Die neue Macht der Fotografie

This week’s lead article in the German weekly newspaper ‘Die Zeit’ is about the ‘new power of photography’. The title is a bit misleading, what they really meant is the new commercial success of photography, and more specifically, of photography that straddles ‘pure’ art and documentary aspects of photography. The article is well researched and – I think – makes a few very valid points, most tellingly when the article describes Andreas Gursky’s career. His career epitomises the current state of the (photography) industry.

Andreas Gursky was a Becher student and out of art/photography school in the beginning 1990s, he struggled as the typical Leica using photojournalist. None of the leading magazines in Hamburg would want to employ him or give him any assignments. Then he switched from the ‘Leica to the computer’ and from ‘small dimension prints to large prints’, as ‘Die Zeit’ dubbed it, and created his semi documentary large format heavily computerised works that sell for millions of dollars these days. His diptychon ’99 cents’ recently sold for $3.5 million and he is apparently very popular with Hedge Fund managers today.

In his own words, he admits that his work is not ‘documentary’ anymore. Only the ‘elements’ of his computer assembled and computer manipulated images bear any relation to reality. His recent project is an image of the Frankfurt airport where he said: ‘…You will not find the real place which is depicted in the image at the airport… You will see from the signs that the place is an airport… the real place is being reinterpreted by me…’.

‘Die Zeit’ sums it up: ‘…Cartier-Bresson and his fellows wanted to be photojournalists and nomadic poets of images… [commercially] usable and romantic at the same time…’ These days to make money or to survive you have to be a ‘photo artist’.

Incidentally, even Magnum has – at least partly - been heading towards the more ‘arty’ end of photojournalism and documentary photography. At least one of this year’s new nominees (Allessandra Sanguinetti) is cleary more in that camp, in my view.