I recently bought a charity shop copy of Crisis of The Real, writings on photography since 1974 by Andy Grundberg (Aperture 1999). It includes a piece ‘The Machine and the Garden’ with the sub-title ‘Photography, Technology, and the end of innocent space’, which references work from Roger Fenton to ‘computer art’, by way of e.g. Lewis Hine, Bill Brandt and Lee Friedlander. He ends the piece:
But will this new technology – called high technology by its advocates – improve our lives any more than mechanization did? Will it promote human happiness any more than the assembly line did? Having seen the history of industrialization of the last 150-odd years through the medium of photography, can we be blamed if we remain sceptical?
The essay was written for a lecture in 1985.