Daniel Shea

"Before one could address the questions above in good faith, one would need a serviceable definition of what “photography” (and here, its hypothetical exemplar, a “photograph”) is. Without veering into convoluted ontology, this “photography,” regardless of what might be argued to fall within its boundaries, seems best described as a type of “medium,” or “an agency or means of doing something,” and in its specific case, “the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses or a force acts on objects at a distance.” Defined in this way, a medium is constituted by a dialectic of applied use and technological development, and is further defined by the conventionalization of the relationship between the two, a process that occurs over time and is in a state of constant revision. It would follow that a medium is never freed from its use, nor is it freed from its position between some agents in a transaction, and it is always steeped in the inertia of its conventions, for this is how, by analogy, each new relation between shifting technologies and new applications is self-historicizing and legible. This is the unending “crisis” of all media, the struggle between adherence to convention, and new relations between technology and use."

Walead Beshty from SFMOMA.