Navtej Kohli Interest Blog

Navtej Kohli-
the photography lover comes up with yet another scintillating article
that he came across and that made him think “Is Photography Really
Dead?” Let’s find an answer!

Newsweek’s worth reading only when Peter Plagens is in it, and
that’s not very often. The sweep of his knowledge and his breezy tone,
his clarity and resolutions make him unique and distinctive.

About that breezy tone: Matthew Collings gets full credit
for creating a style that gave art criticism somewhere to go beyond the
dry bog of the academic, but Plagens was there first, writing serious
things with a light touch.

That’s why his most recent foray – “Is Photography Dead?”- bewildered me. Is photography dead? Of course not.

Plagens is upset that photography has abandoned its commitment to
the truth (”lost its soul”) in order to revel in Photoshop fantasies.
What commitment? Truth in art has always been a fluid concept, and
Photoshop is a tool, not a weakness. By opening a wider crack in the
factual, photography has moved to the center of contemporary art
practice, instead of where it was 30 years ago, at the margins,
brilliant only in the work of a few great photo documentarians and
dead-ended for those following somebody like Ansel Adams, for instance.

What’s threatened in digital photography isn’t art. It’s the
personal record of family life. Until recently, people took rolls of
film to be developed at the drug store. They got back packets of
pictures, which they mounted in albums or left in piles in shoe boxes.

These images existed. Digital photography produces the illusion of
existence. Fewer people bother with the hard copy, and it’s the hard
copy that matters.

Decades ago, Susan Sontag wrote that the unphotographed child
suffered from a form of child abuse. As digital images fade from the
family computer screen, the record they were supposed to provide
disappears with them. Only the tech savvy will avoid this fate, and how
many people does that include?

Well,as far as Navtej Kohli’s view is concerned, he firmly believes that Photography is more alive than ever!!

Tags: About Navtej Kohli, AKA, Kohli Navtej, Navtej, Navtej K, Navtej Kohli, photography