We could go back to the beginning and ask ourselves why we decided to organize
those trilogy of symposia on photography in the first place
Thinking back to 2009 we had the opportunity to organize some kind of
public debate some kind of public inquiry into photography
The idea was to talk about the state of the field at this what felt like a very you know
portentous moment
The first symposium was titled Is Photography Over?
it was designed as an open question to come together and think about what's changing
in the field of photography, in the practice of photography, and what's being
lost and what's being gained
The question "Is Photography Over?" was prompted by the
rise of digital technology
I think that that was where a lot of the anxiety was
located in the field at that moment
The object of a photograph something that
you would touch something that you would hold something that became like a talisman
there was a sense of the loss of that
A photograph on your iPhone or on the internet was a very different thing
There's a lot running through this about the sort of human or humanistic content of photography
What we feel we're losing about photography seems somehow tied to
what we might feel we're losing about ourselves as human beings
One of the interesting things about doing a trilogy like this over so many years
Is that each part can evolve out of the previous part
The second symposium was Bearing Witness
It was also geared towards addressing changes that were happening in the field
Specifically the effects on practicing photographers
working in sort of so-called documentary genre or photojournalism
and how the rise of citizen journalism, the rise of Instagram
the proliferation of photographs on the Internet, were affecting people who
worked in those areas of photography
One of the things that sort of prompted the conversation was the layoffs
I think it was in the Chicago newspaper of their entire set of in-house photographers
and that was one of those beacon moments of, "Something has really changed here"
Professional photo journalists were being laid off
Because it was too expensive to maintain them
And the newspapers could get these photographs from people all over the world
for, you know, much less money
Pictures coming out of the Arab Spring
were mostly taken by participants in Tahrir Square
A lot of the photographs that were seen in major media outlets were made by amateurs
The thing that people got so worked up about with digital photography
was that you could manipulate the images
and that really hasn't proven to be the the source of the blurring
of the line between truth and fiction
it's about who the photographer is, and how the photograph is deployed
Zoe Strauss spoke really beautifully about this in the Bearing Witness symposium
she said that there was a code of ethics that photojournalists adhered to
They were not ideological partisans in these battles
Now there's so many different possibilities
for how a picture could come to mean something completely different
than it was originally intended for
We had talked about what photography or a photograph is
and who was a photographer
I think we saw that actually in all three of the symposia
a lot of the changes that we identified were not ruptures necessarily
that all of these things have been inherent to photography since the beginning
but that we were seeing issues of magnitude
When we decided to do our third and final symposium in this trilogy
we came up with this idea of, "When is a photograph?"
And we called it The Photographic Event
We tend to think about photography as the moment where you've clicked the shutter
but a photograph has so many more events
When it's shared, when it's thrown away
The origin of The Photographic Event was conversation we had about Snapchat in its early days
I still remember that conversation
You sort of really had to sit down and reevaluate
everything you had thought about photography
That idea that a photograph has made to be seen and then to disappear
really up-ends so many ideas about what a photograph is and does
I still maintain that the materiality of the photographic object will remain important
but I do think that this kind of idea of ephemerality
and whether things disappear or don't disappear is really important
There are a number of questions that came out of The Photographic Event for me
The main one came from Trevor Paglen
It was actually a remarkable way to end the trilogy of symposia
with his provocation that the issue was not to do with how people might have manipulated photographs
or how people circulate photographs in different ways
but actually about the ways in which machines are handling photographs
in the invisible world of data accumulation and data retrieval
It brought to a certain kind of conclusion the whole arc of what we discussed
and pointed towards another set of topics that still relate to photography
but are in a difference space altogether
so after this six plus years of organizing this trilogy of symposia
and one thing that's really been a special experience
is the chance to pursue a line of inquiry in public over such a long period of time
and also to take account of what was changing in the world around us
the world of photography and just the world generally