Here's the beginning a long meditation on the question: "Is documentary-style photography dead?" which appeared recently in the LA Times.
IN THE NEW afterword to Aperture’s recent rerelease of her classic, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin writes:
I am terrified that everything I believe about photography, about this work, is over because of the computer and easy manipulation of images it facilitates. This work was always about reality, the hard truth, and there was never any artifice. I have always believed that my photographs capture a moment that is real, without setting anything up.
Later, she continues:
Now, it is so distressing: no one any longer believes that a photograph is real. Almost every time I give a talk or teach, I ask this question about truth and photography. If all but four or five in an audience of two hundred artistic people don’t believe that photographs are true, then what does that say about the rest of the world? So this eliminates the larger reason for having done this book — not for me, but if nobody believes it as having happened …what is the point? The belief that a photograph can be True has become obsolete.
Full text here:
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/02/is_documentary_style_photography_dead/
