What are some of the contemporary issues in photography?
I teach a whole course on that! Photography has been revolutionized by technology. But what you end up with is more important than what you use to create the photograph. Whether digital photography is art or not is a debate that is long over. Digital photography is a powerful medium. The questions to ask are: Does it have longevity? Does it have impact? Are people interested in it and do they learn something from it? A lot of fine art today is cultural studies. What the photograph is telling us about ourselves is more meaningful than the formal considerations and whether they are beautiful pictures. That has been one of the big shifts in contemporary photography. In one of my collage pieces I combined a monument in Prague that commemorated some of the people that died in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Prague with a Bank of America advertisement in Times Square. Aesthetic concerns and layers of content combined to make a statement about two contrasting systems; communism and capital
