23/04/18
Has digital imaging changed how we, the viewer, perceive photography and its relation to truth? Any image, however produced, goes though a series of stages:
- The initial conception
- The event that is imaged
- The creator making the image
- The image is displayed
- The image is seen
- The image is understood
There are choices at all the stages, from choosing to make that type of art, though the method, the display and then finally the viewer looking and thinking about the meaning. The artist may use paint on a cave wall, clay in a sculpture, silver salts in a traditional photographic print or pixels in a digital camera and on-line. Even when only considering ‘straight’ photography there have been a range of choices made, to go out that day, to point the camera in that specific direction, to use those settings and that exact framing. The same choices are made with digital imaging.
Since the advent of digital photography there have been opposing views about its meaning and its validity. There have been concerns about the value of the photographic image as evidence and the ease of changing details in a digital image, but in reality, there has always been the possibility for changing prints, either by the photographer or by the editor and much of the ‘truth’ about an image comes from where and how it is displayed together with any text. As an example – fashion photography has always been manipulated to show the ‘best’ most engaging image that will be most effective as a sales aid.
If one of photography’s main reasons is ‘to provide a picture of a reassuring world’ from Kember, 1998 quoted in Photography, A critical Introduction (Wells,2009) this is more dependent on the final outcome than on the technological means of producing the image. Any argument about digital photography being less ‘truthful’ than analogue is simplistic and fails to take into account the wide-ranging types of image available since the original images were first produced.
A separate argument considers that they are simply different things. Analogue photography takes light, transfers it onto a receiving plate (such as a film) and that is then either shown directly or further printed onto paper or an alternative medium. Digital images are made from electronic data packages, and while they may eventually be printed, often fly around the world in digital format and are never seen off a screen. A more significant difference is probably in the way the images are stored and their availability to be seen rapidly, even instantly, by potentially millions of people, anywhere in the world. Most digital images are meant to look like photographs, and most people will perceive them as such. It is frequently impossible to tell if the image you are looking at is an analogue image, an analogue image scanned into a computer (and potentially then altered digitally) or a digital image – and does it matter?
The argument about truth in photography does not depend on the way the image is produced, and never has. It depends on the truthfulness of the photographer, whether or not they can purvey their vision, and the understanding of the viewer.
6/05/18 – Additional thoughts
Reading Caroline von Courten’s argument in Foam (von Courten, 2018) she points out that one of the key differences between the analogue (chemical) image and the digital on is that analogue images are in a constant state of change. However well preserved they are they gradually degrade, what she calls ‘a process of becoming rather than a state of being’ while digital images either are or are not (if deleted). This matches the photographic images relationship with ourselves and the transience of any moment, the human urge to freeze memories. Photographs hold onto, ‘the unspeakable, mysterious and ungraspable for a second’. Von Courten is speaking about analogue images so is the same true of digital images? In many ways even more so, in that that the particular instant of the image is held more tightly, more indelibly and potentially for a longer time.
13/05/18 – Further thoughts
One of the most important differences between analogue and digital images may be the ability for machines (phones, computers etc.) to take the images automatically, transfer them to another place and read/utilise the images without any requirement for human intervention. The images may be temporarily seen by human eyes (or may not) but still exist as data when the sighting mechanism (phone, computer) is switched off. This ‘allows for the automation of vision on and enormous scale and, along with it, the exercise of power’ (Paglen, 2018). This argument is extended further in ‘Nonhuman Photography’ by Joanna Zylinska (Zylinska, 2017) when she talks about the role, and relevance, of photography by both human and nonhuman sources in this age (the Anthropocene) and how images that could never have been taken other than by a machine impact on how we (as present day humans) imagine and understand the earth.
References
Paglen, T. (2018). Invisible Images. Foam, 49 Back to the Future, p.274.
von Courten, C. (2018). Photo Affect. Foam, 49 – Back to the Future, pp.75-80.
Wells, L. (2009). Photography. 4th ed. London: Routledge, p.323.
Zylinska, J. (2017). Nonhuman photography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MiT Press.
Context and Narrative 