With generative digital imaging, the panic is on about photography. That doesn't need to happen.

How a commercial release of a documentary about a historical investigation ruptured the photojournalism community. https://malcolm-ryder.medium.com/shoot-the-messenger-475f18818cee Given the unholy combination of Social Media and AI as top corrosives of truth, it's important to remember that people are more of a threat than either of those. My analysis of the controversy over the documentary The Stringer is a long-form piece in my growing collection of articles about visual

Most of the time, there is a practical reason why cameras would be preferrable to a pencil or a computer: creating a visual record. Records exceed the notion of "documents" in that a record is always attached to a concern about something specific, not just a view of it. And it is that concern that feels disrespected by the notion that a visualization of some event or condition thought to be relevant might not be reliable as a source of their real-world facts. We go through t

Six separate takes on a controversial new film — not from a film critic but from a photographer who considers various aspects of how we view pictures and the medium. The new documentary The Stringer, released Nov. 28 on Netflix, refutes more than 50 years of celebrating Nick Út’s authorship of the iconic “ Napalm Girl ”  photograph from the coverage of the Vietnam War. Since the film saw its first public showing at Sundance, passions pro and con have been running very high ab

One of the more bizarre things that occurred in the past but that still persists is the phrase “art and photography” . For simplicity’s sake, I‘ll place that statement at the beginning of a historical narrative of culture. It refers to the point where, unlike today, photography was new and not recognized as a possible form of art. From there we fast forward, through the cultural battle to have photography recognized as a possible form of art, then speed further on to the ba

Oakland, CA – The Black Lives Matter movement brought Oakland back into the political foreground in a way not felt since the Women’s March and before that, Occupy. But the granddaddy of them all was the Black Panther Party activism born and bred in Oakland. Only recently has the tremendous role of artwork in that movement been receiving its due attention. But the urgency of the current BLM activism makes newer works the full focus of attention, daily, in the same way. ·

Contents: READING THE IMAGE. THE WORK DONE IN THE IMAGE. THE WORK DONE BY THE IMAGE. DESIGNING THE IMAGE. THE VIEWER AT WORK. THE WORK OF VIEWING. THE WORK BEYOND THE MAKING. THE MAKER’S MOTIVE. MEDIATING THE IMAGE. RECOMMENDED READING. We all want to understand the “meaning” of art, but telling someone how to arrive at that understanding is about as easy as telling someone how to understand the meaning of clouds. My concern with this is to be able to embrace both the “insti

Why do we bother to refer to certain photographs as "still" pictures when the individual picture is by definition a stationary object? I. For me and my contemporaries as young persons, television, more than any other single thing, framed the way photography entered our regular lives. What we understood, without need for explanation, was that a camera saw things and that something "remembered" what it saw long enough to show it to us at a different time. We didn't need to kno

The popular allure of street photography rarely wanes, regardless of time or place. Much of its power to influence audiences rides on the ability to take it for granted that it will show us something we either want to see or need to see, without our having to be there. But it is equally powerful as a means of getting us to see where we are, in a different way. This is inescapably the most dominant factor of street photography’s success: offered without a script, it is a natu