This week's readings dealt with the highly contested subject of the digital image in photography. Each of the readings is rather different. Ritchin's view is the most extreme, eluding to cyborgs and a world where the supposed realism of the photograph is dissolved and replaced by something dangerous. Ribalta's is the most practical, arguing that the underlying reasons for the anxieties digital media has caused is intrinsically bound up with complex historical problems of photography's ontological make up. He also stresses the importance of the document, realism and critical institutions of photography. Finally, Dzenko's text is more concerned with how the image is perceived by the spectator and see this as the most important issue.
Kerry Sharbakka - 'The Struggle to Right Oneself.'
Lets begin with the most relaxed text, Dzenko's.. We'll save the Ritchin's, shall we say, theatrical text, for last. Dzenko's text provides an antidote to Ritchin's writing. Keep calm, digital imaging will always remain rooted in traditional photography practices, he suggests. Dzenko writes "viewers continue to read digital photographs as representative of reality, a function images maintain despite the transition from analog to digital" (19). The main example he uses to discuss this point is the work of (previous Columbia student, who started this work in the Body, Space, Image class and, in fact, badly injured himself attempting to perform this live at the college..) is Kerry Skarbakka. Dzenko sees this work as proof that highly digitally manipulated images are still perceived as truth. As he notes, the work was reproduced on the 'Epic Fail' blog, thus proving its believability to the wider public. As Dzenko claims, theoretical arguments about the loss of the real in digital "do not account for the social function of digital photographic images" (21), which is arguably the most important function of photography's wide range of capabilities.
Dzenko also argues that digital images do not completely severe the indexical tie so many critics seem obsessed with. He informs us that Skarbakka was in fact present in front of the camera and therefore his body was imprinted on film before being digitally manipulated. He also tells us his works "resembles an analog photograph" (22). Is this supposed to be a comfort to us? What is more important in fact is how the image is perceived, or more so, believed. Whether it is digital or film is not really the matter at hand, but rather, how the image will be received by the spectator. That's where the power of the image lies (no pun..) The power of photography to successfully lie to the viewer has been active long before the digital era, take for example the following photograph composite of Abraham Lincoln’s head and the Southern politician John Calhoun’s body. Putting the date of this image into context, note that the first permanent photographic image was created in 1826 and the Eastman Dry Plate Company (later to become Eastman Kodak) was created in 1881 (see footnote). As Damien Sutton writes, "photography has always been dubitative...and this characteristic is not the province of the digital image alone" (21).
Dzenko also argues that digital images do not completely severe the indexical tie so many critics seem obsessed with. He informs us that Skarbakka was in fact present in front of the camera and therefore his body was imprinted on film before being digitally manipulated. He also tells us his works "resembles an analog photograph" (22). Is this supposed to be a comfort to us? What is more important in fact is how the image is perceived, or more so, believed. Whether it is digital or film is not really the matter at hand, but rather, how the image will be received by the spectator. That's where the power of the image lies (no pun..) The power of photography to successfully lie to the viewer has been active long before the digital era, take for example the following photograph composite of Abraham Lincoln’s head and the Southern politician John Calhoun’s body. Putting the date of this image into context, note that the first permanent photographic image was created in 1826 and the Eastman Dry Plate Company (later to become Eastman Kodak) was created in 1881 (see footnote). As Damien Sutton writes, "photography has always been dubitative...and this characteristic is not the province of the digital image alone" (21).
Ribalta seems to be thinking along similar lines. "Why do I think that there's not much gain in that post-photographic liberation? Why do I think that the post-photographic era is actually posing the same dilemmas that the photographic era used to pose?" (178). Ribalta points out the problems of calling Digital the "death" of photography. What does that really mean? If photography is dead, why is it more popular and accessible than ever? What is really at stake by thinking digitally, is the death of preconceived notions about photography's inherent realism. Ribalta claims that the real problem digital photography causes is a crisis of the real that has been bubbling underneath the surface of photography's history for years. He claims that this crisis "finds in Photoshop its last consequences" (180). Ribalta warns us that without realism, photography is irrelevant. What does this mean? If we cannot believe a photograph, it is powerless. This connects to the document in photography and its importance in historical discourse. Ribalta calls for a reinvention of the real in the contemporary art world. He discusses what Crimp called 'The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism' and how various artists such as Sekula, Rosler and Londier managed to acheive precisely this in their time period. Ribalta claims "the challenge today is...producing practices in which realism is reinvented" (181).
Jo Spence, 'How do I Begin to Take Responsibility for my Body?'
How can this be achieved? Ribalta calls for two things
- Molecular Realism - The overcoming of the opposition between documentary and fiction and reinventing documnetary methods based on the negotioation of the relationship between author and spectator. I cannot help but think of Azoulay's Civil Contract in this context.
- Alternatives to the limitations of institutional criqtique confined to the museum. Ribalta says that we need to transcend art's "cultural confinment" (182). He hopes for artistic spaces that can promote production and circulation of images, alternative to the hegemonic conditions of the artistic public sphere. By this I assume he means large scale galleries.
I think what Ribalta is touching upon here is the need to break free of crippling Modernist systems that control the display and reception of art in high end public art spaces. It is as if Ribalta is trying to set up his own kind of Civil Contract, where the artist must strive to overcome the current difficulties photography's validity as a medium is faced with. He hopes young artists will continue to aggressively challenge the high level institutions in order to "pose the question concerning the role of images in a possible emerging post-liberal public sphere" (184). For example, Ribalta discusses the work of Jo Spence, who was an extremely important advocate of self-learning, self-education and displaying the validity of showing work in alternative spaces to museums, through her employment of therapeutic art.
At the other end of the spectrum we find Ritchin. I've read this book before and I was equally as pertubed by Ritchin's sensationalism and ambigious warnings about how digital photography is part of a larger force destroy all we know and love. What irritates me most is that Ritchin has some brilliant points and really is a great writer, but he is so wrapped up in his enjoyment of warning the world of the dangers of this new era of photography that he can't come down to earth. Ritchin also makes many grandiose claims about the digital photograph which are just plain wrong and I find these statements greatly weaken his argument. It seems to me that what Ritchin fears runs much deeper than the photograph's capacity to be digitally manipulated. I see Ritchin's anxieties as rooted in the expansion and overlap of the globalized world and the Internet dominated era of the hyper real, of which photography is a factor, but not a very large one in comparison to the process of Globalization as a whole. When I read Ritchin's books, I can't help but think of the film Blade Runner, particularly when he discusses the loss of the real in family albums, I think of the scene where Rachel realises her memories are false and implanted in her head by conrtolling governing forces. As prevelent as this film is in its message about the the world we live in, I can't help but feel Ritchin takes his arguments to the brink of paranoia sometimes and I think that what he describes brings that movie to my mind illustrates that (not that this is neccessarily a bad thing.. I'm just as paranoid as Ritchin about this kind of stuff, but I also have faith that the human race is more intellegent than that..A select few, that is). I'm going to keep this short by summing up Ritchin's worst a most prevelent statements.
At the other end of the spectrum we find Ritchin. I've read this book before and I was equally as pertubed by Ritchin's sensationalism and ambigious warnings about how digital photography is part of a larger force destroy all we know and love. What irritates me most is that Ritchin has some brilliant points and really is a great writer, but he is so wrapped up in his enjoyment of warning the world of the dangers of this new era of photography that he can't come down to earth. Ritchin also makes many grandiose claims about the digital photograph which are just plain wrong and I find these statements greatly weaken his argument. It seems to me that what Ritchin fears runs much deeper than the photograph's capacity to be digitally manipulated. I see Ritchin's anxieties as rooted in the expansion and overlap of the globalized world and the Internet dominated era of the hyper real, of which photography is a factor, but not a very large one in comparison to the process of Globalization as a whole. When I read Ritchin's books, I can't help but think of the film Blade Runner, particularly when he discusses the loss of the real in family albums, I think of the scene where Rachel realises her memories are false and implanted in her head by conrtolling governing forces. As prevelent as this film is in its message about the the world we live in, I can't help but feel Ritchin takes his arguments to the brink of paranoia sometimes and I think that what he describes brings that movie to my mind illustrates that (not that this is neccessarily a bad thing.. I'm just as paranoid as Ritchin about this kind of stuff, but I also have faith that the human race is more intellegent than that..A select few, that is). I'm going to keep this short by summing up Ritchin's worst a most prevelent statements.
- Ritchin claims a digital photograph is indistinguishable so that the "original" loses its meaning. Wrong. As photopraphs get passed around the internet, printed out, resaved, re-edited, etc, they lose their original format and centex just as much as a mechanically reproduced image in a book does.
- Ritchin claims the photographic act once required "the presence of a seer and the seen" and the "distillation and creation of aura". This is where I get rather annoyed. What does that even mean? The distillation and creation of aura? People have been manipulating images since photograpy's creation. Ritchin is pushing aside a huge portion of photographic history here.
- In addition, Ritchin's metaphor of the horseless carriage doesn't really work for me. He discusses the rise of the automobile and how this has affected the planet in many detrimental ways, wheras the horse was much more effective and less envornmentally damaging. That's all very true, Fred, but we're not taking about cars here, we're talking about the digital image. Ritchin ignores that with widespead use of digital cameras, the use of film and the chemicals has been significantly reduced. The production of film and developing chemicals is an extremely damaging process (as an animal rights activist, I know that it goes as far as farm animals being fed certain types of food in order to produce certain quality gelatin for the film). Obviously film is still being widely used, as are such chemicals, but with the "everyday" person now using a digital camera instead of a film and a chemical process, that has to make a difference. Therefore, his comparison of the digital image to the modern automobile doesn't make any sense to me.
- Ritchin's "God built the world in seven days.." analogies really make me want to throw his book out the window. Grandiose statements like that make me want to pull my hair out and personally I find that this type of writing does nothing but to weaken the argument at hand. Statments like this suggest to me that Ritchin's theories are rooted in outdated Modernist beliefs of the photograph's legitimacty as a truthful document.
- Ritchin talks a great deal about how YouTube and the Macintosh has led us astray from what is real and has placed us in a struggle to discover what the truth is. I feel like Ritchin is a bit behind the times here. Ritchin sees the digital as a "revolution" (20). As Kevin Robins claims, “the question of technology… is not at all a technological question” (1991: 55). In my opinion, the distress Ritchin associates with digital photography has very little to do with the technical workings of the camera, but more with the technicalities of thinking. What Ritchin ignores is that the seemingly natural aura of analog photography is deeply rooted within Positivism, Euclidean geometry and Cartesian thinking. I would go into this, but we would be here all day. Ritchin claims this is the end of photography as a we know it. The word "end" is a very powerful word and I think he uses it poorly. Nothing is ending, only progressing.
Personally, I feel the rise of the digital image is only a worrying prospect if your beliefs about photography are bound up with false notions of truth and evidence in connection to the camera. I still shoot film and for the most part what I shoot is "real." Digital technology has helped photographic practice to become more convenient for all its participants. I think if your main concern is whether an image is "real" or not, unless in specific contexts, you're missing the point.
I'll leave you with some pictures to consider, from Photoshop Disasters.com.. People, forget the loss of the indexical, the death of photographic realism.. Allow me to show you the TRUE horror of digital imaging.. A horror so sick, so cruel, you may never sleep again.. This is something out of our hands. You have been warned:
I'll leave you with some pictures to consider, from Photoshop Disasters.com.. People, forget the loss of the indexical, the death of photographic realism.. Allow me to show you the TRUE horror of digital imaging.. A horror so sick, so cruel, you may never sleep again.. This is something out of our hands. You have been warned:
Something..off..
Put your arm between your knees.. No not your huge arm, your tiny arm!
Never did want that garage anyway..
Anatomy!? Pah!
I knew we shouldn't have settled down beside that nuclear waste disposal unit..
Mixing line work and photography is a difficult task graphically. It requires excellent judgement and carefully feathered masking to.. SCREW IT, JUST USE A CLIPPING PATH, ITS ONLY THE COVER!
Lovely darlings, lovely, Emma can you awkwardly move your leg behind his leg so it looks as though it's been amputated? You can't? Don't worry darling we'll fix it later.
You're right. LSD on a Sunday night before my first big magazine job really was a poor choice.
Arguably this is a Photoshop Triumph (if you are Liza Minelli.) For everyone else it's a bit of a stretch.
Its called Vitamin D.. It isn't expensive.
AHHH!! GET HER AWAY FROM ME!
To be fair, this book is about hideous decapitated women with wigs put on top of the stumps, so maybe it isn't that much of a disaster.
Wait for it. You'll see it. And life will never be the same again.
Sources:
Abe Lincoln photograph and information:
http://listverse.com/2007/10/19/top-15-manipulated-photographs/
Thanks to these guys for the hilarious PS disasters:
http://photoshopfail.net/
http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/
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