There Is Nothing New in Photography!

The photographer Terence Donovan used to ask me when I was talking about another photographer “What are they bringing to the party?”. His fellow photographer Brian Duffy would comment that photography had nothing new to offer. Duffy left the medium and became a specialist antique furniture restorer. Both have since died.

I don’t think they were being cynical or negative, just realistic. We have seen all of the photographs we need to see, and the experimentation, rule breaking and innovation the medium offers has been explored. We could spend the rest of our lives only looking at what has been made, the amount of work in books, collections, archives and online would allow us to do so. We don’t need new work to be made.

You could say the same of literature. There are more than enough books written to keep us busy reading. The form has been established, manipulated, deconstructed and born again on many occasions by multiple writers, as has photography. So why do writers and photographers keep making work? Is it ego? Do they feel that they are better, different, more important than those makers who came before them? I don’t think so.

There is a basic need in the human psyche to tell stories, stories let us share information in a way that creates an emotional connection and gain a deeper understanding of the human experience, which in turn helps us to understand the lives of others and allow us to take lessons learned and apply them to our own lives. It is intrinsic to who we are and who we could be. If we see the basis of photography as storytelling then it will continue to be relevant for as long as humans feel the need to tell each other stories.

The writer does not feel the need to create new words every time they decide to write, they may play with sentence construction, plot development or structure, but the basic elements of their tales will be the same as they have always been. The creation of photographic narrative requires the same level of acceptance of structure over innovation concerning the building blocks of the story.

The photograph is not new, but the ways in which it can be used to tell stories that engage, involve, entertain and inform and audience can provide a sense of newness.

This does not require a rejection of the past aesthetically or a race to deconstruct what is understood as a photograph. However, it does require an understanding of how to construct a story from images, and to do that the image maker must also be a competent storyteller. Such an acceptance challenges the idea of photographer as artist but in doing so it also challenges the understanding of the word artist.

Is the artist defined by the creation of an artefact based purely on aesthetic decision making or are they producing work within a practice that illustrates stories both personal and universal? I recognise the latter definition, but would be concerned by the former assertion. Would it therefore be correct to describe the artist as a storyteller? I think so. Those stories may be conceptual or figurative, but the message will still be available to the viewer to hear or decode. Perhaps both artists and photographers should be more accurately described as storytellers.

The challenge for the photographer is to find good stories; stories that mean something to them, enough for them to dedicate time, effort and potentially personal funds to bring them to fruition. Stories that connect with others and that achieve an element of impact. The problem is that with so many photographers making so many bodies of work a sense of déjà vu becomes a dominant response to that work. When so much work looks the same the strength of the narrative becomes even more important.

To ignore the importance of narrative is to reject centuries of communication written, oral and visual. There are no new stories just as there are no new photographs, all are based on the histories of both mediums either as responses or rejections of past work. Umbrella themes of betrayal, love, good versus evil, courage and perseverance, revenge and redemption have been intrinsic to storytelling through the ages, but all of these are difficult to illustrate within the single photographic image without relying upon easily recognisable tropes and clichés. It is why the photographic series is so important to understand.

There is nothing new in photography and I have no expectation of seeing work that I have not seen before in some form or other. That is the curse of extended engagement with the medium. If you are new to the medium, much will appear to be new as you discover it, but I am writing here from the perspective of the experienced practitioner.

If nothing is new, the expectation of the informed viewer is for work to be successful when held against what has gone before. Photographer Gregory Crewdson (who describes himself as an artist) has said that, “Every artist has a story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures.” I agree with his first suggestion, and that it is not easy to tell stories with photographs, but I do not believe that it is impossible. If it is then one area of photography that could bring a sense of originality would be closed to the photographer. So, what are you bringing to the party?

Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was first screened in 2018 www.donotbendfilm.com. He is the presenter of the A Photographic Life and In Search of Bill Jay podcasts.

© Grant Scott 2022