Digital image processes have revolutionised the landscape of photography in all its myriad forms. We live in an age where we can view billions of galaxies within a single frame, store and share thousands of detailed images from a device no larger than a thumbnail, and produce a short stop animation film of atoms dancing. These advances could never be realised with analogue photographic process. Nevertheless, by removing the materiality from the photographic process, new avenues of inquiry are opened. The most important of which is: "what impact does the dematerialisation of photography have on the photographer?" By looking at this question in more detail, we find that photographers are not only bound by their equipment, more so than ever, but that photographers are at risk of becoming dematerialised themselves.
Human vision
The way the world appears to us is determined by the ways that we perceive the world. It is the action of looking or vision, which enables us to perceive our environment visually. Without the ability to see, by losing functionality to the eyes or brain, there would be a dependence on the other senses and the appearance of the world would change. It is the access to our senses that is essential in navigating through the appearances in life. Without access to ways of perceiving, the world would simply not be perceivable to us and as a consequence we would not be able to reflect on what we observe; we could not form a human world in which to live without human vision1.
To assume then that this dependence on our senses merely reduces us to passive receivers of appearances would be mistaken. It is not the case that an abstract consciousness informs our body to act from some ethereal plane, instead we sense first and then think. Such that, we see the appearances of the world and then act & reflect. There are times of course in which new appearances are driven from our actions. In these respects, we can say that looking and acting is reciprocal and forms the unity of our being in the world2. Thus, in regards to vision, it is the access to our vision that determines how embodied we are within the visual world and subsequently how we think visually about the world. Human vision is not boundless. As anyone with glasses can attest to, we must also recognise that vision, no matter how sharp and competent the eyes are at resolving appearances, they can be constrained in what they can materially do. Our eyes can react only within the present and can see only at a distance as far as they are physically able to do so. Insomuch as to say that we are prone to all sorts of physical limitations and phantasmagoria that are not under our direct control that also constrain our vision. To avoid this material constraint we must look beyond our bodies to the creation of apparatuses that provide new ways to perceive the world.
Photographic vision
The camera is such an apparatus that provides a new way to perceive the world. Photography as a practice has no fixed modality, it has many guises and therefore ways of seeing that, much like writing, it encompasses a wide gamut of practical uses. In fact, there is not a single sense of photography as a medium, but there are several ‘photographies’ and subsequent histories of it3. Further, it is vital when understanding photographic vision that each of these uses is determined by technological and cultural power dynamics4. For example, the technology available to build cameras determines in what way it is built and how it functions. Likewise, ideology shapes the demand and functions required of it. Thus when describing photographic vision we must consequently understand its photographic history.
In the 19th Century, photography in the general sense of the term, was constituted from the technological and cultural effects of that time: chiefly the scientific rationalisation of the world and the escalation of industrialisation. These two prevalent factors propagated assumptions of what the camera saw; that in using a camera the scientist was closer to the truth in nature, and free from the constraints of biological limitations and interpretations that had beset draftsmen before. It resolved the world around us with more clarity and was thus epistemically superior to human vision purely because the camera displaced the centrality of the spectator in their vision5. Thus photographic vision was presumed to free the viewer from the accountability to see. It placed the photographer as commander of a system that has little to do with the frivolity of human imagination and vision. Instead it let nature draw itself.
As photography became more nuanced in its material mechanics and chemical processes, with reduced exposure times and a burgeoning market, equipment became more accessible to those who couldn’t afford it. As amateurs flooded the market, Kodak capitalised on this fervour by propagating a simplistic photographic ecosystem with the intention for the photographer to simply press the button and they’d “do the rest”. Thus it became a hegemonic power in the imaging world within months; even so far as to change the language used when referring to photographic. Nevertheless its rise to power came at a significant cost. By increasing convenience through standardisation, it did not democratise photography but instead placed the consumer outside the means of production, thus decreasing accessibility to the way in which photographs were developed. The photographer was barred from the mythic production of their images and left as a programmer, pushing buttons and receiving a resulting photograph in the post. It is in this regard that Kodak, as a company, mirrors photographic vision in the camera. By removing the maker from what is made, it generates a product that we have had no access to. A photographic world was processed through Kodak, not as Kodak.
The camera is programmed by us and responds to our operational instructions much like our flesh does. However, it retains its own sight that is separate from ours; we cannot see as the camera but through the camera6. We have no access to the photographic way of perceiving as we merely configure our vision to fit through its limitations. For example, lenses can see so far and the camera can only work at certain speeds. As such, when we use a camera, our being in the world is determined through the choreography of the buttons we push. As a result we become a function of the photographic being; human vision is determined through perceiving photographically. In essence, we are subsidiary and controlled by the functionality of the camera we operate at the same time as operating it. Thus photographic vision is in turn controlled by the powers that enable that functionality; much in the same way we are controlled by our biological faculties. The operation of a camera is not an action performed solely by the individual but is an action performed through multiple layers of technology, culture and automation to the degree that it is these factors that in turn operate our operation of the camera.
In the same way, the photograph we produce confirms this conflict – our being is superfluous to determine the way the photograph appears as it is not an appearance from our world, it is an appearance of this world from a view we are unable to reach. The fixed perspective the photograph presents to us is not a view we obtain in our fluid world. Our vision is continuous, riding atop the crest of the present, whereas what the camera produces is extracted from that time and space; the photograph presents not our being in the world, but the camera’s being. Thus although this photographic vision promises unhampered access to new perspectives, in doing so, it creates a world we have no stake in. To participate in this technological and culturally determined fractured practice, we have to learn to see photographically; to see by being operated to see, in order to be a part of a world which is imposed on us.
Post-photographic vision
Two major changes in photographic vision occurred in 1991: Kodak released the first Digital Camera System (DCS), and the Web was made publicly accessible for the first time. Subsequently apparatuses were ‘digitised’ in so far as to say that the apparatus, which was once bound by a transcription of physical properties into another set of physical properties, became a conversion of physical properties symbolised into code7. Like many other discourses, the digitisation of photography turned what were once three dimensional objects into one dimensional, unitary, and intangible surrogates, reducing the materiality of the photograph to an ethereal world of symbols8.
Due to the conversion of materiality into a symbolic order, the Web unlocked prospective replacements to virtually every form of media with the intention of homogenising the multiplicity of file types and compression methods that competed for dominance at the time. Yet at its inception, it lacked the functionality required to sufficiently capitalise on the already ‘tried and tested’ material communicative modes. Thus the promise of a second iteration of the Web as a more collaborative web or ‘Web 2.0’, as it was named, was realised in 2004. This movement actively sought to replace material methods, especially with the advent of social networking as a serious service for people to share digital ‘moments’, be it text or image. Given this, these Web 2.0 services eventually atomised and a plurality of virtual ecosystems enabled multiple uses of the digital codes that were being refined. As such, the consumer became dependent on these services to interpret their digital code that they themselves could not understand. Much like Kodak in the 19th Century, what had started as a venture in convenience ended in an almost complete disconnection from the means of producing photographs. Considering this, the photographer was then placed in a position where their act of choosing not only defined their human vision but at the same time their ability to be understood. It is principally because the digital system converts light into code through algorithms which means the code has to be both captured and interpreted through a dependence on technology. Thus post-photography as can be defined as being predominately determined by technology, due to the dependency the interpretation of digital images has on computer systems9. For that reason, for the photographer, considering that post-photography is determined by both technology and culture, a general shift arose from what the camera could achieve, to what could be achieved with a camera.
As digital code is arbitrary and signifies materiality rather than being transcribed by it, we realise that the apparatus now occupies the same site of human vision. For us, the dematerialisation of appearance through code cannot be experienced as code, however the way that code is perceived by the apparatus is exactly the opposite; it perceives and acts as code within its own dematerialised world. It has its own being in a dematerialised world of appearances. However, as human vision is still used through this apparatus to see, the world of appearances we view returns, as if through a darkened mirror, as an abstract and dematerialised world of aligned to own capacity for meaning. This is in so much as to say that though post-photography releases us from seeing photographically, it limits our access to the meaning or signification of the world of appearances it creates for us. As photographic vision is based on the material world of sight, and our operation of the camera actually operates our human vision, we can understand that post-photography, which we program for signification, in turn programs our own signification. Thus the true shift comes in the sense that we no longer have vision in the photographic sense of the term so that we instead see through meaning but not as meaning. To perceive or to have vision in the post-photographic sense means that we need now to learn how to mean something by, in turn, being operated to mean something.
As we have seen, photographic vision created a reliance on the apparatus through a material connection with lenses. Post-photographic vision on the other hand created a reliance on the photographer to act within the world of photography. Thus if photographic vision constrains our being through the fixed locality of the camera, then post-photographic vision constrains our being through continual fluidity of action. Post-photographic vision produces photographs that project meaning as the computer sees, not as we see. However as the apparatus, be it camera or computer or other device, does not give us access to this mode of production of meaning, we cast ourselves against a meaningless void attempting to become one with an absurdly dematerialised world10.
The way we perceive the world is, and has always been, defined by forces that are beyond our comprehension. We are reliant on these new cultural and technological forces in order to see11. Yet our sluggish human vision faces an increasing ‘derealised’ environment in which we can no longer react or adapt to the speed in which these forces develop, leaving us as impotent observers in a world we don’t understand12.
A recent study13 identified occupations that have a high probability of computerisation of employment. It predicted that the role of “Photographic Process Workers and Processing Machine Operators” had a 99% probability of being made redundant by computerised processes. Likewise the role of “Camera and Photographic Equipment Repairers” were equally susceptible to being replaced by machines with a 97% probability of computerisation. However, this is in stark contrast with “Photographers”, who had a probability of just 0.02%. The reason for such a large shift in projected redundancy is due to the fact that as technology progresses, workers will shift to creative and social skill based roles which are not susceptible to computerisation14.
This study points to a new outlook, where participatory acts create a ‘networked’ vision, re-appropriating meaning specifically through the malleability of the digital codes we see through. This ‘hypermemetic’15 or networked vision could pave the way for new ways of perceiving, using the determinism of technology and culture itself as the act of vision, thus overcoming the limitations we find in our post-photographic world.
In the end we must ask ourselves if losing the materiality of photography is vital to being a photographer today. However, in the image saturated and meaning deprived world of appearances we work in; where we are cajoled to see, act, and mean something within parameters set by unseen forces, the question changes. How can we, as photographers, transition to a dematerialised world of photography without dematerialising our vision, action, and significance; our being, in the process? How vital are we to the apparatus we use?
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This is disputed in the Phenomenology of Perception where Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that the lack of our faculties “can be coordinated only if we identify the basis of movement and vision not as a collection of sensible qualities but as a certain way of giving form or structure to our environment.” Pp.132↩
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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge. Pp 142↩
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Tagg, J. (1988). The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. University of Minnesota Press↩
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Bodily processes are of course also highly politicized and body politics is large and worthwhile topic for considering the ethics of photography; especially in regard to Feminism and ethics of the body as appearance.↩
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Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. Penguin↩
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Flusser, V. (1985). Into the Universe of Technical Images. University of Minnesota Press. Pp.36↩
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Wells, L. (2015). Photography: A critical introduction (5 ed.). Routledge↩
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Sasson, J. (2004). Photographic Materiality in the age of Digital Reproduction. In Photographies Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (pp. 186-202). Routledge↩
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Mitchell, W. (1994). The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT Press.↩
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Flusser, V. (1985). Into the Universe of Technical Images. University of Minnesota Press. Pp.47↩
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Crary, J. (1999). Suspensions of Perception. MIT Press.Pp.13↩
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Dixon, J. B. (2005). Postscripts: Ground Zero. In Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism (pp. 164-6). Routledge.↩
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Osborne, C. B. (2013). The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation? . Oxford University. Oxford University Press.↩
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Osborne, C. B. (2013). The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation? . Oxford University. Oxford University Press.Pp.45↩
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Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press.↩