“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Mark Twain

In his essay, Molecular Documents: Photography in the Post-Photographic Era, or How Not to get Trapped into False Dilemmas, Jorge Ribalta discusses William Mitchell’s pronouncement that photography is dead and speculates what the implications might be  for photography in the “post-photographic” era.

1. “What is Ribalta’s argument against the death of photography?”
   Ribalta suggests that, while photography, as we knew it during its first 150 years of the medium, may be considered  “dead”, it has actually experienced a resurrection, of sorts, “disembodied from its traditional technological material condition”. That is, while photography lost it material connection to the “photo-chemical process”, it has become, in its digitized form, the “immaterial paradigm of visual culture”. Instead of being dead, it has been transformed through a “diffuse explosion into culture”.
2. What does Ribalta mean when he says that photography dies, but the photographic is reborn?
   Jorge Ribalta agrees with William Mitchell in his view that traditional photography may be “radically and permanently displaced”, but it is also liberated. For Ribalta, the death of photography is essentially the result of the loss of indexicality, or realism, at the hands of “artificial construction” (i.e. Photoshop). As he states, photography is “ontologically linked to the notion of document, testimony and historical representation”.  In order for the medium to be “reborn”, he suggests we need to invent ways “to reterritorialize photography by producing practices in which realism is reinvented”. The mechanism for this rebirth is a resistance to the loss of realism through what he calls “molecular realism”.
3. What is Ribalta’s argument about the photography of the real?
   Ribalta argues that the “challenge today is that of understanding or defining how photography can maintain its social relevance in an era of crisis in photographic realism.” That is, “photography of the real” must re-invent documentary methods. He points to the collaborative survey projects of Marc Pataut in Barcelona, started in 1999 by photographer Patrick Faigenbaum and historian Joan Roca, as examples of this re-invention. In Ribalta’s terms, the Barcelona survey replaces the traditional survey structure “as an institutional critique strategy”.
4. What is the author’s hope or desire for photography in the 21st century?
   Ribalta states that the “challenge today is that of re-inventing realism in micro- political terms, as photography without realism is “an empty signifier”. Whereas earlier documentary projects, such as the Works Project Administration of the 1930’s, sought to demonstrate the “universality” of man, micro-political documentary is more about integrating complex indexicality, in new ways, to represent realism. An example of this is The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960-1980 which exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago from October 26, 2014 through January 11, 2015. As Janet L. Abu-Lughod, an urban sociologist, states in the forward to the book that accompanied the exhibit, The City Lost and Found “represents brilliantly what I consider to be the most exciting developments in urban studies in the past decade or so”. Through the use of photographs, films, printed materials, public documents, maps and objects, the collaborative project brings “fresh perspective to historical topics that have great significance for our present-day relationship with cities”. In essence, it reinvents the documentary method.
5. What is Ribalta’s argument about the role that institutions play in the future of photography?
   The author suggests that cultural institutions must “constantly resist the reified condition of the art object in the bourgeois public space”. Institutions must help reintegrate photography and position it between. what Ribalta refers to as. traditional, “archival topological objectivity” and “special effects”. This means that “photography of the real” needs to move away from the insular use of free standing photographs as the center of documenting reality. We saw this approach in the photography of Lewis Hine, in the early 20th century, and the subsequent work of the WPA photographers. (Although, one could argue that the collaboration between the photographer Dorothea Lange and her husband Paul Taylor, who functioned as a field economist/anthropologist dealing with the effects of the depression, could be seen as an early form of the collaborative documentary process.)
   Finally, Jorge Ribalta argues that there is a need for a “radicalization of institutional critique” and that the promise for this radical change may rely on the “potential of new articulations between art, social science and politics”.