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HERE IT IS. MY RAMBLINGS ON THE state of of the medium and its apparatus. First things, first .... setting the stage ...
.... unlike any time in the past, photography milieu wise, it would be safe to write that we are all photographers now inasmuch as the dictionary states that a photographer is "one who practices photography". So, logically writing, in addition to those who use a camera to make pictures, there is an enormous number of people in the "civilized" world have a cell phone capable of making photographs. Suffice it to write that the medium's practitioners have expanded to a number never before seen.
That written, the bulk of those practioners are not "serious" picture makers. They are what was derisively called "snapers" at the time of the introduction of the first KODAK. Their primary picture making activity is making pictures for placement on social media and their pictures rarely make beyond their phones / virtual world and into the real world in the form of actual printed photograph. It's all good for them.
Then there is the much smaller subset of "serious" and very "serious" picture makers. That group ranges from casual to dedicated "hobbyists" to those consumed-by-the-desire-to-make-art and it is these groups of picture makers, and their pictures, with whom I am most interested.
It may seem overly simplistic to write that not much of significance has changed over the past year. There has been no out-of-the-blue / sudden emergence of an heretofore unseen manner of seeing and picturing the planet and/or life thereon. The practioners of various picture making genre plod along following the tried and true picture making conventions of their chosen field of interest (which is not to write that there are no pictures of interest being made).
That written, there is one particular genre-one of medium's earliest movements-that seems to be undergoing a wide spread revival. That is the movement labeled as Pictorialism .... from Wikipedia:
Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of "creating" an image rather than simply recording it .... For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer's realm of imagination.
I come to this belief from my experience over the years of submitting pictures to gallery calls for submissions for juried theme-based group exhibitions. And that experience-especially so over the past year-is increasingly dominated by submissions and subsequent juried selections which could very accurately be labeled as pictorialism aesthetic pictures.
No matter the specific theme of a call for submissions-as simple as, say, pictures of a tomato on a plate-very few "straightforward" pictures of a tomato on a plate make the cut into the exhibition. Typically, if an exhibition is comprised of 30 pictures, only 3-4 are straightforward pictures. Most selections are visual "constructions" straight out of the picture maker's photoshopped imagination.
Why the emgerence of pictorialist picture making tendencies? I could go down a rabbit hole of cultural influences but I don't want to get all pyscho(logical) on this subject. But, in a practical picture making sense, the introduction and continuing development of of Photoshop and picture altering apps have made it easy, for the picture maker, to slip into the domain of making acts of the imagination visible. However, more to the picture making point, it is easier to make a catchy-to-the-eye picture of an imagined world than it is to make a straight, catchy-to-the-eye picture of the real world.
Does this scenario dictate that the end of straight picture making is nigh (as one blogger has declared)? Of course not. Does it mean that the medium and its apparatus will be used to create another digital-era genre which will be dominated by pictures which display that genre's cliches and repetitive visual tropes? It a word, yes.
All of that writen, in a very real sense, the state of the medium and its apparatus is the same as it ever was. That is, the characteristic of the medium and its apparatus which distinguishes it from the other visual arts-its intrinsic relationship with and to the real world-will always be the most challenging aesthetic sensibility within which a picture maker can work.