The Digital Age

The digital age, according to Fred Ritchin, has killed photography's aura, it's physicality. Photography has expanded.  Comparing the automobile to the digital age in this opening chapter, we can assume Ritchin believes that digital photography has given us more control, more power, more autonomy, more information, and a sense of entitlement.

Digital photography has also "banished the actual experience and flattened it into a small rectangle, preferring its commodification as a picture show. It is not because it makes it more immediately 'real' that we prefer the image, but because it makes it more unreal, an unreality in which we hope to find a transcendent immortality, a higher, less finite, reality."

According to Ritchin, the digital age has created "continuous partial attention," everyone is producing and consuming images all the time. Our world has become photographic: we see and experience the world through a screen. We literally interact with each other through a screen, i.e. Facebook and text messages, continuously being in actual reality and at the same time being in the non-reality of the screen and images. We also are more concerned with experiencing life through a screen, for example, we go to art museums and instead of experiencing the art object, we photograph it. At concerts, no one is experiencing the live music being performed in front of them, instead cell phones and cameras are held up to their faces in order to immortalize and "remember" the event. No one is watching the event, or looking at the object, instead they are looking at a tiny cell phone screen and making sure they are holding the camera steady.

We are constantly ready for our next photo opportunity, the potential image. Nothing just is, everything is now thought of in terms of photographs, everything is staged, nothing is real. At social events, people are more interested in documenting their presence and staging their photographs than actual social interactions, so that their recorded  and staged social interactions can be seen on social media. How constructed and fake and non-real.

Privacy is diminished, with the digital age images last an eternity, there is no decay or sense of time or space, everything is flattened and on the surface. Digital photography can be thought of as surfacism, as Krista Thompson would say.

Finally, Ritchin believes images are replacing reality.

Are they? I think the digital age of photography has put an emphasis on the surface of reality, not the actual visceral experience, but on what can be recorded and immortalized for the world to see. Digital is about appearances, perfection, and consumerism as we can see from the women and men on magazine covers who are an idealized and perfected version of reality. Then there is Facebook, where users can construct their virtual identity, and show not who they are in reality, but who they want to be perceived as, though this idea is not different from pre-digital, it is just expanded and extreme and surfacist.


When I first think of this non-reality, the potential image, constant pose, and diminished privacy, I think of Evan Baden's work Technically Intimate.

 This image in particular is an exemplary example because the sign in the window says "Life is not about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself" with the focus on "creating yourself"and the images on the wall are gridded in the style of the Facebook photo album.

Tangent:

This sexuality is performed, created, published, constructed. The images the masses have seen from the porn industry have influenced and constructed what sexuality is, what it looks like, what it can be. These images are representative of how images and media are consumed and produced and influencing each other. Porn, a now digital visual media, expanded along with digital photography and created a billion dollar industry. I think the digital age is the golden age for porn, in the sense that it has never been more prosperous. How interesting.

Not that any of this is a new idea, it has just proliferated through the digital era.



 Jorge Ribalta's "Molecular Documents" starts out comparing digital photography to the onset of globalism and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. With the death of the physical and chemical analog photography, image makers must reconsider their relationship to their materials. Gone are the days of printing c-prints, there is only one paper left. Processes are dying out, and Ribalta correctly predicts that "new capitalist economies" will provide traditional photography supplies. Polaroid is being revived and Fujiroid came out in response to the end of Polaroid.

Ribalta's central argument is against the notion that photography is dead: "Paradoxically, photography's death is simultaneously its diffuse explosion into culture, its most definitive triumph."Amateurs no longer have to worry about chemicals, processes, editing, printing, viewing. The cost is down, the limits are nonexistent, and everything is autonomous with digital photography, everyone can take pictures now, without having to know anything technical about the medium. Digital photography democratized the medium.

Death of photography, meaning the chemical process, and the birth of the photographic, meaning the new digital age. With the ease of the creating things that never existed, digital photography loses its indexicality. And with photography's history being seeped in a tradition of documenting the real problems of the real world, if photo loses its historical mission of document (realism) as means of social transformation (an Ariella Azoulay idea), it is dead. Literally dead because photography without realism is irrelevant in our culture.

So, how do we maintain social relevance in the age of digital photography? We create a new style of documentary, somewhere between indexical and fake. Staged or, as Fried would say, near documentary. According to Ribalta and Jacques Ranciere, "fiction is the condition for the real to be thought." And in the case of Kahn and Selesnick, Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, Loretta Lux, Matt Siber, Lori Nix, Ben Gest, and Vincent Debanne, this is true.

Ribalta uses Jo Spence as a "strong demonstration that the self-experimentation, self-education, and self learning involved in true artistic play cannot be frozen into art commodities but must constantly resist the reified condition of the art object in the bourgeois public sphere." Or, more simply, Jo Spence questioned what are is and where it should be displayed, and that we should also critique the art institutions. Alternative spaces, like the ones at MDW fair last weekend and the apartment galleries, web galleries, blogs, streets, and all other alt spaces have been an action of the contemporary, digital era. Until now, museums and galleries were the only ways art could be seen and bought. Now there are global art fairs, biennials, and all the spaces I just named. Institutional critiques must continue so we can "transc[ed} art's 'cultural confinement'."We must continue to create our own ways of showing, buying, and creating art.

Ribalta believes we need to reinvent realism, to be in between documentary and fiction, since our world is now in between the real and tangible and the abstract and intangible.

Alt spaces fair for Chicago spaces

Loretta Lux

Ben Gest, imitating painting through multiple images and digital compositing

Gregory Crewdson, creating stories through digital manipulation and compositing

Lori Nix creates her own post apocalyptic worlds through dioramas and digital means

Kelli Connell, Double Life

Jeff Wall, near documentary

Kahn and Selesnick create fictional stories through digital manipulation

Kerry Skarbakka

Kerry Skarbakka, the image that was posted on FailBlog.com and actually believed

Vincent Debanne

Vincent Debanne compsited Metro Map gazers and other environments to create this series

Matt Siber

Matt Siber

Corey Dzenko's "Analog to Digital" claims that digital accelerated and enlarged photographic processes. Though theoretically, digital should lose it's indexicality, viewers still believe digital images and take them at face value.


Because of the photography's physical and chemical connection to reality, it has been used as a visual recorder and historically indexical. From the physical to the digital, the object is abstracted and turned into data. This lack of physical connection to the real world presents a theoretical challenge to the indexicality of photography, especially in since Photoshop makes it easy to create realities and objects and people that do not exist. We, as image consumers, should know all this and mistrust the indexicality and realism of photography, right?


Wrong. Viewers still believe the images they see, whether they are online or in a newspaper. Digital photography has not changed the indexical nature of photography. This is the social function of digital photography, that viewers believe images, always.



Digital has certainly made my life easier as a photographer, but the past year I've missed the physical connection to making art, using my hands. There is a visceral feeling about making things with your hands and the physicality of it that digital can never mimic. Digital is an abstraction, and it feels that way, it feels non-real. I think a lot of photographers are feeling this way and that's why we see people like Elizabeth Ernst painting over her photographs of her sculptures, or Matt Siber starting to build sculptures, or the proliferation of photograms and alternative processes. It's reactionary against digital photography. Also, art schools are beginning to desegregate photography from other arts, becoming more interdisciplinary,  which I think is reactionary against digital photography in the sense that art curriculum gets back to hand made things with a presence and an aura, but at the same time, without digital, photo might have been segregated indefinitely from other forms of art.