Ectoplasm Reading

Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age

Notes:

The effect of widespread introduction of computer-driven that allow "fake" photos to be passed of as real ones.
- viewers will discard their faith in the photograph's ability to deliver objective truth
- digital images that look exactly like photographs, photography may even be robbed of its of its cultural
  identity as a distinctive medium.
         loss of objective truth - image processing = fake images

The suspicion we are entering a time when it will no longer be possible to tell any original from its simulations.
- the whole world will consist of an undifferentiated "artificial nature"
- distinguishing truth from falsehood
          boundaries merging/ being crossed


          original vs. simulation
one technological (computerized images), one epistemological (broader change in outside influences)

          photography's association with death
Old Processes: if one wanted to appear lifelike in a photograph, one first had to act as if dead
- miniature painting was quickly made extinct; other art practices also under threat
- influence on capitalism?

- it (photography) is a force that is simultaneously positive and negative

- photography's birth pangs coincided with both the demise of a premodern episteme, and with the
  invention of a peculiarly modern conjunction of power-knowledge-subject; the appearance of one was
  only made possible through the erasure of the other.
- A life born of death, a presence inhabited by absence


           photographies effects on viewing time
"photography has already enabled us to hand down to future ages a picture of the sunshine of yesterday"

photography was a visual inscription of the passing of time and therefore also an intimation of every viewer's own inevitable passing.

even photography is therefore a chilling reminder of human mortality.

the reality offered by the photograph is not that of truth-to-appearance but rather truth-to presence, a matter of being rather than resemblance.

Digital Images: "film-based information is a dying business"
- Bill Gates company only bothering to acquire the ELECTRONIC rights

- question of image integrity
- whereas photography still claims some sort of objectivity, digital imaging is an overtly fictional process;
  abandons even the rhetoric of truth that has been an important part of photography's cultural success.
- digital images are actually closer in spirit to the creative processes of art than they are to the truth values
  of documentary.



What makes photography distinctive is that they depend on this original presence, a referent in the material world: photography doesn't cast doubt on reality's actual existence.

Photographs are privileged over digital images because they are indexical signs, images inscribed by the very objects to which they refer.

Digital images are not some much signs of reality as they are signs of signs.

Photography will cease to be a dominant element of modern life only when the desire to photograph, and the peculiar arrangement of knowledges and investments which that desire represents, is refigured as another social and cultural formation.