Photography faces an unprecedented existential crisis as traditional printing methods disappear and the medium grapples with questions about its material future. Last October, Grieger, the legendary Düsseldorf laboratory that defined fine art photography for over fifty years, unplugged its final RA-4 printer, marking the end of an era that produced iconic works by the Becher School photographers including Thomas Struth's renowned Museum Photographs series from 1987-2004.
The crisis extends beyond individual laboratories to encompass the entire infrastructure of analog photography. Thomas Struth, speaking from his Berlin studio, declared that "the possibility of producing new C-type prints has ended," highlighting a technological rupture that threatens the physical foundations of photographic art. This summer, Cindy Sherman launched the Cindy Sherman Legacy Project, an unprecedented initiative to secure authorized reprints of her photographs while acknowledging the long-standing problem of print fragility and corrosion.
Recognizing the urgency of preserving photographic knowledge, the Deutsches Fotoinstitut is set to begin operations in 2026 with the mission of safeguarding the medium's technical and embodied knowledge. Andreas Gursky, one of the institute's founding initiators, has been actively raising awareness about the gradual loss of specialized photographic expertise and traditional processing techniques that have defined the medium for decades.
Paradoxically, while analog photography infrastructure crumbles, the medium enjoys unprecedented omnipresence in digital form. This contradiction forms the backdrop for Artforum's comprehensive examination titled "The Future of Photography," featuring a roundtable discussion with prominent figures including artists Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Thomas Demand, and Jeff Wall, alongside curators Roxana Marcoci from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Florian Ebner from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, plus conservator Christian Scheidemann.
Rather than focusing solely on artificial intelligence and generative technologies that dominate current photography discourse, these experts emphasize the physical durability and fundamental ontology of the photographic object itself. The roundtable, conceived in collaboration with Thomas Demand, accompanies a portfolio of the artist's recent works that interrogate the complex relationships between illusion, material substance, and representation in contemporary photography.
Conservation experts from the Metropolitan Museum's Photograph and Time-Based Media Conservation Department, including Nora W. Kennedy, Jonathan Farbowitz, and Katherine Sanderson, raise fundamental questions about the nature of photography in their accompanying essay on preservation techniques and philosophies. They ask: "What counts as photography when prints are conceived as temporary and replicable, or when photographs circulate only on screens?"
Despite the digital revolution, analog photography tools are experiencing an unexpected renaissance, mirroring the resurgence of analog film techniques in cinema. Wolfgang Tillmans' exhibition "Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us," which concluded its successful run at the Centre Pompidou on September 22 under Florian Ebner's curation, demonstrates the public's continued fascination with immediacy and analog aesthetics in an increasingly digital world.
Five photographers featured in portfolios throughout this issue – Dionne Lee, Mame-Diarra Niang, Kunié Sugiura, Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah, and Casey Reas – represent both emerging and established voices suggesting that photography's future may lie in carefully balancing inevitable technological change with the material practices encoded in its rich historical tradition. Their work collectively points toward new possibilities for preserving photography's essential character while adapting to contemporary realities.
