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Spectrum

S: So you are saying that it was all very academic except that at some point it gave rise to an advertising industry which believed they were the new artists.
   
P: Yep they and the journalists took the ideas of Maholy Nagy and turned it into an industry
   
S: And the rest as they say is the history of consumption
   
P: Photography moved from being the hand maiden of science and the arts to the hand maiden - and sometime apologist of the consumer society.
   
S: So far from being an art, it's use has become purely instrumental?
   
P: By and large, of course we got colour and the career artists went "big" with their pieces, but this seems little different to me from the earlier traditon of history painting; a salon art.
   
S: Yep we also got nastiness instead of humanism
   
P: But "read outside of the photograph" - it simply mirrored the values of the artist and her times
   
S: So where are we now?
   
P: Tricky to find the right word, but digital and global I guess.
   
S: Digital cameras and the web? But it hasn't happened, I mean it's still frames and galleries, and the media market economy with a big carbon footprint.
   
P: Yet the photograph is everywhere, albeit most have a half life of a second and the gallery is meaningless to most people
   
S: It's the economy stupid
   
P: Yes but there are implications... What is the role of the gallery when the exhibit is on the web, When a right click at home saves anything, who needs to own it? You want a picuture of something - even the worse thing you can imagine? And it's there with a couple of clicks
   
S: So gumbo is history and the future?
   
P: Well history of a sort I don't know about the future, here's Albertine
   
A: You two still talking, come and see what I found
   

 

gumbo