I recently heard these things from three different people. This first one is a paraphrase:

“I would like to do everything with 100% integrity. But sometimes I would see prints that my friends made, and when I asked them how they got it done they would say, ‘well, I sent it to such and such a lab…’ So maybe the prints weren’t perfect, but they still looked good, and they had them on paper!”

“I think you need to pay to develop as much of that film as you can afford. Do it tomorrow. Right now it’s like a clog in a drain. Creative work should be flowing through you steadily always. It seems to me that the most successful designers and artists are always producing. When you hold work in process like this, it creates attachments. How much do you hope the photos in that fridge will be great? Attachment is really dangerous; it makes it hard for you to judge the real successes and failures of your work.”

“No one is obliging you to take photographs!”

A world, the smell of Dektol, the sprocket driven technology that went back to Edison who invented it in New Jersey, the world of Gene Smith, of Frank, silver gelatin prints, mounting tissue, negatives, drying racks, and small black and white things of enormous beauty and power, that until now has had an unprecedented life of six generations and has altered how the world is seen and known for all time, is coming to an end. It is the end of the age of photography. It is an undeniable fact. Just look around.

The sign at the entrance to my gym locker room says “no cell phones please, cell phones are cameras.” They are not. A camera is a Nikon or a Leica or Rollieflex and when you strike someone with one, that is take your camera and use it as a weapon, they know they have been hit with something substantial. ”

The logic of this article is full of interesting holes, but the most obvious mistake for me is taking a bull-headed view of what is or isn’t “photography.” I mean, how is it “an undeniable fact” that “photography” is dying? I would be happy to deny that myself, and so would many other people, for other reasons I’m sure.

I think Danny Lyon does mean something when he talks about “photography,” but he hasn’t gone beyond identifying its smells and brands.