Judy Fiskin's 2006 Film The End of Photography Declares Medium's Obsolescence at Angles Gallery

Judy Fiskin presented her 2006 Super-8 film The End of Photography at Angles Gallery in 2006, arguing that photography's 150-year history has concluded. The two-minute, fourteen-second black-and-white work features grainy, trembling shots of Los Angeles neighborhoods accompanied by a raspy female voice listing lost objects and processes. Fiskin contends that digital photography lacks the medium-specific materials that defined traditional photography—film, canisters, enlargers, timers, safe-lights, negative carriers, dodging tools, aprons, tongs, squeegees, darkness, and radios. Her position rejects postmodern prejudices, embracing nostalgia and sentimentality to assert that contemporary methods differ fundamentally from past photographic practices. The film's elegiac tone and quantitative claims about obsolescence create a persuasive case without relying on arcane theoretical debates. Fiskin's argument focuses on observable formal processes nearing extinction rather than abstract declarations. Christopher Bedford reviewed the exhibition for Afterall in 2007, noting the film's pragmatic duration allows viewers to stand comfortably without distraction. The work's manual camerawork prevents complete stillness, evoking photographic stillness through absence as images of 1950s apartment buildings, untended hedges, and architectural details flicker across the screen.