The Camera in the Gallery, the World as Collage

Writing in The New York Times (4 Sept. 2011), Roberta Smith remarks on how many gallery- and museum-goers are taking photos of the art. Most of these museumographers are using point-and-shoots or smart phones where one doesn't have a viewfinder; in consequence "the framing process [is] much more casual" and "is changing the look of photography. "

Hmmmm... Changing the look of photography, eh?

Some bewail that the art has become sigh! yet another photo op while Smith offers that this use of "the camera is a way of connecting, participating and collecting fleeting experiences."

But isn't that what cameras have always been for? An interesting question, very. The answer must be, no, not always. In a pinch one might even make a case that cameras have almost never been used that way (outside of the laboratory).

Mathew Brady and his team were not documenting the ephemeral on the battlefields of the Civil War. Their equipment was not at all suited to THAT kind task--too big and cumbersome, and way too slow. They were documenting, if not creating, history. Much photo journalism is like that, even when the equipment is better suited to the ephemeral. It's not the photographer's experience that's being captured, it's a moment out of history that's being memorialized. The photo's not about the moment, it's about what the moment represents, which is very different.

The kind of portrait photography that seeks a person's essence, that's not about the ephemeral at all. If it's not about the eternal, it is more hopefully a plea to implant the mortal in eternity. Maplethorp's nudes and flowers? Not the ephemeral at all.

But it's a hard line to draw, that line between the experience and the scene. At what point is does the ephemeral scene take over from anything one would want the objects and actions to represent? Is that really what those pointers and shooters in the museum are up to? Perhaps it is.

And perhaps they don't know. Perhaps it's neither one nor the other. Could be both. Perhaps these gallery shooters are, as Smith says, changing the look of photography. But the look is all, no? Does not 'changing the look' strongly imply 'changing the nature'?

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The question interests me, of course, because of my work photographing graffiti. Graffiti IS ephemeral, and is created TO BE ephemeral, though not perhaps on the fleet-footed time-scale of a museum-goer's drive-by on a Titan, a Giacometti or a Warhol. And, as I've argued time and again, the NYCandPhilly-to-the-World brand of graffiti wouldn't exist without photography, for it's the photographs that create the persistence around which community can coalesce, a persistence the works themselves lack.

Are the point-and-shooters turning the world into a vast graffiti collage? Is the world really changing, that much?