This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘What is the future of photography?’
Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. Earlier this year, I spent a few months in the South Bronx to write a profile of an arts institution in New York called the Bronx Documentary Center. And it made me think a lot about photography. One of the many things the school does is offer free photo documentary classes to middle and high school students, teaching them how to shoot on film cameras and develop their photos in a darkroom.
And the students’ work is incredible. Part of what makes it so great is that the South Bronx is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the United States. And that means that people have assumptions about it. These photos challenge those assumptions because they’re taken by the people who know it best. Meanwhile, these days, I think we have a pretty suspicious relationship with photographic images. Like, when you’re scrolling on your phone with that photo you just saw doctored? Is it actually an AI image? Is it made to look spontaneous but really, it was staged? This atmosphere now, it makes me wonder if the art that these kids are making in the Bronx still has a place in our jaded world. Our US art critic Ariella Budick has been writing about this medium for years. She actually has a PhD in the history of photography. So I’ve asked her to join me today to help make sense of the landscape. Ariella, hi, welcome back to the show.
Ariella Budick
Hi.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Thanks so much for being here.
Ariella Budick
It’s a pleasure.
Lilah Raptopoulos
So nice to have you. So I want to start by asking you about your relationship to photography. You did a PhD in the history of photography, right?
Ariella Budick
Yes, I did. At the Institute of Fine Arts.
Lilah Raptopoulos
I know you wrote your dissertation about Diane Arbus, one of the most famous photographers in the 1970s. And I was wondering if you could help me reflect on this feeling that I was having while I was reporting on the Bronx Documentary Center. I felt on the one hand, like it was just amazing to watch these kids learn this like very pure form of social documentary photography. But then on the other hand, the world that we’re living in now is just so different than it was then. And like, we’re all making images all day on our phones and we have access to phone editing apps and AI. And I’m just wondering how you see that reflected in the photography shows that you’re going to these days.
Ariella Budick
I think that one of the developments of now is that photographers are putting more thought into constructing their images. I think that there’s always been some doubt about how truthful documentary photography ever was. I mean, it’s presented to us as we’re going to show you this thing that you’ve never seen before and these people are suffering or these people are, you know, living in this city in this way, that’s a certain kind of corrupt city. And they had to pretend or make you think that you were seeing some kind of reality. And I think that now there’s much more openness to the murky borders of what is reality.
And I think this corresponds to a lot of things in our time where, you know, what is it? Is it news? Is it feature? What is this information I’m getting? And can I trust it? You know, and the photographer is saying, well, no, you can’t trust it. They used to be saying, yes, you can trust it. I’m here with my camera to bring you back the proof. But I think that those questions about what’s real and what’s fake have come to the fore in photography as well and with especially with digital photography. You know, it can be manipulated in ways that you can’t even see or you used to be able to see the hand of the photographer bobbing and weaving in the shadow. You know, and right now, it’s less hands-on and it’s less real, but it can also be more real because you can tell you a deeper truth about power relations in this country or in any country or, you know, just deeper truth, but necessarily more staged or more invented.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Interesting. You know, OK, we’ll talk about this more. But first, I thought it would be helpful to go back to the earlier days of documentary photography, like, say we take Diane Arbus. She’s best known for these black and white portraits that she often took at carnivals or freak shows. She died in 1971. Who is she influenced by? Like, what was the sensibility of the time?
Ariella Budick
You know, probably some of the most influential people in her life were Lisette Model, who had come here as a refugee from Europe, who was her teacher and sort of taught her how to look at things in an unbeautiful way, I would say. And also Model was very political. But you can see aspects of tabloid photography. And then, you know, you have Robert Frank in ’58 taking these very dark pictures of America, being very critical of American race relations and of American consumerism. And then Walker Evans, I think, is another important influence because for one thing, he used a view camera. When you’re using a larger format camera, you’re taking more monumental type images. They have a kind of stasis and they have detail and they’re sort of more frozen or apart from the world seeming.
Lilah Raptopoulos
So, OK, let me unpack some of these names for listeners. So you mentioned Lisette Model. She was mostly a portrait photographer. She was from Austria. Robert Frank is best known for his book The Americans from 1958, which is this really stark commentary on the state of America. And then Walker Evans was one of the photographers that the US government hired during the New Deal. So he used, as you were saying, that large-scale camera, the kind that uses film plates instead of quick 35mm film and the kind you have to set up. And he documented farmers and people suffering during the Great Depression. How do you organise these photographers in your head, Ariella?
Ariella Budick
I would say that you can sort of break down street photography into two sort of parallel avenues. One is the photographer is kind of a hunter, kind of going through the crowd, grabbing images with his or her small camera, finding the unexpected moment or the moment that, you know, what did Cartier-Bresson call it? Not the precise moment.
Lilah Raptopoulos
The decisive moment.
Ariella Budick
The decisive moment, there we go. Yeah. He was interested in the decisive moment of a sort of serendipity. And the most famous photograph is of a man, I think, at a railway station jumping over a puddle. And you can see the reflection. He’s jumped to the other side or he’s about to jump. But it’s this kind of moment of poetry that kind of comes out of surrealism and the unconscious eye. You don’t go out and find those images. They just sort of appear to you.
And then on the other side are people who did much more sort of formal set-ups where, I mean, they’re also documentarian, but they often used large-format or medium-format cameras. They weren’t trying to take something, you know, grab it out of the air or pull it out of the imagination. They would sort of stalk the people they were photographing and they would frame them, and then they would shoot them. And they have a very strong sort of intentionality and even often a rapport with the subjects. But I think you kind of get the difference, like what this sort of action, you know, composed on the spot and then the other is much more static, much more detailed in terms of what the photos express, operating on a sort of more symbolic level.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
You know this is helpful, Ariella. It’s nice to think of these two categories as different ways to get at a similar thing that documentary photography seem to be trying to do at the time, right? Like, whether it was this kind of quick, fleeting on-the-street style or this grand composed style. Like, both were really like kind of earnestly trying to present some sort of greater truth. And then now we’re in a very different world. I wonder if you can catch us up a little about what happened in between. You know, in-between there were photographers like . . . our listeners may know Robert Mapplethorpe or Richard Avedon or Annie Leibovitz, like these portrait photographers that I associate with the late 70s, 80s, 90s. Can you give us a sense of the kind of periods that we’ve moved through?
Ariella Budick
Yes. I think that the biggest things that have moved photography around have been kind of motivators. You know, one is money. One is art and, art and money. And, you know, the photographers that you mentioned, institutional and gallery affiliations and their work being seen more as art and less as document. And so the people you mentioned, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon, you know, they were portrait photographers who were me making mostly commercial work.
I mean, Annie Leibovitz now is, you know, trying to sell her work as art. But it was really for the covers of Rolling Stone and for the covers of Vanity Fair. And so I think what you have is a kind of aspiration. You know, it used to be the photographers, their big goal was to do a book, you know, if they’ve got the book, like that would be the thing. But the idea for a photographers being shown on the walls of, you know, museums, let alone galleries, I think as their aspirations grew and the commercial potential of their work grew, gallery owners realised that they could capitalise on photography as something that they could sell.
And let me let me clarify. I think that over a very long time the sort of legacy of documentary photography, it was this idea that, you know, you cropped your image on your camera. You didn’t do anything to it afterwards other than, you know, use the darkroom techniques. You didn’t set up a photograph. You didn’t, you know, interpolate into it. And then, you know, that really changed. And now, you know, you have these much more elaborate set-ups. There’s this photographer, Deana Lawson, who seems to be taking photos of people at home, except it’s not really their home and they’re totally set up and they kind of fool you into thinking they’re intimate, but they’re not, actually. Or Gregory Crewdson who does these kind of cinematic photographs that take, you know, staging isn’t even the word. I mean, they’re directed as much as if they were films, as extensively as if they were films. So there’s a kind of entrance into it of cinema, of spectacle, and that’s not part of traditional documentary photography at all.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, it was interesting to watch one photographer become very popular recently from the past, who is Vivian Maier, this photographer who, like was a nanny in the 50s and she took over 150,000 photos and then they were discovered like 10, 15 years ago. And there was a documentary about her work. And it was just on show in New York. And you look at those photos and you think, whoa, that’s a person who’s probably not alive any more. That’s a moment from like the street of Chicago that like, no one would have known existed if it hadn’t been for this woman who had taken this photo that we didn’t even know existed, etc. And obviously, that’s part of the kind of like excitement and beauty of this documentary photography. But now nothing feels lost because we’re all documenting everything all the time. Or it feels like because we have cameras at our fingertips, we’re trying to make sure that that never happens again, that there will be no Vivian Maier of the future, because, like, we’ve all taken a picture of every meal that we’ve ever eaten. And I guess how . . . yeah, how do you think about that?
Ariella Budick
The irony is that those will not be preserved because technology is changing so fast that unless you print out your 100,000 photos from your phone, you know, you might get another phone. And who, you know, these things that we feel surrounded by and that are so intricately involved in our lives can be pulled away from us. Separated from us. You know, disappeared. And I think it’s probably scary to a lot of listeners to think about this. But, you know, they think they’re collecting all this data, but that could all be ripped away in a moment. It’s all in the ether. There is no actual photograph. It’s just, you know, a figment.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, and it’s like, I mean, think about all the dead links that we visit and think that, you know, were all the digital cameras from, you know, 2005.
Ariella Budick
And the photographs that illustrated stories that are no longer accessible to us. So I think that we underestimate or just don’t consider the future of our photographs. And we think that they’re, you know, in some way eternal and preservative, when in fact they are more fleeting than anything has ever been.
Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, Ariella, I want to go back to my experience at the Bronx Documentary Center quickly, because even though photography is in a very different era and time, there was something still very hopeful to me about the fact that these kids were taking photographs, partially because the work was just impressive and they’re telling incredible stories, but also because it reminded me that, like, we still like objects despite it all, you know, and we’re going through this with a lot of media. You know, people are still buying books. We’re still buying records. We still draw and paint. Those are very old art forms. Like, we want to use our hands. And even if film photography is an outdated technology, like, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist or that you can’t make great art with it. And so I’m curious from you, like, what of this do you think can remain and what are you hopeful about?
Ariella Budick
I think that photography is one of these amazing media that, you know, that a group of people in the South Bronx can pick up and train themselves to use and then turn the lens on their own communities and not just to have like a picture of my grandma but the systems that undergird the community and the way they experience them. And photography is an incredible tool for doing that. You know, it doesn’t require a huge amount of training. Darkroom experience is great and film is great and the object is great. But sometimes you don’t need those things as much as making the invisible person visible or the invisible community visible.
There used to be a very top-down approach to that, and like those photographers in the Depression, they fanned out across the country to take pictures of homesteaders and farmers. But, you know, those people were being photographed by professionals who would kind of come in and swoop in and take their pictures and disappear.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, outsiders.
Ariella Budick
I think the thing about this is that these are from the inside of the community. These people are not being exploited by some rich white photographer who’s going to come in and take their picture. And these are taken by people who have an investment in their communities, in their lives, and they’re documenting them in a much deeper, profound, more intimate way. And I think that’s incalculably richer.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
Ariella, my last question for you is one that I kind of don’t want to ask, but I’m told that I have to. And that is about how you think AI will affect photography as a medium. I ask because there’s a lot of talk about this right now. The New York Times recently printed this long discussion among four photographers and its photo editor, and it was called “AI is the future of photography. Does that mean photography is dead?” So I guess I have to throw the same question to you. Is AI, which, to be fair, already can create photorealistic images. Is it about to kill regular photography?
Ariella Budick
No. I think that what AI does from my minimal experience with it is to kind of boil everything down to like average protest photo. You know, AI could generate a photo of a protest march like a pro-Trump march or, you know, pro-choice march. And you could tell it like give me a photo on a pro-choice march and they’ll be sure to be like people with placards and wreaths, fists. And, you know, it’s very good at doing a conventional thing.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Ariella Budick
But not one that will stop you in your tracks or make you feel anything or surprise you or give you that authentic human subjectivity that a person can bring. So those are all things that I think AI won’t, you know, I can’t really say will never, but can’t do yet. All they can do is a kind of approximation of the conventions. And I think that the truly important things can never be done by a bot because all AI does is assemble everything that’s already been done. Work off that, but doesn’t create new things.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I hate talking about AI in this context of like, will it replace human creativity? Because I don’t know. It’s like, it’s a cool tool in its infancy, but it’s just so . . . it’s just like, not interesting the way people are interesting yet. And the thing we’re all afraid of, like, it might not happen. And so I don’t know. I don’t find it interesting yet in that way.
But Ariella this, on the other hand, it was so interesting and so thought-provoking. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Ariella Budick
Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be here.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Please check out the show notes. I have linked to some excellent reviews of recent photography shows by Ariella and also a link to my FT Magazine profile of the Bronx Documentary Center, and it asks the question how arts institutions like it can survive. Also, our next Monday episode is with the great wine expert Jancis Robinson. So if you have any questions for her or want tips from her about choosing wine or building your own wine cellar, please write me. I’m on email lilahrap@ft.com, on Instagram @LilahRap. Those links are also in the show notes. I’d love to hear from you.
I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. And here’s our incredible team, Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner, Sam Giovinco and Jo Salcedo. With original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.
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