An iconic South Central Pa. amusement park is open for the summer season. One photographer is capturing all the sweetness, proving nothing is out of her reach.

While the subject of new technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) floods our news feeds and prompts ample discussion, the 27th edition of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto embraces new imaging technologies, and the ability to question, and push against, the perceived boundaries of contemporary photography.

Throughout the month of May, CONTACT presents lens-based exhibitions throughout the city foregrounding work by local and international artists. With more than 180 exhibitions on view, it offers a journey through galleries, artist-run-centres, and non-traditional spaces, as well as outdoor installations, many complemented by talks and panel discussions with artists and curators

New technologies are also making a place for themselves in the festival. Images are no longer only created with a lens but through digital infrastructures. Rodell Warner’s exhibition at Trinity Square Video features a series of animated GIFs derived from public-domain archival footage and enhanced digitally. At Evergreen Brick Works, Jawa El Khash presents holograms that respond to the flora and fauna of the site, in iridescent and engaging images that imagine a re-populated and diverse future ecosystem. Featured at street level on the exterior windows at Onsite Gallery is an aerial photograph by Robert Kautuk. Depicting ice floes in Canada’s Arctic region, the image was taken using drone technology.. These examples show the creative possibilities that have recently developed in the field of photography, but also testify to the richness of interpretation that these practices allow.

However, semantic novelty and technical progress quickly come up against the boundaries that have until now defined photography: is an image still photographic if it was not initially captured by a lens? This debate was at the centre of a recent debate at the Sony World Photography Awards, where an image created using AI garnered an award, and, similarly, an AI-generated film also won an award at the Nikon Film Festival. From a historical perspective, these new formats and tools should be studied alongside everything else that is practiced in photography today. For CONTACT’s Artistic Director, Heather Canlas Rigg, “Photography is a vast medium that exists in various modes of materiality and immateriality. We welcome all of the poetic and surprising ways in which artists work with camera technologies, transgressing their limits.” She adds: “I am very interested in the directions that artists take in terms of experimental moving images; this is an aspect that I would like to see featured more substantially in future editions of the Festival.”

Without putting them on the same level as “traditional” photographs created with a lens, these new imaging practices hold a lot of promise and present uncharted terrain ripe for exploration by artists and photographers.

More information:

From May 23 to June 6, Christie’s presents its Photographs online sale which brings together major photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries: Helmut Newton, Richard Mosse, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Wolfgang Tillmans, Irving Penn, Guy Bourdin, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman or Hiroshi Sugimoto. The selection offered for sale covers a vast panorama of different photographic genres including fashion photography, documentary photography and conceptual photography.

Roselyne, Château d’Arcangues, 1975 by Helmut Newton is the flagship work of the sale. This large size print uses a technical process rarely used by the photographer: tintyped silver print. Helmut Newton particularly appreciated its technical qualities and speed, but also its singular aesthetics. Thanks to its brilliant rendering which inevitably evokes the glamorous universe of glossy magazines, it fits perfectly with the tone of Newton’s images which are then part of the pictorial movement of the 1970s that the New York Times ushered into history under the name of “porn chic”. (Est. €80,000-120,000).

Seven contemporary women photographers with committed works will be highlighted in the sale, through prints by Cindy Sherman, Ellen von Unwerth, Shirin Neshat and Zanele Muholi (Vukani II, Paris, 2014, €12,000-18,000) to whom the European House of Photography has just dedicated a first retrospective in France.

Christie’s : Photographs
Online sale in Paris from May 23 to June 6
Exhibition from May 22 to 26 and from June 1 to 6
https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/photographs/lots/3444

The time has finally come. Leading to this moment, you sat in the hot sun for hours, waiting for the grazing of the bird’s toe on the water, creating mesmerizing concentric circles, and boom: you got it!

Or perhaps you set up an expertly crafted four-strobe lighting, and after repetitively throwing kombucha left and right, you nailed your splash shot (then mopped all night). Maybe you worked for weeks on a mood board, pulling the latest trends in fashion, coordinating with other vendors, and using your new optical spot, you created a resplendent fashion shot. You edited it in Lightroom, then in Photoshop, and now the time has finally arrived: you get to share your masterpiece with the world. And then…

“Did I forget my hashtags? Nope, they’re there.”

Meanwhile, a reel of an 18-year-old doing bicep curls gets its 763rd like and 26th comment.

You wait until the next day and check your insights.

“It only showed it to 374 people of my 7k followers?!”

It is so easy to get discouraged as a photographer, especially if you’re the kind of photographer who is not into reels, social media trends, or taking videos of yourself sipping lattes and doing an orchestrated song and dance to the latest popular audio clip.

If you are one of the photographers who hopes that people will love and engage with your work because it shows a high level of skill, patience, ingenuity, and crushes the checkpoints of  “seven elements of art,” you may often find yourself discouraged. You may feel like no one cares about your brilliant shots, and they just want you to shake around brainlessly in your studio to the latest trending audio.

There are several reasons that can leave you feeling disheartened as a photographer. One of them is having to deal with clients who always try to negotiate for the lowest possible price while demanding the most amount of work from you. This constant devaluation of your work can leave you feeling frustrated and demotivated. Another source of disappointment for photographers is submitting their landscape images to magazines, only to receive no response at all. While rejection can be tough, being completely ignored can be even more defeating. With all of these challenges, it’s no surprise that photographers feel tempted to throw in the towel. 

But this is why you don’t give up: because you’re an artist. You continue to make art because you are an artist. You don’t make art because people give you a three-centimeter pixelated heart on a cell phone. You make art because you are art — an art maker. You don’t make art because you want people to stroke your ego; you make art because you have something in you that you want to express visually. You don’t make art because people validate the art. You make art because you have ideas, curiosities, and visual explorations inside of you that need to come out. You make art because it makes you happy to make art. Period. You make art for the sake of making art. The way to not quit at making art is to remember why you make art.

We can get fall into discouragement when we lose our why. It’s important, when battling defeat, to come back to that earlier version of yourself. The one that launched you to become a creator. The one that existed before you started building your website, making your YouTube channels, sending your work to publications, and posting it on Instagram. Come back to the person that loved creating photos for the joy of expressing your unique interpretation of whatever is behind your lens. Try to detach yourself from everything else that comes with the business of being a photographer, and come back over and over to the love of expressing your unique vision. 

Let me leave you with this closing quote. I have shared it before, but it’s so fitting in this instance. It’s a Michelle remix of an Andy Warhol quote and it has kept me many times from throwing in the towel in the illiterate Insta art world:

Make art, and while everyone is deciding whether they like it or not, make more art.

I’m wishing everyone a week of making art: for the pleasure, purpose, and end aim of making art.

In banner, left to right: 

@ludmillo_pierre, @beautymarkdebbie, @epicactionimagery, @lightnlense, @germainephoto, @afcasallas35, @sflphoto_com, Pete Coco.

Presented in collaboration with students from ANU’s School of Art & Design, Photography is Dead! Long Live Photography: An evening celebration of the life and death of photography as we know it will feature a funeral procession, a specially commissioned lament, and a history of photography and its rise and fall, as well as an open-casket viewing of the corpse (you’ll have to attend to see what the corpse of photography looks like).