Photography is all about capturing what you see in the world. The concept mentioned by the American engineer and scientist Vannevar Bush in his quasi-futuristic essay As We May Think, of "advanced photography" shifts the focus from the seen, realistic images to what is not seen on the image. The underlying narrative gains interest and modern technology tries to find ways to capture this unseen story. In many cases nowadays, the thing that cannot be seen holds the greatest and most interesting narrative. One of the missions of modern photography is showing the story hidden behind the daily life, and the points of view of a picture should dig up the unseen messages concerning our position towards photography and culture. In the project "Asian Photography" that we are working on and that you can discover here, the focus is also in showing the culture codes that are hidden behind the images. We are going to analyze them with a step further, let something unseen be seen again.
Nowadays, people can shoot, print, delete, restore pictures without there being any kind of consideration or even thought involved. The trend of dry photography can be seen both literal, as a kind of synonym of digital photography, or figurative, referring to a kind of boring-ness attached to it. Has photography nowadays lost its authenticity, thanks to this dry-ness? Has it lost the underlying narrative?
It is interesting to notice that after the peak of the development of digital cameras and the industrialization and democratization of photography, that there is a trend of going "wet" again. Photographers try to find a way to create a narrative again in their films and photos.
On our website, the photographs shot by Japanese and Chinese photographers one can find are all shot in films. All of them try to discover and recover some kind of authenticity in the consumers' society they (and we) know so well. Asia, being the fastest growing continent in the economic world, has lost sight of her authenticity and in art - the thing truest to the human nature - they are finding a way to regain their touch with authenticity again. What does this trend of "back to wet" mean, how the refusals of digital cameras affect the culture. "Certainly progress in photography is not going to to stop", this statement made by Bust over 60 years ago is definitely right, but how about next 60 years? What will happen to the technology of photography? Will our eyes become the most convenient medium to shoot?
Nowadays, people can shoot, print, delete, restore pictures without there being any kind of consideration or even thought involved. The trend of dry photography can be seen both literal, as a kind of synonym of digital photography, or figurative, referring to a kind of boring-ness attached to it. Has photography nowadays lost its authenticity, thanks to this dry-ness? Has it lost the underlying narrative?
It is interesting to notice that after the peak of the development of digital cameras and the industrialization and democratization of photography, that there is a trend of going "wet" again. Photographers try to find a way to create a narrative again in their films and photos.
On our website, the photographs shot by Japanese and Chinese photographers one can find are all shot in films. All of them try to discover and recover some kind of authenticity in the consumers' society they (and we) know so well. Asia, being the fastest growing continent in the economic world, has lost sight of her authenticity and in art - the thing truest to the human nature - they are finding a way to regain their touch with authenticity again. What does this trend of "back to wet" mean, how the refusals of digital cameras affect the culture. "Certainly progress in photography is not going to to stop", this statement made by Bust over 60 years ago is definitely right, but how about next 60 years? What will happen to the technology of photography? Will our eyes become the most convenient medium to shoot?