TAIPEI (Taiwan News) —  Taipei Fine Arts Museum opened the photo exhibition, “Theater of the Times,” on Sunday, drawing upon works from 17 contemporary photographers.

At an opening press conference, curator Sharleen Yu (余思穎) said digital cameras and mobile phones have allowed everyone to become a real-time reporter. Yu said this creates more opportunities for reportage, though commercial media is pushing photography in another direction, with an emphasis on image manipulation and editorializing, per CNA.

Yu added that photographic technology, as well as image production, is changing the way people view and interpret images. While the medium invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839 focused on the primacy of the image, technological innovations have led some artists, like conceptual art pioneer Solomon LeWitt (1928-2007), to write, "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

The exhibition also draws inspiration from the Japanese photographer Sugimoto Hiroshi’s photo series “Theaters.” This artistic work ruminates on the interrelationships among creators, camera functions, photography, time, and image production, per press release.

Sugimoto worries that modern photography adopts the creative approach of “anti-reportage,” altering or slowing down the cadence at which reportorial photographs were taken in the past. This pays less attention to decisive moments and conflicts, or using medium- or large-format cameras (instead of the usual 35mm cameras) in an attempt to present their subjective worlds in stylized manners, with attitudes of circumspection and contemplation.

Chang Chien-chi (張乾琦), a member of Magnum Photos, explores this sentiment as well as changing times in his photo “Magnumnite,” with a group of photographers as the subject of the camera wearing T-shirts that read, "Warning! Digital manipulation kills photography." This blunt message shows the challenges that photojournalists face in an era when editing and editorial direction alter images.

Even so, some purists believe in the primacy of image, such as Ishiuchi Miyako, who photographed the relics of the victims of the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima, Japan. Hsieh San-tai (謝三泰), who has long been concerned about the survivors of the White Terror, depicted the plight of rural people in the black-and-white photography “Untold Herstory.”