PhotoLA 2009 – Los Angeles, CA

If you’ve ever wondered what really drives the modern art world, photography included, then you’d be hard-pressed to do better than spend a day at PhotoLA, one of the main photography events in the U.S. where famous dealers and galleries show up, all with lots of photos to sell.

Besides the overwhelming sameness of most of the imagery what you quickly feel is the undercurrent of highbrow voyeurism and an excuse to view a bunch of naked chicks while holding an expensive glass of wine, or a $4 Americano.

Actually, naked men are well represented too, although it’s difficult to find one over 18 in any of the photographs available for purchase. At one gallery’s booth a man in a motorcycle jacket that cost more than most people’s entire wardrobes listened intently while the twenty-something female gallery employee described the history of the prints she was leafing through. “All of the boys in this series are between 8 and 14,” she told the man. He nodded in understanding. All of the boys were completely naked as well.

At another gallery’s booth the main attraction was a set of prints based around the theme of women getting felt up in Japanese subways while supposedly not knowing their pictures were simultaneously being taken. Having come from the generation of Vice-magazine and virtually unlimited amounts of online pornography, the imagery wasn’t particularly disturbing. What made it feel odd was that it had been hung on a wall, along with the other galleries displays of pre-pubescent boys and girls, and called art.

Perhaps it began with, or ended with, guys like Robert Mapplethorpe picking up a camera and just going shithouse crazy with it. At this point, though, it seems we’ve reached the end of the road of photography as art. There’s simply nothing left to take a picture of. The form has descended to a kind of really expensive pornography, an excuse for people to get off on imagery otherwise taboo to the mainstream culture.

Landscapes, still life, portraits, everything has been done. Because of the restrictions of the form – lens, camera, developing, printing – once someone perfects a genre as a photographer you’re forever doomed to be compared with them. No landscape can ever be photographed seriously after Ansel Adams.

The human landscape is all that’s left and it too is rapidly diminishing as a viable subject. Ryan McGinley and Tim Barber have done youth culture as well as anyone’s going to do it. A thousand photographers have documented every niche and every sub-niche available in the human spectrum. Art thrives on the new, on uniqueness, and as a mechanical art photography is unable to deliver as it once was.

That’s not to say that photography is over and done with as an art form. People will still collect it and every once and a while a photographer will come out with something new, usually based on pushing the boundaries of extreme imagery. But honestly, after Mapplethorpe devolved into Terry Richardson, where does the form have to go?