There is no true photography. And that’s the beauty of it. Styles change. Remember the Group f/64. With one of the masters of 20th century photography, Edward Weston. Everything should be altogether sharp.
Group f/64 was more than a club of artists. It was photography as a socio-political movement. The late 1920s and early 1930s were a time of substantial social and economic unrest in the United States.
They described themselves as engaged in a battle against a “tide of oppressive pictorialism” and purposely called their defining proclamation a manifesto, with all the political overtones that the name implies.
The Pictorialists? Photographers manipulating what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of “creating” an image rather than simply recording it.
World’s first “Photoshoppers” — an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries.
And today you get a postcard in the mail from the Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco which appears to be a 98% completely out-of-focus photograph by Mona Kuhn.
Oh boy does today’s photography look boring in comparison to what it once was? A medium for also political change.
Well, as nihilist Nietzsche said, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
It’s like they just can’t make up their mind!
