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June 19, 2011
One of the core arguments in the academic photographic literature these days is that the digital revolution in photography has eroded the old belief in the light-based transparent nexus between a photography and reality. We call the pictures made with digital cameras digital photographs as if to ease the passage into a new regime of picturing the real world.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Port River, Adelaide
William J. Mitchell in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-photographic Era (1992) says that though a digital photography may look the same as a traditional one, the former differs from the latter as does a photographic from a painting. They are computer generated images based on pixels and the product of computer programmes. We are in the era of post-photography.
So what? What hangs on this?
Alan Trachtenberg in his Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory says that the notion of photography as a form of memory unique among the visual arts became the groundwork conception of the medium.
Belief in photographs as true pictures of the past comes from apparent correspondence between them and images we hold in the mid and call "memory", traces of what our eyes once delivered to our brains. Collecting and preserving snapshots, making family albums, pinning pictures of loved ones on the wall, all are based on the the belief that photographs are remnants of past experience, image remnants of past feelings, associations, stories, the stuff of pictures we carry in our heads of our pasts, of the private history we have lived and the public history we share with overlapping communities.
The camera was understood to be a machine for freezing time into recoverable images--eg., Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.
The positivist assumption is that a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it . Walter Benjamin's optical unconscious in his "Small History of Photography" (1931) essay refers to what appears in the image unintended, not the product of the photographers will, but a sign of the contingency involved in the making of the photograph. Here is a sign that matched a referent; an incontrovertible fact; that brings past histary into present tense.
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