History of Photography — Module 12: Postmodernism, Digital Photography, and the Smartphone Era

The question photography spent its first century and a half trying to answer was whether a photograph was a record or a construction. The postmodern era answered it plainly: it was always a construction, and the pretense that it was anything else had served specific interests. What changed in the 1970s was not photography itself but the willingness of artists and critics to say this clearly, and to make that clarity the subject of the work.

The "Pictures" exhibition in 1977 was the moment the argument crystallized into a movement. Cindy Sherman photographed herself as anonymous women from film noir and melodrama, dressed and posed and lit to resemble stills from movies that did not exist. The pictures looked like photographs but functioned like quotations. Sherrie Levine re-photographed the photographs of Walker Evans and exhibited the results as her own work, under her own name. The gesture was deliberately provocative and precisely calibrated: Evans's photographs were themselves records of people living in poverty, and his reputation was built on the claim that the camera had simply observed what was there. Levine's act made visible the authorship, the framing, the cultural context, the market value, all the things the myth of photographic objectivity had been designed to conceal. Neither Sherman nor Levine was arguing that photography was useless. They were arguing that it was never innocent, and that the conventions of innocence were worth examining.

Fashion photography was arriving at a parallel conclusion from inside the industry rather than against it. Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans both photographed their immediate social worlds, friends and lovers and the texture of daily life, with a snapshot aesthetic that was entirely deliberate. What looked unguarded was carefully developed. Tillmans moved between gallery work and fashion editorial, photographing for i-D and other magazines with a visual intelligence that treated the fashion image as a cultural document rather than a product illustration. The snapshot aesthetic that documentary photographers had used to signal truthfulness was now a stylistic choice available to anyone, and fashion photography used it to suggest intimacy, spontaneity, and access. The line between the candid and the constructed had been so thoroughly dissolved that the distinction itself became meaningless.

In 1975, Steve Sasson built the first portable digital camera at Eastman Kodak. It was the size of a toaster oven, recorded to a cassette tape, and produced an image one hundred pixels wide and one hundred pixels tall. It took twenty-three seconds to save each image. The device was a proof of concept, not a product, and Kodak filed it away rather than develop it. Thirteen years later Kodak created a one-megapixel sensor. Nikon released the first commercially available digital SLR. Thomas Knoll began writing the software that would become Photoshop 1.0 in 1990. By the mid-1990s, professional digital capture was commercially viable, and the darkroom as a physical space had begun its long decline. Capture One arrived in 1998, giving photographers a raw conversion workflow that treated the digital negative as something to be developed rather than simply read. The analog process had been replaced not by a simpler process but by a more demanding one, in which the decisions made after capture were as consequential as the decisions made before it.

The anxiety about digital manipulation was real, but it was also misdirected. The technology made alteration easier and less detectable, but it did not invent alteration. Photographs had been retouched, staged, cropped, and sequenced to produce specific meanings since the medium's first decade. Stalin had operatives airbrush inconvenient officials out of state photographs. Gardner moved a corpse at Gettysburg. Lange had a retoucher airbrush a flaw from Migrant Mother. What the digital moment produced was not a new problem but a more honest accounting of a problem that had always existed. As Spanish photographer and critic Joan Fontcuberta observed, the metamorphosis from silver grain to pixels was not itself that significant. What should be judged, he argued, was the intent of any manipulation, not the process itself. The medium had always required judgment. The digital era simply removed the last excuse for pretending otherwise.

The smartphone camera brought photography to a scale that no previous technology had approached. By 2010, digital had effectively replaced analog across every sector of the industry. The camera in a pocket changed what could be photographed, who could photograph it, and what happened to the image afterward. Abu Ghraib was documented by soldiers with digital cameras and circulated globally before any news organization could have organized coverage. Every political demonstration, every police interaction, every moment of public life was now potentially on record. Sebastiao Salgado spent years photographing laborers and refugees in remote locations, and the formal beauty of his large prints sparked a debate about whether beauty was appropriate for subjects of such gravity. The question was not new: photographers had been debating the relationship between aesthetics and ethics since Jacob Riis. What was new was the context in which the debate was happening, a context in which anyone with a phone could publish an image to a global audience within seconds of taking it.

The history of photography is, in its final chapter, the history of photography becoming the dominant visual language of human civilization. Not the only language, and not an uncontested one, but the one that most people use most of the time to record experience, to communicate, to persuade, to remember, and to construct identity. Every photograph in that history, from the daguerreotype of the Boulevard du Temple in 1839 to the image uploaded to a social media account this morning, was made by someone who decided what to include in the frame and what to leave out. That decision is where photography lives. It always has been.