ABSTRACT

Digital Photography: An Introduction Photography is no longer a singular experience involving the interrelationship of a subject with light and value as practiced by Paul Strand, nor is it about Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment.” The medium has evolved into a threading together of human experiences to formulate complex iconographic patterns. Today, many photographers have become image-gatherers, using various digital means to collect and make images, discarding the strict real-world, observational, photographic practices of the past. This new, explosive digital aesthetic blurs the imagistic positions among commercial work, fashion, journalism, popular culture, and snapshots in both print and on the Web. Historically, this can be compared to the Dada movement that was born of anti-war sentiments in First World War-era Europe during a time of radical social change driven by rapid technological achievements. Dadaists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy investigated the arts without regard to the walls traditionally separating drawing, graphic design, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and theater. Their new conceptual directions, as personified in Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), proclaimed that anything artists called attention to could be thought of as ART. Indirectly, the Dadaist championing of ordinary objects called into question one of art’s central premises-the Aesthetics of Beauty-by proclaiming a philosophy of the banal and mundane as the chosen High Art practice.