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Photography in era of change
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PETER MacGill, founder and president of the renowned Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York City, said that photography has changed greatly in its short history and is now in the midst of another big shift.
MacGill recently attended Photo Shanghai at the West Bund Arts Centre and is considered one of the most important gallerists of contemporary photography. His Pace/MacGill Gallery has represented legendary photographers including Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Robert Frank and Harry Callahan, opened more than 200 exhibitions and set many price records for photography sales.
The world of photography has changed dramatically. In the past it was about taking negatives and making pictures in dark rooms. Now it’s digitalized. Virtual exhibitions are set up online that are easily accessible to anyone with a computer or smart device and Internet connection.
“There’s a huge transition occurring, but what we have to do is to look at the transition in light of the fact that the history of photography is incredibly short, so we still have the opportunity to focus on the objects, though it’s becoming an increasingly rare opportunity to really hold great works of art made with a camera,” he said.
With digital photography, authentication is something different, especially if the picture only lives on the screen.
“Those issues of authenticity which are so important to analog photography don’t necessarily apply to digital photography, it’s different, I don’t think we should take the rules of analog and apply them to digital, because it’s gonna force the digital (photography) into a place it need not go, and I like the freedom of digital photography, of the language that’s been created using it,” MacGill added.
The transition to digital photography means people are now actively sharing photographs taken with smartphones on various platforms like Instagram and Facebook, which has changed the concept of photography as well.
“What we have now is the opportunity for the world to change its way of looking at itself via digital means, more people utilize photographs to create a kind of language, it’s what photographers have done since they picked up a camera, but now I think there’s a whole movement for the world to use photographs as a vehicle for communication.”
Conceptually it’s also a very different time as people can easily invent themselves on social media sites in ways different than reality.
“It used to be photography replicated the reality, a picture of you was a picture of you, now a picture of you can be taken on your iPhone, can be manipulated and posted so you create your own identity that may not have anything to do with reality of you or your life,” MacGill said. “It’s a different kind of language, a different kind of storytelling.”
Photography wasn’t always considered an art form, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the pioneer in changing how people viewed it.
The change started in the late 1930s, when Beaumont Newhall was the first director of MoMA’s photography department and author of “The History of Photography.”
“They started their relationship with photography in a very powerful way, then by the 1960s, they (MoMA) hired John Szarkowski, who was a photographer and brought two assessments of photography to a whole new way of thinking and conceiving what photography could be or should be, and he’s also one of the world’s great writers.”
The first real photography collection boom took place in the 1970s, and it started when museums endorsed photography as an art, said MacGill, who graduated with a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona.
“It took very few people — a couple museum directors and a couple of museum curators — to start the boom to turn the tide,” he said.
While in graduate school, he worked all day at the center for creative photography where he was the curator of exhibitions. At night he would be in the dark room making his own pictures, but during the day MacGill worked with the archives of Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Harry Callahan and more to organize exhibitions and produce publications.
“One has to remember that the field was very, very small back then. In the history of photography, 100 great photographers in the early to mid-1970s, to this day forward, I either met or worked directly with at least half of them,” he said. “It’s extraordinary because our history is so short, it was a very small, tight community trying to convince people that they should care about photography.”
“But then everybody went out for the coffee break, and like this (all checking their cell phones), and then they realized he was right,” said MacGill.
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