argument - strange, at best, from this proponent of all things digital - began with a semantic distinction between digital imaging and photography, progressed to heartfelt sentiments regarding the sanctity of the image recorded by the lens, and concluded with the assertion that digital images, because they are so easily altered, do not deserve the respect accorded to real photography. Unspoken throughout is the embarrassing notion that if it isn't difficult it can't be art.

What occasioned all this, apparently, was an article by Erwin Puts, whose thinking about Leicas, anyway, is usually entitled to some respect. Puts's own pronouncement of photography's demise seemed motivated mainly by disappointment with the digital experience as exemplified by the Leica M8. (And who would argue?) In the course of it, Puts quoted a recent post by Jim Lewis, on Slate, eulogizing John Szarkowski. And that quotation goes to the heart of what interests me here:

"In the years just before Szarkowski retired, the best of photography underwent yet another deep change, becoming integrated into the broader concerns of art in general, influenced by conceptualism, performance, painting. It is only slightly overstating matters to say that there's really no such thing as photography anymore. It simply doesn't exist, except as one of many ways to make something that counts as art . . ."

In other words, says Lewis, it wasn't digital killed the photography star. It was art.

And that may well be true. Much of contemporary photography still suffers from the malaise of insufficiently digested conceptualism. Not everyone can be Ed Ruscha. Or Sherrie Levine. Or Cindy Sherman. Or even Richard Prince. But that doesn't stop a lot of people from trying. And that, if you ask me, in combination with the unfortunate revival of set-ups of all kinds, is what ails photography today.

But that problem, if it is one, has nothing to do with digital. On the contrary, the heyday of photographic conceptualism was over before digital tools were widely available. And the falsity of set-up photography has little if anything to do with post-processing; on the contrary, that lie is told before the shutter opens.

And so we come, full circle, to Johnston's discussion of Fay Godwin's photograph of Bison at Chalk Farm. It just wouldn't be the same, he says, if we thought even for a moment that it was faked:

"Really the only thing that gives [the] photograph its power is that, for better or worse, we really do believe that the pretext . . . is authentic—another way of saying that the hulking bison (even if perhaps he's stuffed) really was standing there in the road . . ."

I disagree. I couldn't care less whether it was there or not. In fact, my assumption would be that it was not. But what difference does it make? Inherently fantastic photographs, including those of buffaloes on city streets, don't demand literal belief. What they ask is complicity, and a sense of wonder.

If we've learned anything over the last 50 years, it's that photographs lie. And when they don't, we lie for them, by misunderstanding what they show. And it is that insecurity in our relationship with images - not Photoshop - that has stripped photography of its veneer of truth.

As for Fay Godwin, she gave an interview in 2002, a few years before she died, in which she was asked: "What is your dream as a photographer?" Her answer? "To learn to print digitally, using Photoshop which I love . . ." Go figure.