PHOTOGRAPHY AND DIGITAL IMAGERY

Photography and Digital Imagery

Photography and Digital Imagery

The materials and tools employed by artists help to shape the character of their art: it is difficult to imagine Rembrandt painting with tempera instead of oils, or Cartier-Bresson taking his photographs without a hand-held camera. For this reason, any innovation in materials and tools, any technological advancement, would seem to expand the resources of art, providing artists with more possibilities to choose from, more ways of creating. (Haglund, 1996)

But the relation between technological advancement and artistic resources may not be quite this simple, because technology may not be simply additive in its effects. Patrick Maynard discusses this issue in his paper "Photo-opportunity: Photography as Technology." Maynard describes how technologies can generally be understood as amplifiers of our powers; that is, of locomotion, of communication, of production, etc., but he points out that while a given technology will amplify certain of our powers, it will, typically, suppress others. "A fork-lift tractor greatly increases our already existing powers to lift and move loads ... but a fork-lift does so by losing, even suppressing, the abilities that hand workers have to sense--not only weight but load, strain, density and frictional hold between surfaces." Maynard describes photography as a technology that enhances our powers of depiction and detection, and calls on us to investigate the suppressions to which photography may be subject. (Haglund, 1996)

It will be my contention here that not only does any particular technology, like photography, have its own amplifications and suppressions in the manner discussed by Maynard, but that such a new technology introduced into the realm of art can affect the whole field of choices available to the artist, widening it in one area, only to narrow it in another. New technologies alter rather than simply add to the resources of art. (Haglund, 1996) This needs some explanation. With the introduction of fork-lifts, the use of manual lifting is not abolished; it can still be used in those cases where the disadvantages of the suppressions associated with fork-lifts outweigh their advantages. The fork-lift simply adds to the possible ways we might choose to lift things. There is also a sense in which a new technology of art simply adds. By the mid-nineteenth century, an artist interested in creating an image not only could choose from among charcoal, ink wash, water color, oil paint, etching, etc., all media available to previous generations, but he or she could also choose to make a daguerreotype or a calotype, something that would not have been possible decades earlier. (Haglund, 1996)

But the resources of art are not simply physical materials and processes. Each process has attached to it beliefs, practices, and conventions that affect our understanding and reading of the images produced, and that the artist employs to achieve his or her desired effects. The development of a new medium can change the way we see and use older media, and can thus change our readings of works produced in those older ...