Is Photography Over?

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosted a symposium last Friday entitled: Is Photography Over? There are several great essays posted on the topic. Here are a few my favorite quotes:

What's over is the narrow view of photography — the idea that the camera is a recording device, not a creative tool, and that its product is strictly representational — not manipulated, not fabricated, not abstract. .... Photography over? More often these days, it feels like it's only just begun. -Vince Aletti, independent art editor and photography critic

Photography's role as a verification of the world is lost. Reality has become a parallel universe with photographers returning with different versions of what it truly looks like. And nobody really believes any of them. - Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Chief Critic at the graduate school of art, Yale University

Photography has been over, finished, dead from its inception. As a medium founded in technological innovation, it is subject to the product life cycle, which is to say that every new device or process reaches a zenith of popularity only to be superseded by the next invention. The seed of each innovation's demise is thus planted at its birth. - Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Each essay is worth reading in it's entirety. Links to individual essays:

Vince Aletti, George Baker, Walead Beshty, Jennifer Blessing, Charlotte Cotton, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Geoff Dyer, Peter Galassi, Corey Keller, Douglas Nickel, Trevor Paglen, Blake Stimson, Joel Snyder

This post is intentionally short in hopes that it will provide time to read other viewpoints.