“Photography Is A Political Issue”: Deconstructing The Medium With Michael Reisch

As someone who has worked in photography for decades, Reisch has witnessed the industry change dramatically, particularly in the last ten years as technological innovation has exploded. Beyond ecological concerns, his awareness is rooted in new issues. “There is no photography anymore,” he says. “And at the same time, everything is photography. It’s a paradox.” Reisch asserts that our complete digital environment is based on photographic principles now, and yet we live in societies that are completely digitally overstrained. “The state of photography is far less innocent, if it ever was innocent,” he says. “It has always been a very powerful medium, but now it is a political issue. Google and Facebook are harvesting our pictures, our data. And you have photography-based digital tools being used by totalitarian systems to build up government surveillance.” It is something that he says should be regarded with a lot of awareness. “But it is not all negative, of course,” he laughs. “On the other side for us artists there are a lot more technical possibilities. And there is a democratization of photography; everybody uses pictures, it’s accessible. We use photography as we use language—a picture is almost like a word.”