Foreword

This lecture is intended as an introduction to developments in the theory and practice of photography as they have evolved in response to new technologies, principally digital capture and the world wide web. As a photographer and not a philosopher I want to try and avoid getting sidetracked by lengthy philosophical deliberations. Friedrich Schlegel was right when he said, ‘What is called Philosophy of Art usually lacks one of two things; either the philosophy, or the art’. However I do hope to cover enough theory to provoke further investigation and discussion and I will deal with new theories and aesthetics in the context of traditional theories. Firstly I will look at how many of the issues that have become so controversial and so widespread at the beginning of this century were already issues at the beginning of the last. I will then look at some of the philosophers, critics and photographers who’s work responded to the advent of the digital world. Throughout I will situate the issues in the context of photographic images themselves, and explore how ideas and theories played out in emerging practices.

Introduction

The digital revolution transformed photography and impacted on all photographers working in all areas of photography. The instant nature of the image process, the accelerated speed of the work rate, the significant lowering of costs, the increased insubstantiality (or “lightness”) of the product and the resulting ease of transmission or exchange all contributed to a fundamental change in photography practice across all disciplines. At a theoretical or aesthetic level however, some areas of photography were much more impacted than others.

In my own case and in much commercial photography there was actually not much obvious change between the analogue aesthetic and the digital aesthetic. We just carried on making beautiful pictures of buildings, women, dogs and other products. As you might expect much photo theory does not really engage with images of lovely houses - except possibly as ethical questions and as social history. These issues were not significantly altered by the particular nature of the digital image.

I am in the business of making glamorous pictures and much like a fashion photographer I will use any or all of the traditional photographic techniques to do this. These techniques have always been the same. They are lighting, framing, perspective (even false perspective), editing, the close up, the wide angle, focus, and of course retouching.

As you all know the digital revolution made retouching or postproduction much more widely available and much easier to practice. It is possible now to change completely how an image looks on a computer, add other images, create lifelike forms to insert etc etc. In fashion photography this has given rise to a great deal of controversy. Idealized images of women (and men) have been criticized extensively. Of course there has also been a reaction to this kind of idealization, for example in the the intimately autobiographical works of Nan Goldin or the fashion photography of Jurgen Teller.

It is important to emphasise that this idealization and the reactions to it pre-date digital photography. In fact all of the photographic techniques used in digital photography were already in use in analogue photography and therefore at an aesthetic level there has been no change. Even the post production techniques (retouching, replacing elements etc) were in use.

The development of the digital photograph and the nature of the new medium are not so much a rupture or break with the traditional or analogue photograph so much as a natural and organic progression in photography and art. A brief review of the most important features of this heritage might be helpful at this point before we turn to what has in fact changed.

• Quantity: As we all know the most obvious effect and feature of the digital revolution is the sheer quantity of images that are being taken. Currently estimated at 30 billion a year. Whilst it is hard to estimate actual pictures taken the proliferation of images we now see was begun by the introduction of the Brownie box camera - of which 250,000 sold in 1900 alone. This trend accelerated with the development of the handheld camera using 35mm film by Leica in 1924 (originally using movie film). The market really took off in 1963 with the introduction by Kodak of the Instamatic camera using a 35mm film, this time prepackaged inside a plastic container. This packaging simplified the whole loading and processing sequence. Within seven years Kodak had sold 50,000,000 of them. Later in the early 1970s Kodak refined and miniaturised this process with the pocket instant camera with a smaller film known as 110.

• Sharing: The speed of sharing images and the mass commodification of experience into instant souvenirs was well under way by the turn of the century and took some unexpected forms. Postcards celebrating lynchings of blacks in the southern states were very popular as souvenirs in the 1920s (Without Sanctuary, Twin Palms Publishing 2000). The popularity of images of violence has always been a theme of the development of the photographic image. As Baudrillard noted in the early nineties ‘The gulf war movie was instant history in the sense that the 8 selected images which were broadcast worldwide provoked immediate responses and then became frozen into the accepted story of war: high-tech weapons, ecological disaster, the liberation of Kuwait’. (Baudrillard, 1995 p.3).

• Techniques: All the techniques and styles that the digital image excels at were in use in the analogue world, and not only the standard ones derived from traditional art, that is to stay portraits, landscapes etc. Collage from early politically orientated practitioners like John Heartfield and Raoul Haussman to the abstractions of John Baldessari; The photograph of the mundane (Sigma Polke, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston); Multiple reproduction (Richard Prince), Art photography (Steiglitz, Steichen etc). Even the participation of the audience and the group creation and sharing of art has a firm foundation in the history of art starting with the high antics of the Dadaists, through the happenings and performances initiated by Alan Kaprow in the 60s. As important stylistically and theoretically to these has been the development of highly immersive installation art. Digital practice has merely extended all of these forms.

• Abstraction: Some see the digital image as the liberation of representation from the referent, a kind of emancipation from any need to represent or refer to, or even rely on objects in the real world to create meaningful works of art. The history of 20th century art is the story of this emancipation. Abstraction from Cezanne through Cubism and the Russian Suprematists; The machine iconography of Dadaism (from Hausmann to Picabia); The synthetic image findings and object transformations of Surrealism (from Dali to Magritte). Finally the raster-technique (Lichtenstein, Warhol, Dieter Rot, Sigmar Polke, etc.) is most obviously a prefiguration of the pixel of the digital image.

Aesthetics, Theory, Ethics.

Having spent quite a lot of time establishing what has not changed from analogue to digital we can now move forward to seeing how the digital image is in fact a complete rupture with the analogue image.

Before we do though I would like to stop and look at some terms we are using: aesthetic, theoretical and ethical.

aesthetic /iːsˈθɛtɪk,ɛsˈθɛtɪk/

adjective
concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty.
"the pictures give great aesthetic pleasure"

noun
a set of principles underlying the work of a particular artist or artistic movement.

There are aesthetic considerations for example that underlie the work of the cubists, but when I said earlier that in my business or in the fashion business there has been no change aesthetically I mean that the aims and values associated with that type and look of photography have not changed. Basically to seduce the viewer in order to sell products. However there are other kinds of photography, art photography or reportage for example, that have responded with new aesthetics In fact contemporary photography is in a golden age of invention and significance as photographers respond to the advent of the digital image with some extraordinary new ways of image-making.

There are aesthetic considerations for example that underlie the work of the cubists, but when I said earlier that in my business or in the fashion business there has been no change aesthetically I mean that the aims and values associated with that type and look of photography have not changed. Basically to seduce the viewer in order to sell products. However there are other kinds of photography, art photography or reportage for example, that have responded with new aesthetics In fact contemporary photography is in a golden age of invention and significance as photographers respond to the advent of the digital image with some extraordinary new ways of image-making.

theoretical /θɪəˈrɛtɪk(ə)l/

adjective
concerned with or involving the theory of a subject or area of study rather than its practical application.
"a theoretical physicist"
based on or calculated through theory rather than experience or practice.

The fact that digital photographs look exactly the same as analogue photographs is deceptive. If you open a book and see a digital photograph on the same page as an analogue photograph it would be difficult to tell them apart. I myself have published a book where half of the images where shot on film half on digital. No one has ever been able to tell which are which.

However a closer study of the digital image reveals a profound fracture. The difference between the digital image and the analogue image is that the old image was tied to its subject by its mutual dependence on identical electromagnetic laws, wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum. The new image is not. This interdependence of the analogue image with natural processes was a source of confidence and a token of the veracity of the image, of its truth to nature often referred to as the indexicality of the image. The lack of this quality has been the chief cause of concern regarding the new digital image. The problem as expressed by the film and culture critic Bill Nichols is that: ‘the chip is pure surface, pure simulation of thought. Its material surface is its meaning, without history, without depth, without aura, affect, or feeling’.The digital image is a simulacrum, that is to say a copy of something without any of the qualities of the original, a sign posing as reality.

There is no doubt that for many people the ultimate goal of the digital image is the recreation by computer of a reality so exact as to be indistinguishable from external reality. This is already the case in 3d rendering and will be perfected by AI in the near future. This is what the processors of supercomputers in Hollywood are attempting to generate. This is the liberated image that art has been trending towards at least since the modern movement and Cezanne.

This fracture has recently led some critics to announce that ‘Photography is dead’ and that the illusion that it still exists is due to its outputs looking the same as the ones they replaced. The digital camera uses the same frame as the old analogue photograph in order to replicate the look of the photograph, but the rectangular frame is only a temporary container for holding information. This formlessness is not obviously apparent when viewing a digital photograph on a screen or in print.

When a latent image is fixed chemically on film it becomes frozen in time. The digital photograph is never fixed in this way. From the moment the shutter is released, the image flows from the camera’s imaging sensor to the digital memory. This state is a virtual state, a binary code able to be transmitted electronically to another or several other receivers simultaneously, where once again it can be reconstituted as a replica of the old analogue image.

The digital image is only a replica of the photographic image, and this has many consequences. It is interesting in this context that Brian Dowling a fine art photographic printer when discussing the tonal issues associated with digital printing refers to a more realistic tonal range as “getting a photographic look”.

Theorists and photographers have responded to the paradox exposed by this divergence, and the aesthetic and ethical challenges it poses.

ethical /ˈɛθɪk(ə)l/

adjective
relating to moral principles or the branch of knowledge dealing with these.
"ethical issues in nursing"

It is perhaps the ethical considerations in photography that have caused the most discussion after the digital revolution especially in reportage photography. Before we look at these it is worth having a quick review of the different types of photography and of photographer.

Types of photography and photographer.

Photography falls broadly into the following categories:

• Erotic / Pornographic.

• Architecture / Design.

• Portrait.

• Fashion.

• Landscape.

• Still life.

• Reportage.

• Scientific.

 And there are three main types of practitioner:

• The Popular: Takes pictures because they can; it is a way they like to relate to their world and to themselves. The fact that they are not professional, together with the almost automatic way they work lends their pictures an aura of truth and of veracity, of ‘true life’. This photographer shares their photographs freely making a collective experience of photography.

• The Professional: Gets paid for what they do and specializes in a particular area, where their knowledge and experience lend value and/or veracity to their images. Type 1 photographers are threatening to this photographer’s livelihood. They often imitate the techniques and styles of type 1 and type 3 photographers.

• The Artistic: They use all the techniques and subjects of type 1 and type 2 practitioners, synthesised with a knowledge of art historical and contemporary picture making, aesthetics, political theory etc, in order to convey their take on the world. Through skill and subterfuge the artist photographer stages objects that reconfigure our relationship to our environments.

St Veronica & the truth content of the image.

You will have noticed that with all the categories of photography and with all the types of photographer the one value that lies at the heart of the photographic activity is veracity, that is to say truth in relation to the real.

From the very start of its history photography laid claim to this same idea, that whereas all other images merely represent reality, it alone is that reality fixed in time. Throughout its history the photograph has claimed its value by appealing to this truth content. It is the conveyor of a true and lived experience, a guarantor of the truth of what it depicts, a “vera icon”.

This claim was not always universally accepted, even as early as Kracow and other early critics. The photograph and its relation to truth or history have been a controversy ever since the birth of photography.  But the advent of digital photography has laid waste to this claim of truth, and in an atmosphere of increasing paranoia, much photographic activity has now come to deal directly with this issue or the fallout from it.

This is how fellow journalist Don Barleti describes him at the time he shot this image: "When I saw him I really did not recognize him. He was sunburned, had not eaten in days, nor slept in 36 hours; his clothes were filthy, his beard – all over the place. And he smelled like a goat."

Like many war photographers Walski went to great lengths, putting himself in considerable personal danger to bring the truth of war back for people at home to see. However this was the image that ended Walski’s career. The image is manipulated in photoshop and some other journalists noticed this when it was published. When asked he admitted it was manipulated and claimed that it was a momentary lack of judgment due to stress tiredness etc. As any of you who have tried this sort of thing it is not that easy to do well and requires a certain degree of calculated judgment. Walski was fired immediately and has never worked again.

But actually this is all he did. He took some elements from the first picture to make the second more dramatic. As Frank Van ripper wrote in The Washington Post: “What makes Walski's action so tragic has very little to do with what he did to his picture, but a hell of a lot to do with the fragile currency in which all reputable journalists trade: their credibility” (My italics). Walski is now a wedding photographer.

As we all know this kind of photo manipulation is nothing new. Here are two early examples of photo manipulation, altered to change the viewers understanding of the truth. The first image is a picture of Mau Tse Tung. Mao Tse-tung on the right had Po Ku on the left removed from the original photograph after Po Ku fell out of favour with Mao. There are many examples of this editing of history. They are especially frequent in those countries and at those moments in history when censorship of the press was thought to be an essential component of good governance.

Stalin routinely air-brushed his enemies out of photographs. In the photograph on the right a commissar was removed from the original photograph after falling out of favour with Stalin. All these images were used to influence a viewers understanding of history. And it was not only totalitarian regimes that practiced these deceptions.

This kind of retouching then has gone on since the beginning of photography, whether it is to make a person look more beautiful or a scene more vivid or in the worst case to alter the historical record. So what has changed with the advent of the digital?

We see daily that computer-generated images (CGI) look more and more realistic. The blending of these images in virtual reality games is a common place whose cash value has been realized in a spectacular way. Rockstar games banked $1 billion in three days when it released GTA 5 in September 2013. This new immersion in a realistic looking world holds a huge attraction for the viewer / participant but it has also given rise to an increasing sense of anxiety. This paranoia was deftly exploited and graphically illustrated in The Matrix where humans are depicted as prisoners whose minds have been subjected to a comprehensive computer simulation, whilst their comatose bodies are harvested of their vital energies in human factory farms.

With the knowledge that a realistic digital image can be manufactured in a studio the question of the truth content of the image has become critical. This accounts for the slightly hysterical reaction of people to the actions of those photographers who are caught falsifying images.

Here is the critic Van Ripper again: “Remember: news photographs are the equivalent of direct quotations and therefore are sacrosanct”. (My italics).

Van Ripper is claiming that the image is the equivalent of a quote from the real, using identical signifiers - in the case of the image shapes instead of sounds – as a guarantor of authenticity. Just as a journalist should not alter the words that a person speaks, so a photographer should not alter the shapes of a scene.

Van Ripper is being naive here and this equivalence he is so keen to establish is metaphorical at best. The two dimensional image may be subject to the same electromagnetic laws as the original scene but lacking the performative attributes of speech it cannot reproduce that original like the spoken word can.

Whether a quote is generated by a machine or spoken by an actor, in its actualisation it is once again identical to the original spoken words. Not so with the image, it is at best a copy and a poor copy at that, existing as it does only in two of the three dimensions available - and that’s if you do not include the dimension of time. Unleashed from the laws of electromagnetic radiation that at least suggested a faithful copy, the digital image is one remove even further away from the reality - no longer a copy but a copy of a copy.

There is a further problem raised by the photo manipulation of images like the one by Brian Walski. His photo manipulation altered the image not in order to make it more truthful looking but simply in order to make it more beautiful. Not only did he deliberately alter the truth but he altered it to make it more beautiful. This is an ethical problem and one that has been much discussed especially in relation to the many posed and art directed photographs passed off as documentary by photographers.

Take Aurthur Rothstein for example and his image Fleeing a dust Storm - commissioned by the American Agricultural agency the FSA. Aurthur Rostein originally said that he came across this scene by accident picked up his camera and ‘went snap”. He later confessed that he had art directed the entire scene from scratch to as he puts it “….In the development of an idea, each photograph is required to tell its part of the story as clearly and vividly as possible. It forces the photographer to become not only a cameraman but a scenarist, dramatist, and director as well. As a director, in my opinion, it is necessary for him to plan each picture carefully from the conception of the idea to the final visual impact on the spectator. In short, his direction involves not only the influencing of the subject before the camera, but also the influencing of the person looking at the finished print. To do this successfully demands a highly developed dramatic perception”.

As the critic Mark Reinhardt’s says in his introduction to the book Beautiful Suffering: “the aestheticizing of suffering is inherently both artistically, and politically reactionary, a way of mistreating the subject and inviting passive consumption, narcissistic appropriation, condescension, or even sadism on the part of viewers.”

This aestheticisation of reality has always been a problem for the photographer. Over 150 years ago Walter Benjamin noted that photography had “succeeded in transforming abject poverty – by apprehending it in a fashionable perfected manner – into an object of enjoyment.”

Let us look at these two photographic reactions to the bombing of the twin towers.

After the terrorist attack on New York questions were asked as to the ethics of representing the suffering which occurred on September 11th. Many people thought that there ought to be limits to what was shown. This discussion continues today. Some suggest that silence is the only adequate response to horror.

This picture of the twin towers was taken by Joel Meyerowitz and commissioned by the then mayor of New York, Rudi Giuliani in the immediate aftermath of the bombings. In this time he took 8,000 photographs. This image shows the remains of the North Tower looking towards the Woolworth building. It is a carefully composed photograph showing a charred mess of pipes and walls. It is a very well composed melancholic image suggesting tragic loss and suffering as well as the possibility of regrowth.

Thomas Ruff ‘s Jpeg ny01 deals with September 11th in a different way from Joel Meyerowitz.. Ruff used an image grabbed from the internet depicting the Empire State building in the foreground and a burning tower in the background. Unlike Meyerowitz this was taken on the day itself when people were actually suffering and dying, ‘though we cannot see them. Ruff enlarged the image to 101×74 inches and when displayed in a large room it’s dominant feature is all the pixelated distortions. The more you approach the image to see better the worse the distortions become. As Max Reinhardt says: “This distancing has the effect of inviting reflection on that layers of mediation structuring perceptions of such events as 9/11.,…It is precisely through its aesthetic strategies…that this remarkable photograph invites both critical engagement and a kind of meta-critical reflection on the mass-mediated character of disaster, the fascination such spectacles tend to inspire, and the confidence they tend to invite in their reality - a confidence undermined by the image's flagrant distortions." Not really

Both these photographers used techniques to distance the observer from the events photographed. Myerowitz uses the aesthetics of elegy to suggest recovery, Ruff draws attention to the artificiality of the medium in order to highlight the difficulty of understanding what actually took place. Meyerowitz is caught up in the old paradigm of Atget’s ‘dumb’ witness. Thomas Ruff is looking towards a new paradigm of photography as part of a vast and complex information / experiential network. What is certain is that neither photographer feels able to report events from the old standpoint of the photographer as guarantor of truth.

Unfortunately Joel Meyerowitz ended up by making souvenirs of the events. His images look back almost with pleasure at the 19th century taste for the gothic ruin. In this series of nearly 8,000 images he packaged up the experience into objects of pleasure, objects of what Walter Benjamin once called “vacated memory”, that very thing he most criticized: “The liquidation of memory”.

As you know there were millions of other images of the twin towers catastrophe, the single most photographed catastrophic event ever recorded. Within minutes of the first impact, gift shops surrounding the WTC reported selling out of disposable cameras. Was this as Susan Sontag might have thought a need by people to distance them from what was going on? When questioned some said the opposite, that in fact they felt the need to photograph the burning towers to prove to them that it really was happening. Whatever the reason it is these photographs instantly shared across the www that are perhaps more interesting even than either Ruff’s or Meyerowitz’s. They are the work of the forerunners of what we now call the citizen journalist.

Fred Richtin is professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch Shool of Art. He is the author several very important books on photography and photojournalism and he has written extensively on the impact of digital technology on photography. Richtin advocates the notion of a new photojournalism dedicated to rousing the consciousness of a mass of people distracted by the proliferation of crafted media images; a media largely controlled by the government, the army or the police and subject not only to aesthetic but also political constraints. “No longer is there the role of the elite journalistic chronicler. With the newspapers running out of money citizens with camera phones are taking over photographers stories. Viewers of images more than ever are able to see what they want when they want”.

Ritchin sees a whole new medium emerging, one with the “…ability to convey multiple levels of information through hyper linking and multimedia integration. Eventually, digital photographs relationship to space, to time, to light, to authorship, to other media will make it clear that it represents an essentially different approach than does analogue photography. It will also become clear that to a large extent this emerging cluster of strategies will be forever linked with others as a component in the interactive, networked interplay of a larger metamedia. This new paradigm, which has yet to fully emerge, can be called “hyperphotography”.

In the face of the highly stylized and controlled images purveyed by the press, the citizen photographers practicing this new type of journalism have themselves now laid claim to that old photographic territory, the truth. As non-professionals they are free to report without censorship.

Vietnam is widely regarded as the last photographer’s war in as much as it was the last major zone of conflict where the photojournalist was both accorded a fairly neutral status (and thus to a certain extent safeguarded from danger), together with fairly few restrictions on what or where he photographed. In contrast to this as Julian Stallabrass has written: “the images made by embedded photojournalists, confined to their assigned military units, are not so different from the propaganda produced by military photographers”.

One reaction to this censorship is illustrated by the work of Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg. Embedded with British troops in Afghanistan in 2007 they made images by daily exposing long pieces of photographic paper to light without using a camera. The resulting pictures were abstract traces of the light and colours of a particular place. When exhibited these were captioned with a description of a news item of an event that had taken place that day.

As Oliver Chanarin says “As embedded journalists there are hundreds of restrictions. We were forbidden to photograph soldiers who were injured or even the results of enemy fire… we also couldn’t photograph in the morgue, in any of the hospitals or officers tents. You are actually forbidden to photograph anything which resembles a sign of war. The British military have around 40 professional soldiers who are also professional photographers. They carry an M16 and a Nikon D3. They are on the frontline, spending up to three weeks on patrols, their first duty being to take photographs and their second to engage combat. When the combat shooters get back to the base they hand over their digital chips to Media Operations and anything deemed unnecessary or too contentious is deleted and the rest is held on file or made accessible to the public. Now to get “good images” of combat means you have to collaborate with the military. If you want real access, you need to be embedded which brings with it a whole set of obstructions including self-censorship. This collusion gives you remarkable access and the possibility to create spectacle, images the public and photo-editors demand: like a soldier silhouetted against a desert sunset”.

In the face of this kind of censorship it is not surprising that news networks might create a demand for other more independent witnesses. With faster upload speeds and wider telephone networks and a huge increase in smart phone usage - currently estimated at 1.7 billion world wide - the citizen journalist has stepped in to feed that demand. Compared to other sources they are relatively unbiased and even if as agents in a conflict they are taking sides, this very bias or subjectivity itself is a guarantor of reliability, of their proximity to the events reported, and of the actuality that they depict. This closeness is often further enhanced by the purposefully rough, low quality nature of the images, the lack of framing and exaggerated pixilation. These effects are seen as more real than those taken by professional photographers who are still trying to tell stories, deploying rhetorical techniques to make pictures that now look formal and fake by comparison as they simulate the old analogue look with the old analogue paradigms.

However the single most important aspect of this new digital journalism’s claim to the truth is the number of images recorded at one event. The process involves transcending the photographer as an individual author and as Fred Richtin puts it “taking data from everybody, from the entire collective memory visually…. “

In this new reportage no longer does the photographer author have control over the viewer. The viewer has the option to select the type of information they wish to see from a number of related information sources whether it be text, moving image or still. The ability to craft an individual experience tailored to the viewer is an engaging process. This multiplicity of shared data is the guarantor of truth. This kaleidoscope of vision you will of course recognize as Cubist.

And of course this new journalism represents a huge cost saving to the media networks. No longer do they need to send out photographers, they just log in to a newswire library. Any newsworthy event anywhere will have journalists on the ground uploading images as soon as they are taken. Demotix is such a newswire service. It boasts over 17,000 contributors. As it states on its website, ‘Demotix was founded on the cross-roads of activism and journalism, with two principles in mind – freedom of speech and freedom of information’. Here is the new age of reportage.

 This then is the new digital truth, but unfortunately all is not as good as it might at first appear. It turns out that these new photographers are as susceptible to the old paradigms as the old photographers. Whilst the news networks have celebrated the cost saving and unprecedented access and immediacy that these new photojournalist represent, there are already great concerns about this new style of reporting.

The main problem is not that these witnesses may be biased or one sided or that they may be less informed than full time professional journalists. The problem is precisely because they are not photographers. The fact is that not having spent years out in the field, covering different conflicts, different though similar environments and developing distinctly individual reportage styles – learning as Vilém Flusser says to: ‘deliberately play against the photographic program and thus produce an informative photograph’ - many photojournalists of this new kind resort again and again to the same few tropes, many drawn from Judeo Christian Iconography; Christ figures, Cain and Able as refugees and thousands of Madonas with children. Totemism is a human trait. The downfall of the popular photographer is simply that they often want to take what Oliver Charin calls “a good photograph” and in the face of these conflicts and the horrors he witnesses they often ends up by resorting to traditional - and distancing - visual tropes.

There is another problem too with all these images flooding through the system. Whilst Richtin and others like him are keen to downplay any panic over the sheer numbers of images being made (not more than one every three days for every one on the planet according to one critic) others are not so calm. Nothing less than a “visual crash” of “electro magnetic confusion” is what Paul Virillo has called it and David Levi Strauss simply says it is media “pandemonium”: chaotic, random, unintelligible, hellish.

Here is one reaction to this visual crash. At a time when the message and truth of documentary photography itself is disappearing into the pixels of digital imaging, and the usefulness of social documentary photograph is being questioned, there remains the example of Sebastio Salgado who appears to be making a new kind of document, with a different intention to the old one. Salgado does not seem to be interested at all in the grand objectivity claimed by the old photojournalism, nor the instant kaleidoscopic fizz of the new. Slowly and persistently over the last thirty years he has immersed himself in the lives of those he has photographed achieving what David Levi Strauss calls the “transcendence of self which calls for epiphany of the other”, aspiring through aesthetics to a realm of collective subjectivities.

Sebastio Salgado’s strategy effectively returns to the original roots of photographic practice: The photographer as subjective witness contributing to the collective subconscious.  You will not be surprised to hear he works with film.

Traditional analogue photography like Salgado’s persists and I believe will continue to exist along side digital photography. My belief is that this is the case simply because there is something in the film photograph that lends itself to the idea that a photograph can be useful to history - to memory - and that this witnessing is best done by the physicality of film. The importance of this witnessing activity has always been a central tenet of the photographic practice and has not been without its critics. Whether professional or amateur, photography has always been discussed in relation to history, memory, absence, and loss.

As Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida. “If a photograph is to be discussed on a serious level, it must be described in relation to death. It’s true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more. Even if the person in the picture is still in love, it’s a moment of this subject’s existence that was photographed, and this moment is gone. This is an enormous trauma for humanity, a trauma endlessly renewed. Each reading of a photo and there are billions worldwide in a day, each perception and reading of a photo is implicitly, in a repressed manner, a contract with what has ceased to exist, a contract with death.”

These concerns exercised many early theorists including the great critic Sigfried Kracauer. In his view photography did not recreate reality for eternity, as art does, it merely embalms time rescuing it from natural decay, reorganising the spatial elements of a moment with no reference to time, without “durée”. No one has illustrated this idea of photography better than Marcel Proust. I have printed this out for you to read during the short break which follows. Marcel is describing his grandmother towards the end of her life.

Hélas, ce fantôme-là, ce fut lui que j’aperçus quand, entré au salon sans que ma grand’mère fût avertie de mon retour, je la trouvai en train de lire. J’étais là, ou plutôt je n’étais pas encore là puisqu’elle ne le savait pas, et, comme une femme qu’on surprend en trahi de faire un ouvrage qu’elle cachera si on entre, elle était livrée à des pensées qu’elle n’avait jamais montrées devant moi. De moi — par ce privilège qui ne dure pas et où nous avons, pendant le court instant du retour, la faculté d’assister brusquement à notre propre absence — il n’y avait là que le témoin, l’observateur, en chapeau et manteau de voyage, l’étranger qui n’est pas de la maison, le photographe qui vient prendre un cliché des lieux qu’on ne reverra plus. Ce qui, mécaniquement, se fit à ce moment dans mes yeux quand j’aperçus ma grand’mère, ce fut bien une photographie. Nous ne voyons jamais les êtres chéris que dans le système animé, le mouvement perpétuel de notre incessante tendresse, laquelle, avant de laisser les images que nous présente leur visage arriver jusqu’à nous, les prend dans son tourbillon, les rejette sur l’idée que nous nous faisons d’eux depuis toujours, les fait adhérer à elle, coïncider avec elle. Comment, puisque le front, les joues de ma grand’mère, je leur faisais signifier ce qu’il y avait de plus délicat et de plus permanent dans son esprit, comment, puisque tout regard habituel est une nécromancie et chaque visage qu’on aime le miroir du passé, comment n’en eussé-je pas omis ce qui en elle avait pu s’alourdir et changer, alors que, même dans les spectacles les plus indifférents de la vie, notre oeil, chargé de pensée, néglige, comme ferait une tragédie classique, toutes les images qui ne concourent pas à l’action et ne retient que celles qui peuvent en rendre intelligible le but? Mais qu’au lieu de notre oeil ce soit un objectif purement matériel, une plaque photographique, qui ait regardé, alors ce que nous verrons, par exemple dans la cour de l’Institut, au lieu de la sortie d’un académicien qui veut appeler un fiacre, ce sera sa titubation, ses précautions pour ne pas tomber en arrière, la parabole de sa chute, comme s’il était ivre ou que le sol fût couvert de verglas. Il en est de même quand quelque cruelle ruse du hasard empêche notre intelligente et pieuse tendresse d’accourir à temps pour cacher à nos regards ce qu’ils ne doivent jamais contempler, quand elle est devancée par eux qui, arrivés les premiers sur place et laissés à eux-mêmes, fonctionnent mécaniquement à la façon de pellicules, et nous montrent, au lieu de l’être aimé qui n’existe plus depuis longtemps mais dont elle n’avait jamais voulu que la mort nous fût révélée, l’être nouveau que cent fois par jour elle revêtait d’une chère et menteuse ressemblance. Et, comme un malade qui ne s’était pas regardé depuis longtemps, et composant à tout moment le visage qu’il ne voit pas d’après l’image idéale qu’il porte de soi-même dans sa pensée, recule en apercevant dans une glace, au milieu d’une figure aride et déserte, l’exhaussement oblique et rose d’un nez gigantesque comme une pyramide d’Égypte, moi pour qui ma grand’mère c’était encore moi-même, moi qui ne l’avais jamais vue que dans mon âme, toujours à la même place du passé, à travers la transparence des souvenirs contigus et superposés, tout d’un coup, dans notre salon qui faisait partie d’un monde nouveau, celui du temps, celui où vivent les étrangers dont on dit «il vieillit bien», pour la première fois et seulement pour un instant, car elle disparut bien vite, j’aperçus sur le canapé, sous la lampe, rouge, lourde et vulgaire, malade, rêvassant, promenant au-dessus d’un livre des yeux un peu fous, une vieille femme accablée que je ne connaissais pas.

New Weather: Interliminal space, the artist’s response.

Professor Richtin and those like him are anxious about photography’s role as a tool for telling the truth about the world and as we have seen those engaged with reportage have had to reinvent it in response to the new digital environment, exploiting new forms of reporting like personalised versions of history narrated across multimedia platforms and social networks, blogs, photo essays, as well as the immediacy of instant data uploads via the web.

So far we have dealt almost exclusively with reportage photography and the crisis that the digital revolution engendered in this field. For the rest of this lecture and before I take some questions I would like to look at some other practices that have emerged during this period, all of which engage directly with or a product of the digitalisation of the photographic images.

Some of these practices have emerged in popular photography others in fine art photography where their development has been synchronous with a vertiginous rise of the prices paid for individual photographs. This kind of work has moved the photograph into the art gallery and the museum. With the astonishing rise in popularity of those two institutions this photography has found a much wider audience.

There are many practitioners of this new photography but it‘s terms and aims are perhaps best illustrated in the photographs of Anton Gursky and Jeff Wall. Informed by art history and aesthetics digital imaging techniques are deployed to create very large format prints. The generation of photographers that has grown up around and after Wall and Gursky seem to insist that to convey truth about life the image must be entirely manufactured and all the content invented.

I could spend a whole hour just discussing these two images and another time it would be great to look at all the work by these two as well as the work of the many others like them but unfortunately we don’t have the time here. Instead I would like to start at the extreme end of these practices with one of the earlier works of digital art, one that foreshadows some later developments.

This is The Golden Calf and it was made by Jeffrey Shaw 1995. This virtual sculpture is situated on an empty plinth and viewed on a hand-held LCD display with a spatial tracking system. The object in real space - an empty plinth - becomes the location for a synthetic sculptural object in electronic space - the Golden Calf. As you go around the plinth, the virtual perspectives correlated to the real depth and distance views the viewer has of the plinth. The calf has shiny skin, and the viewer can see reflections in it of the actual gallery space around the installation. This was achieved through photographs of the area shot earlier and digitized to create an environment that is ‘reflection mapped’ in real time onto the calf.

 It is no coincidence that the image chosen by the artist is The Golden Calf. Shaw's cybernetic calf reinvents this myth for the technological age questioning our belief in the existence of a singular, objective, perceptible, permanent truth. With his digital rendering of the virtual calf Shaw is affirming a new paradigm of collaborational, synthetic, polychotonous, perception, a ‘cyberception’ based on mutuality, simultaneity and concordance. Perception itself is active, tentative and open to interpretation. If you look carefully the calf is not a calf at all, it is a cow. Also the fact that Shaw’s choice of icon is made of gold is not insignificant. Gold is not just a precious material, It also possesses exceptional conductivity, allowing the rapid transmission of electrical information with little resistance. 

This type of new imagery has now entered the main stream. Have a look at this cover of Garage by Jeff Koons, a consumer art magazine this issue of which bears the witty title “Scan to Koonsume”. You download an app and then look at the the cover and some pages inside and all the images become animated.

As with the Golden Calf the viewer of this image is an active participant in the creation of the work via a cybernetic intermediary. The eye of the author as witness to reality has been displaced or shared out. The perspective of the visual field is no longer singular.

This displacement of the observing eye is evident in the work of other photographers.

Another practitioner using the disembodied eye is German artist and photographer Michael Wolf. The photographs in A Series of Unfortunate Events received an honorable mention in this year's World Press Photo. He also uses Google Street View.

A remarkably prescient description of these developments came in what was really the first systematic appraisals of the digital imaging revolution The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post- Photographic Era by William J. Already in 1992 he saw that the development ‘a worldwide network of digital imaging systems is swiftly, silently constituting itself as the decentered subject’s reconfigured eye’.

Where some see this multiplication as a tragic loss of ownership others like Caterina Fake see it as a gain. After completing her English degree Caterina Fake was working as a fine artist painter in New York in 1991 when she got a temp job in Columbia University’s IT department. There she was shown an early version of the graphic web browser Mosaic, the innovation that enabled the explosion of the world wide web. She began blogging and learnt coding to develop games. In 1995 she joined Organic, one of the very first web development shops. Nine years later she launched the photo sharing site Flikr.

A Flickr page works as an interactive autobiography or diary, by layering an ever changing or growing stream of photos on a user’s page. These then can be commented on and linked to other images, put in collections etc. By extending the viewing eye across a network of participants this practice seems to aim to create a resonance in group activity that can restore the lost aura evacuated from lived experience initially by photographic reproduction and traditional aesthetics, and more recently by the very lack of indexicality of the computer chip itself.

Many people are critical of what appears to be a proliferation of entirely self-orientated, self-interested images, often in the form of repeated self portraits. But seen in this context the ‘selfie’ and its seemingly endless attendant stream of autobiographical and haphazard snapshots, starts to make more sense.

The haphazard so called ‘drive by’ pictures, the photo collections of random objects, of plates of food, all this serial and almost automatic cataloguing of the minutiae of every day life is not intended as a record of significant individual events authored in the form of a traditional historical narrative. This activity forms part of a persons life, these images are micro manifestations of a continuously evolving present whose sole purpose and substance is realized in the interactions they engender as they proliferate and pollinate across interactive social networks.

A casual disregard for aesthetics or ‘originality’ is another essential strategy in this production. The founder of Fotolog another photo sharing site, for example is famous for having taken a photo of every meal he has ever eaten. There are even sites devoted solely to aeroplane food. Have a look at airlinemeals.net.

Some have claimed that this is a whole new category of photography, called ‘ephemera photography’, or the photography of the everyday and the mundane. Ephemera photography is another attempt to divest the photograph of all formal qualities, reducing it to unadulterated information, a quote from the real world; pure if lurid information.At the other end of the spectrum a popular art form has emerged which is the aesthetic equivalent of ephemera photography. It is all surface and no content and it is called Glitch art.

John Glenn you may remember was responsible for the transmission in 1969 of the first digital images from space. Glitch is used to describe these kinds of bugs as they occur in software, video games, images, videos, audio, and other forms of electronic data. Begun in electronic music they have proliferated into visual entertainment all over the Internet.

Glitch art exploits digital or analog errors, such as artefacts and other ‘bugs’, by either corrupting digital code/data or by physically manipulating electronic devices for example by circuit bending. Despite Glitch theorist’s arguments that this work emulates and foregrounds ruptures and aberrations in pervasive and highly organized information networks, I do not think the work engages adequately with the pressing questions the cybernetics, the internet, digital technology, and satellite communications all pose for the image-maker.

However there are a number of photographers out there who are confronting the issues of perception and veracity in the digital age in a very valid and instructive way.

Once again you will have to forgive me if I do not cover or even mention all of those working today with these new ideas, but there are two who seem to me to be particularly engaged with the questions that I have been attempting to raise and I am therefore especially interested in the work they are producing as well as what they have to say. For the following therefore I have used as much of what they have themselves said in relation to the work they are doing.

Dan Holdsworth is a British landscape artist. At first glance his images appear to be classic landscapes in the style of traditional landscape or industrial landscape photography. Whilst there are no humans anywhere to be seen, these landscapes seem to be very humanized, and even when there are no obvious signs of industry or even human activity there is a pervasive human presence. Holdsworth’s interest lies specifically in this human involvement. Look at this image of a tree line.

In the 2000/2001 series ‘A world in itself’ Holdsworth began to make interventions himself in post-production, accentuating the eeriness of these sci fi or lunar images. Later in 2009/2010 this digital intervention develops into a wholesale modification of the image. This is the Blackout Series, a startling and uncompromising suite of images depicting mountains in Iceland.

In these large-scale heroic landscapes you can see that the sky appears to be unnaturally dark, darker than any polarizing filter might make them, and in addition to this there are these slightly disturbing dark washes or smudges on the snow itself. The image has been heavily manipulated. Holdsworth has in fact removed large amounts of information from the image. But why? He explains: “this removal of material from the everyday accesses the idea of what is virtual in the image”.

Holdsworth is not only interested in the landscape but also in how we perceive the landscape, and this he says is as much an internal process as an external process. Exploring how humans participate in the creation of what they see and to what extent perception is active and not passive has he says got a great deal to do with knowledge and with technology.

Here he talks about the sublime in relation to science of geology: “For me a contemporary sense of the sublime develops out of this frontier of knowledge, of scientific feedback into culture. I would say that the first really big impact where this was given shape was when the science of geology came into being, and informed us as a culture that mountains weren’t a few thousand years old, but billions. At that point there’s this new industry of leisure and tourism, The Grand Tour, and a sense that these mountains, which were previously seen as obstacles en route to somewhere else, became the focus of ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ style time travelling. There was this paradigm shift, a comfortable sense of the creation myth was shattered and people were suddenly overwhelmed by this sense of time, and how small humanity was within that context – I think that was the first time that the edge of science that became fed back to give a mass perceptual shift. Scientists and artists were very much one and the same at that point in terms of their practice, they were friends, colleagues, exchanging ideas and those scientific notions were fed straight back into art at that time, acknowledging the perceptual shift. Someone like Turner for example, was interested in technological development and the evocation of human fragility, the fear of new technology, and a deep sense of time, wilderness of landscape and emergence of this knowledge”.

Holdsworth’s interest in these effects of technology on perception led to his recent collaboration with the geomorphologist Dr Stuart Dunning on a new series of pictures called Transmission: New Remote Earth Views. These images represent their interpretations of digitally rendered laser scans of the earth appropriated from U.S Geological Survey data.

“We’re now becoming more used to looking at the earth in planetary terms, because of increasingly used satellite technologies. Initially it threw up this anxiety about the isolation of our planet, for example the photograph taken by Voyager from the edge of our universe looking back at the earth as a number of pixels, amongst this void of apparently nothing. As such we’re becoming more aware of our human fragility, the reliance on our planet and of our own interaction with the fundamental nature of Earth. It’s partly to do with our huge spectrum of space and sense of time as well, there’s this deep connection between our perceptions of time and the way we look, so I’m trying to develop that dialogue in the work.”

“Ways of working with aerial views have been around for a century or more, but at the moment we are in the midst of this revolution of imaging the Earth’s surface. The use of drones for imaging is becoming quite normal; it’s also a big hobbyist area. There’s definitely a kind of visual revolution whereby it’s becoming more common for people to be able to elevate their vision. It’s an interesting thing either way to have been to a landscape and then to look at it again on Google Earth or vice versa – high resolution imagery means you really feel like you can get a true spatial sense of the landscape from that virtual interaction.”

Holdsworth is concerned with perception and vision as an internal process rendering in the real world as a three dimensional objects. Here is one from his most recent series called Forms Photographs. They deal with a phenomenon known as False Topographic Perception. 

“In a way these photographs are about exposing the facets of human perception, they distance the viewer but they also expose a deeply networked aspect to the human mind in terms of what our eyes do to the things outside of us and how they manifest in our perception. I think they are quite honest in that way. It seems like we’re limited educationally in terms of understanding our own internal workings, so I think that to have a better understanding of our place in the world, it’s useful to have a sense or feel for the mechanics of perception”. Holdsworth exhibits these images in pairs, one upside down. In a way it is hard to tell what is going on, whether what you are looking at in relief or not.

He says: “Yes, I gathered the raw material and then spent a long time thinking about it and working with it. I realised that this very simple strategy of a photograph upright and upside down created quite a complex narrative around perception. The images become a virtual projection in the mind’s eye; the work itself doesn’t happen outside, it’s in how your mind is inadvertently processing it into this 3D space’”.

Holdsworth’s examination of perception and his use of digital techniques has many echoes in the work we saw previously. Staging these ideas in the way he does in his images reminds us that the photograph can be seen as an event, where the viewer is an active participator in the drama unfolding as his eye scans across the image.

The traditional polarity of photographer-author and viewer interpreter is ruptured in this activity. Whilst working with his apparatus (in this case a large format plate camera) and according to its rules Holdsworth subtly undermines the process to activate a kind of third or inter-liminal (a favourite term of Holdsworth’s) space where the viewer can actively engage with the creation of the image.

Working with photography and the photographic print but in a completely opposite way is Spiros Hadjidjanos.

For this work Spiros Hadjijanos makes a 3d print of his smart phone.

This is what he says: ”Yes, it’s my phone. I took a screenshot with the default wallpaper of iOS and then I superimposed the screenshot to an image of a smartphone that I found online. There is this process called displacement mapping; it is for creating rich texture in 3D Software. You pull out the surface of a 2D grayscale image along a vector and the light parts shift up and the darker parts stay down. The algorithm converts the 2D surface into a 3D height map. I find the transformation of a flat image to an object very fascinating. The “slide-to unlock” Apple interface patent makes perfect sense on our touch screens but when you transform it to an aluminum object, there is nothing to slide and nothing to move, it becomes absurd. Even the minute the work was created becomes part of the aluminum object, unintentionally immortalized…. The fact that this process includes myself, only as a decision maker but not as a producer of the physical object, makes it more interesting. In the final object the pulling process of the 2D image and the glitches originating from the low resolution images are visible on the aluminum surface. These imperfections are what make these objects interesting.”

Hybrid Landscape (Silicon Valley) depicts the birthplace of the digital revolution. It is an ultraviolet print on a carbon-fiber plate showing the landscape of Silicon Valley. Part of the plate has been cut out with a laser, freeing space to be subsequently occupied by microchips that contain fragments of the landscape in digital form. In this work, the landscape of Silicon Valley is combined with microchips.

For Carbon Fibre Z20:X50 3D, an image of a carbon fibre plate was magnified via digital microscope and then printed on a plate of the same material – the image of a material embedded into the material itself. The numbers in the title refer to the lens, Z20, and the degree of magnification, X50. The colors come directly from the microscope and are a precise depth map of the surface of the carbon fibre measured in microns (1000 microns = 1 milimeter) from blue to red.

We will end with a very appropriate image from Hadjijanos,

All these techniques and the accelerated nature of technological innovation are adding to the possibilities of photographic expression, but there remains a strong feeling that our understanding of perception, and of the world we live in is becoming not more but in fact much less clear.

 To quote Dan Holdsworth again: “The paradox is of course that this great wealth of new knowledge almost only goes to emphasize what we don’t know. New technology has added to this – there is a sense of being out of control because it’s just so overwhelmingly big in itself. With the spread and growth of technologies, how do we harness and really understand its impact on our ways of being and how do we learn from it?....The sublime is a constantly evolving frontier that sits at the edge of what we do and don’t understand. It’s not so much the thing ‘out there’ it’s the thing inside your mind – a cybernetic feedback. It’s like a new sense, because it’s conscious, not just this ephemeral sense of ‘wonderment’ – it’s much more physical, to do with optics and perception”.

I hope I too have unearthed some questions as to how digital technology has impacted on photographic theory and practice and on the way we see our world and our place in it. I told my son the other day that when he texts me the message goes all the way to a server in the USA and back again in the brief instant before I receive it. He was amazed by this fact. My point is that cybernetic technology though it is largely invisible and automatic, is an integral part of the way we are wired to perceive the world. It is only by becoming conscious of the operations of this technology that we can re-examine our relationship to the world and thereby to position ourselves appropriately within its new order. 

THE END

Provisional Reading List

Fred Ritchin: After Photography (2008).

Fred Ritchin: In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (2010). 

Fred Ritchin: Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (2013).

Ariella Azoulay: The Civil Contract of Photography (2008).

Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others (2003).

Susan Sontag: On Photography (1977).

Mark Reinhardt: Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique in Reinhardt, Mark, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (eds.) Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (2007).  

Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida (1980).

Sigfried Kracauer: Die Photographie  - first published in Franfurter Zeitung 28 Oct 1927

David Levi Strauss: Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, (2003)

David Levi Strauss: Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography (2014)

Walter Benjamin: Illuminations

William J. Mitchell: The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post- Photographic Era MIT Press (1992)

Vilém Flusser: Towards A Philosophy of Photography (1983).

Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulations (1983)