Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

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I read a short essay today - a student piece, I imagine - by one Julius Zimmer of the Ludwig Maximilians Universität, submitted for a course on American photography, entitled "On The Change of Photography in The Age of Smartphone Cameras". It voices in part the now familiar idea - trope - even, that the ubiquity of the smartphone and its by now remarkable [by any standards] photographic capability and image storage capacity, is making the profession of photographer redundant. To a degree, one might argue that this was indeed the case: so few people require or even want their personal lives recording by a professional third party photographer these days as their and their friend's phones are always there, making the best of them via some very clever software. So yes, the jobbing (portrait) photographer as a species is indeed on the  endangered list; but as for true professional portrait photographic artists - those who not only command the highest prices but produce works of high art as opposed to best quality 'snapshots', will always be in demand, and will always produce work that not even the finest smartphone in the most able of normal hands will ever be capable of. Viz the above: Karsh of Ottawa's portrait of Ernest Hemingway, made in 1957 - I say made, because a silver halide and chemical based actual photograph is physically made with skill and craft, both in camera and the darkroom - one of a series of masterpieces of the photographic portrait master's art. I saw a print of this particular image in a Karsh exhibition in Paris years ago. The image is several times life size and has a presence, depth and power that no digital process could produce or emulate. Add to this the vision of Karsh himself, and you have a creative process of realising an image that so far no machine on its own could possibly even get close to. To quote the conclusion of Zimmer's essay: '... [just] being able to read and write does not make you a writer...'.  That's Art, pure and simple... 

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