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March 3, 2011
The third in Culture Machines series of Liquid Books is Technology and Cultural Form: A Liquid Reader, which presents a series of texts that interrogate the notion of ‘technology’ as a specific cultural form.
In Part 111: Technology in the Making: Art, Craft and Poiesis there is a section on photography entitled 'Digital Futures, or Who Is Afraid of the Amateur Photographer?' Most of this is concerned with the citizen photographer as photojournalist.
However, there is a broader article by Manovich, L. entitled The Paradoxes of Digital Photography’, Photography after Photography exhibition catalogue (1995).
In it he states that he will:
refrain from taking an extreme position of either fully accepting or fully denying the ideaof a digital imaging revolution. Rather, I will present the ogic of the digital image as paradoxical; radicallybreaking with older modes of visual representation while at the same time reinforcing these modes. I will demonstrate
this paradoxical logic by examining two questions: alleged physical differences between digital and film-based representation of photographs and the notion of realism in computer generated synthetic photography.
His arguement is that the logic of the digital photograph is one of historical continuity and discontinuity. The digital image tears apart the net of semiotic codes, modes of display, and patterns of spectatorship in modern visual culture -- and, at the same time, weaves this net even stronger. The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic. In short, this logic is that of photography after photography.
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