Genius of Photography (2007)

RATING:	40%
FORMAT:	DVD

(Image: http://www.bbc.co.uk)

craft wishing it were art

Essentially, pretentious blather about photography attempting to claim it as the art it can never be because of its limiting connection to literal reality.

(Image: http://www.bbc.co.uk)

Technologically-primitive tribes-people sometimes fear cameras because they are afraid of losing their souls. In a sense, they are right because photography – especially portrait photography - never truly captures the essence of someone - only their appearance. This failing is evaded in this series in favor of pretending photography is a source of mystical revelations about reality. This is all-too-typical of the materialistic West in believing that only appearance matters and that people are simply objects with delusions to some kind of superiority over other objects. This series ethnocentric obsession with Western photography compounds this fixation. A superficial assessment of a superficial so-called art that diminishes what it records as photography itself does.

(Image: http://www.bbc.co.uk)

None of the bland talking-heads in this series is as convincing as they are passionate about photography and so are poor ambassadors for their own work and interests. The enfeebled body-language-contradicting-their-speech strongly suggests that even they do not believe their own hogwash and are simply talentless personalities avoiding the manual labor that would normally be their due.

(Image: http://www.bbc.co.uk)

The deadendedness of photography results from the lessening of the human personality in images that can only reveal a diminished sense of what it is to be human. The fact that photography is still debated about in terms of 'Is it Art?' shows that few wish to accept that it is not - otherwise the debate would have been settled by now. Photography is simply a craft tool that is forever 'haunting the doorstep of art', so where is the genius of the title here? - it is not in evidence. Photography is an implied art because it offers only implications about the world it pretends to record. This is why painting did not die out after the invention of photography - as neither the radio nor the cinema died with the advent of tv.

(Image: http://www.bbc.co.uk)

Clearly, Western culture has run out of suitable (ie, politically correct) subjects for documentary - as evidenced in this flimsy six-part series. Photography remains the formalistic craft that lacks content; struggling to pretend it is an art. The only way to make this pretence work here is to show explicit photos, give the jaded audience a cheap thrill and then pretend they have had a meaningful experience. Here, photography reveals itself to be the ultimate dead medium lacking no content other than its technique; form and content becoming one and the same.

(Image: http://www.bbc.co.uk)

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