Director’s Pick
David Griffin examines Geographic photography.
Digital Photography
Ken Geiger writes about photo technology.
Photography
Read the latest from our editors and photographers, get photo tips, or comment on the latest issue.
Great story and photographs on state fairs:
Top Ten State Fair Joys – Article by Garrison Keillor
Photo Gallery – Photographs by Joel Sartore
I love this post dated Jan 2,2008 by Ken Geiger on the National Geographic Society Blog:
That’s the pessimistic headline of Peter Plagens’s recent Newsweek article on the fate of photography. He contends that the digitalization of photography is leading to its demise as an art form.
“Film photography’s artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality.”
Digital photography has leveled the playing field such that a commoner with computer can create art, so if the masses can create faux photographs, then photography must no longer be considered art. Or is photography merely in an awkward adolescence, thrown off balance by a few pixel-grabbing headlines of photo manipulators who tarnish the credibility of reality in front of the lens?
Perhaps photographers should adapt the brilliant precedent writers set by segregating themselves from the digital masses—cleave off the untrained commoners sitting at home pecking words on a laptop, their grammar and spelling checked only by digital word processing software, daring to publish commentary to the world—by labeling them not writers but bloggers. So that no one is goaded to ask: Is writing dead?
Check out the National Geographic Society Blogs. I bet you find some good reading and viewing.
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