The entire enterprise shifts and shape-shifts into a new practice and a new form. The traditional materials are disappearing while a genie behind a curtain makes calls about market share. Customer demands have become a force and anyone can be a photographer now, no viewfinder necessary.

 

Light transforming silver now becomes light waves creating a mathematical algorithm with infinite variation.

 

The medium, of course, has withstood many schisms throughout its brief history. If 1839 were not complex enough with simultaneous discoveries vying for primacy, we also remember 1851 as the year the wet plate supplanted the daguerreotype, 1880 as the rage of the democratic KODAKers, and 1890 for the perfection of the halftone that allowed photography to be distributed in ink. Later the rise of color as an independent medium riled the status quo. If we look at the contemporary scene that matter of color has solved itself handily. In the 80’s, somewhere in Michigan, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was crafted and sold to the marketplace. Since then we have experienced a decade-long schism – a tumult so serious that the medium’s very fabric was rewoven into a new compendium. New materials, a new appearance, a new technology (which I believe is now referred to as “workflow”) has asserted itself as the new language of the medium. The taking, printing, and presence of photographs has been reborn into, well, something else. Not quite in its infancy, nor quite out of adolescence, the digital realm drapes itself over the entire contemporary medium. It’s a new and unfamiliar practice; it’s force in culture. One that remains convincing and beguiling and as dangerous as ever.

 

This period is “after photography,” when images come from a different source and, to my thinking, are more abstract and fleeting and ephemeral than ever! Ink on an elegant paper vs. silver floating in an emulsion.

 

Light – the effect of light, the referent and skeleton of experience left by this latent mark - is missing, or at least fundamentally changed.

 

These arguments are complex and imply a permanent disquiet for how we understand the medium. It’s the newest, latest, most modern implication within the medium amongst us, pictures made of pixels and a numeric code delivered from a sensor to create the picture. Change is a must though – we recall that the daguerreotype disappeared and yet was recently resurrected. The Calotype was always problematic and yet implied the modern principle of the conventional process, its tendency to fade, brown, and disintegrate does not alter its direct reference to the medium’s most inherent power.

 

Composed of thousands of tiny, fragile pixels which are fugitive (and endlessly and seamlessly malleable), digital memories can disappear without explanation; electromagnetic radiation can speed this process and force it upon us at will. So a solar storm, a scratch on a Kodak Gold CD can ruin this primary code of ones and zeros. Spontaneous corruption without explanation!

 

But we must embrace these new images for indeed they are everywhere. I understand that recently on Facebook fifteen billion images were resting there (no doubt more by this writing) and ImageShack has twenty billion images. That’s not a few pixels! That’s unsettling – permanence with these materials beats 170 years now yet the remain ephemeral and abstract.

 

Here’s a concern and perhaps the latest schism calling for our attention: the changing and unreliable status of the structures of images. If there are problems (as I believe there are), then they are the problems of believability and authority of photographs. Fundamentals such as mimicry, originality, and essential versus literal truth come to mind immediately. These are, of course, photography’s traditional problems but they are, I suggest, now so seamless and prevalent, perhaps taken for granted that they are undermining photography’s traditions with regard to reliability. The implications suggested here are issues for consumers of images, for the readers of photographs. Though objectivity is always a photographic principle without clean edges, I believe it’s worse now and a much more dangerous concept worth consideration. 

 

The historical and the contemporary problems within images appear to be merging. In order to remove an element that is not pleasing in a photograph, with the desire that the replacement be seamless, well there’s an action for that (!) and I assure you, no trace will be left of the decision to alter the scene. Renaissance and baroque period engravings were sometimes embellished with applied color via watercolors, and gouache. Even further embellishments sometimes included gilding the edges with gold leaf. These embellishments were in the end disdained and, ultimately, rejected and further deemed corrupt.

 

It’s certainly been a while since a “photograph” cast any doubts. A hundred sixty years ago, photography was deemed “something new under the sun.” The Cincinnati Times ran a headline in 1839: “Farewell ink, type and clocks.” (Perhaps they forgot to say farewell to doubt as well.) Photography and reality have a shared and intermingled status and photographs are so “good” at describing the way things look that they function as a special index.

 

We have a new philosophy to read and implement, a new way to consider, read, ponder, and evaluate the images that confront us. On a per pixel level the color space may be moved, altered, snipped, and hued with the swipe of digits and then remain to satisfy a new reality, even one that wasn’t in front of the lens.

 

Dead Civil war soldiers were moved and photographed with a rocks propped beneath their head for more patriotic aesthetics and the public accepted it wholly in 1864. In 1857 to align the medium with Victorian sensibilities an image was created from 30 negatives! So, ultimately our issues are not new – they remain. They are complex.

 

The origins for photographs are in flux, and ‘original’ might not mean ‘original’ anymore. Images made with cameras are ghost-like now –perhaps only shells of reference.

 

Someone operates a mouse or drags a corpse thirty yards. 

 

So, it goes……….with the medium enmeshed in another schism we look for light we search for deeper meanings. This philosophical net will expand our awareness of the capacities of the medium that are just beyond us – waiting for clarification.