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May 21, 2010
One of the laments in the 1990s with the emergence and early flourishing of digital photography, with its post processing using computers and Photoshop instead of the darkroom, is the loss of photography's indexical nature and its connection to truth. Digital meant a shift towards representation and an emphasis on aesthetic and cultural codes.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Petrel Cove, near Victor Harbor, 2010
In Analog to digital: the indexical function of photographic images in Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2009 Corey Dzenko says that:
the notion of the photograph as index relies on the physical and chemical processes that constitute the medium. In film-based photography, light bounces off an object and is recorded in the silver salts of the film's emulsion. This process depends on the presence of an object in front of the camera's lens in order to record its image through projected light.
This conception of photography----photographs are perceived to represent reality in their reference to a subject in time---is deeply entrenched in our culture.
Roland Barthes describes the relationship between object and image and time as "that-has-been" in Camera Lucida: Reflection on Photography. According to Barthes, this characteristic is unique to photography:
I call "photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph... In the daily flood of photographs, in the thousand forms of interest they seem to provoke, it may be that the noeme "That-has- been" is not repressed ... but experienced with indifference, as a feature that goes without saying. (pp 76-77).
As Barthes explains, "Show your photographs to someone--he will immediately show you his: 'Look, this is my brother; this is me as a child, etc."' Cory says that it was this physical, indexical connection to reality that resulted in photography's use as visual recorder in documentary contexts such as news imagery and photojournalism.
Digital photographs, it was held, present a challenge to the indexicality of photographic media. No longer does light bounce from an object and cause a physical and chemical reaction of silver on photographic emulsion; instead, the image is converted into intangible data.
This shift away from physicality caused some, such as Fred Ritchin, to respond that with digital technology, it is arguably easier to edit and create images of objects that never existed in reality thus casting doubt on the reliability of photography's connection to the real. So we have the end of photography as we know it.
The problem with this kind of realist position that reduces photography to a particular technology of image-making is that many digitally constructed or distributed images, such as the snapshot photograph of the two poodles at Petrel Cove above, "look like" analog photographs and are processed with, and used in, applications similar to their analog "predecessors." The picture of reeds at Port Philip Bay in the Romanticism: a note post is an analog photograph.
We read the digital photograph within the tradition of reading and understanding analog photographs. We do not say that the digital transcoding of images in the picture of the poodles results in the negation of photographs' indexical function on the practical level compared to the picture of the reeds at Port Philip Bay. The reaction to the poodle photograph is not one of mistrust of photographic "transparency" as was feared in the 1990s.
It is the notion of 'transparency' that needs questioning, given the constructive nature of photographic image making and the way that it is embedded in text in a digital world of computers and the Internet. The digital shift means that we have moved from the photograph to the image, in that the image has become one of the constitutive elements of the consumer society in which we live. The urban landscape with its images of billboards, shop signs and advertising is now a world of images; an ‘empire of signs’ in which a flow of images are produced, circulate and are consumed.
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At http://jonathan-morse.blogspot.com/2010/05/he-must-be-wicked-to-deserve-such-pain.html I consider a similar polarity: not chemical photography vs. digital photography but textual representation vs. digital photography.