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October 22, 2008
During the late nineteenth century, photography established itself as a medium of great importance in collecting and securing visual information in various fields of research, such as anthropology, criminology, and medicine. Today, in the wake of the proliferation of digital media, photography is in a state of dispersion. Diverse applications of light-based picturing techniques are being enhanced digitally. Photographic archives are remodelled into databases.
Hybrid forms of photographic imagery mixing analogue and digital technologies have become the norm. The “photographic” is undergoing a transformation. We can speak of the “expanding field of photography” and standing on the threshold of the “post-photographic era.”
In this context, the old question, whether photographic imagery should be considered in terms of the technical qualities of the medium or in terms of cultural practices arises once again, and what is more, in a rather peculiarly polarised form. New digital technologies lend attention to material-technical questions, while, at the same time, visual literacy tends to be considered in equal terms with the ideal of literacy connected to writing.
The ways in which photography “makes sense” are not to be reduced to semiosis in that photography also produces sense by reconfiguring aesthesis, Walter Benjamin argued that photography displaces our nornavision by introducing new spatio-temporal configurations (temporal short cuts, arrested movements, inhuman scales, superimpositions, etc.). It thus undermines any notion of natural visibility, that is, the natural legibility of visual appearances.
At the same time, this discrepancy brings forth its reverse.It shows the “peculiar convergence” of different modes of experience, which, call for translation. The eye is likely to encounter images that exceed its capacities of reading. It has to learn how to read cultural fragments with floating meanings. Thus foreshadows the floating and aestheticised postmodern sensibility.
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