By Gemma Marmalade and Jane Boyer

A couple of years pre-COVID19, there was a series of articles presented by Hotshoe Magazine, a respected photographic publication, that asked contributors, including a seminal British voice in photographic criticism, David Campany, to answer, ‘Why do you hate Photography?’ Somewhat elusively, Campany said, ‘When photography is only photography it isn’t even photography?’ Much to the frustration of many photographers and photography critics, Campany’s response was apparently too ambiguous. Internet forums erupted, including this blog effusion:

‘Numbskull cheerleaders for over blown egos lie cheek-by-jowl with duplicitous careerists. Misogynist frauds pose as princes. Pointless darlings are bloated by prestige. Vanity, faux-Feminism, neo-Pictorialism and the ensuing dumbed-down imagery, fuelled by an idle instagram generation hell-bent on popularity have distorted a landscape of promise. Pandering curators and festival directors monopolise in backroom cabals. The gallery system is rotting in a Chelsea basement; its hackneyed swan song echoes down university corridors….Self entitled and be happy is the message, photography cannibalising itself for the sake of personality is the outcome. A carefully constructed broadcast life permeates the air. We live in an age of suburban celebrity, of social network tabloidization….Credible challenges to the monster machine are few and far between, while contrary to shite-hawk rumblings of one and all being valid, not every star is a sun, and not every status is sincere.’ (Barry W. Hughes)

Barry W. Hughes isn’t wrong per se. As a keen observer of the photography market for well over twenty years, his public remonstration was bound to manifest, as it did with many others. Susie Linfield writing for the Boston Review in 2006 wrote:

‘…There is little pleasure to be had [in photography], and even that is condemned as voyeuristic, pornographic, or exploitative. Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics haven’t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography — not specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear.’ (Susie Linfield)

This acerbic commentary is arguably borne from a raft of thinkers who have taken their pot shots at photography from Baudelaire to Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht; to Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and John Berger; to Victor Burgin, and other postmodern and contemporary critics. Like a rude child, photography is caught in the act of pointing, and giving awkward, ill-informed, and incoherent explanations that go no further than a superficial explanation of events. Linfield explains, ‘It is this anti-explanatory, anti-analytic quality of the photograph — what Barthes called its stupidity — that critics have seized on with a vengeance and that they cannot, apparently, forgive.’

Students of photography today have grown up in the echoes of such disparagement and reluctance to the value of photography. They’re commonly told that ‘anyone can take a photograph’ and the subject ‘is not a real one’ for serious study. But these students, who soak up the self-loathing from photography’s inside and a problematic reputation on its outside, face a bigger challenge to the problems of photography — AI. Because if photography doesn’t explain anything and is only ever a fragment of reality, then AI generated imagery is complete fantasy originating in our linguistic syntax. While we talk about the ‘language’ of photography and that the image is a language to shape new forms of communication, we have a messy knot to untangle in the role of language in image-making and in image generation.

As Campany suggests, when photography is only photography — that being a state of expectation, of known quantity — it is not photography as it ought to be. Instead, photography is so much more than it is perceived, and it has so much more to do and say.