Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (detail), 2020, ink-jet print, 18 7⁄8 × 23 3⁄4".
IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES, Artforum turns its sights on photography’s material futures. Depending on whom you ask, photography is either thriving or at an existential crossroads. “The possibility of producing new C-type prints has ended,” Thomas Struth declared to us in his Berlin studio this year. Last October, Düsseldorf’s Grieger—the genre-defining lab where Struth’s “Museum Photographs,” 1987–2004, were printed alongside the works of other Becher School icons—unplugged its last RA-4 printer, ending more than fifty years of fine-art production. And this past June, Cindy Sherman announced the Cindy Sherman Legacy Project, an unprecedented initiative securing authorized reprints of her photographs while tacitly acknowledging a long-standing issue: the fragility and corrosion of prints. It’s not just the prints that are at risk: the Deutsches Fotoinstitut, set to begin operations in 2026, aims to safeguard the medium’s technical and embodied knowledge. Andreas Gursky, one of the institute’s initiators, has long been sounding the alarm about the attrition of photographic knowledge.
At the same time, given its omnipresence, is photography not in better shape than ever before? A debate surrounding this question, and a sense of indeterminacy about what’s next for photography, forms the backdrop for “The Future of Photography,” a roundtable with artists Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Thomas Demand, and Jeff Wall; two curators, Roxana Marcoci of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Florian Ebner from the Centre Pompidou in Paris; and conservator Christian Scheidemann on photography’s longevity in a moment of technological and material rupture. While current discourse on the future of photography often fixates on large language models and generative AI, the artists, curators, and conservator gathered here focus instead on the physical durability and ontology of the photograph itself. Conceived in collaboration with Demand, this roundtable is accompanied by a portfolio of the artist’s recent works that interrogate illusion, material, and representation.
Similarly, in their essay on the techniques and philosophies of preservation, Nora W. Kennedy, Jonathan Farbowitz, and Katherine Sanderson—from the Met’s Photograph and Time-Based Media Conservation Department—ask, “What counts as photography when prints are conceived as temporary and replicable, or when photographs circulate only on screens?”
Digitally, photography is everywhere—embedded in our pockets, etherized in the cloud—yet analog tools are enjoying an improbable renaissance, much as analog film techniques have experienced a resurgence of interest amid the growth of digital film. The public success of Wolfgang Tillmans’s “Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us,” which closed on September 22 at the Centre Pompidou, where it was curated by Ebner, testifies to a current fascination with immediacy and analog aesthetics. Across five portfolios in this issue, the emerging and established photographers Dionne Lee, Mame-Diarra Niang, Kunié Sugiura, Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah, and Casey Reas suggest how the medium’s way forward may lie in balancing inevitable change with the material practices encoded in its past.
