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April 30, 2009
In Through a glass, darkly: photography and cultural memory Alan Trachtenberg raises the issue of the difference that digital photography makes. He quotes W.J Mitchell who points out in his book, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, that calling these new instruments "electronic photography" or "digital camera," in hope of easing the passage into a new regime of picturing the putative "real world" we are using metaphors that misleads, and obscures the digital difference.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, fish, Kaikoura, New Zealand, 2009
Mitchell says that although a digital image may look just like a photograph when it is published in a newspaper, it actually differs as profoundly from a traditional photograph as does a photograph from a painting. Based on changes in chemical emulsions caused by exposure to light, old-style photographs are analog or continuous tone images; computer-generated images are digital, based on discrete units called pixels, entirely the product of computer programs.These programs may include actual photographs converted into digital images, which then can be altered, reprocessed, or recombined to produce an image as if made in the old manner of light-generated images.
As a result, Mitchell writes that we are faced:
with a new uncertainty about the status and interpretation of the visual signifier...The inventory of comfortably trustworthy photographs that has formed our understanding of the world for so long seems destined to be overwhelmed by a flood of digital images of much less certain status.
Trachtenberg adds that with electronic image-making having effectively taken over and computer memory established as the matrix of images-of-the-world, we are already well within the era of post-photography. Digital photography reinforces recent post-Enlightenment suspicion that "reality" is something made up, a construction, not something secure for a camera to confirm. More likely the camera is part of the game, not to be trusted as a guide to anything but itself. What is lost, on this argument, is a sense of the photograph as an actual portion of the visible world, a physical trace or residue of an actual event within light.
I'm not sure what to make of this argument. It strikes me as overdone. There is not that much difference between a photograph taken with a Leica and film and using the darkroom and a photography taken with a Leica and film and using Adobe Lightroom. We are mostly a talking about the difference between a negative and a digital file ---not the final image. It strikes me as nostalgia for old technology. Much ado about nothing.
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