ABSTRACT

Digital photography is not new any more. Today’s artists are heirs of the digital revolution. They no longer need to agonize over the identity of digital photography or questions of digital truth.1 They use digital technology both to make photographs that operate in traditional ways and to generate forms that could not have been anticipated twenty years ago. The first generation of digital imaging was dominated by illusions and fantasies.2 Contemporary practice includes a much wider range of strategies, many of which are grounded in aspects of vernacular image-making. This chapter does not propose to describe the full spectrum of current digital activities but rather to explore a particular axis. It explores, on the one hand, photographic works that create immersive visual spectacles and, on the other, works that foreground their materiality, engaging more with the everyday uses of digital images. First we will explore works by Andreas Gursky and Gregory Crewdson

involving high budgets, elaborate technology and, in some cases, full cinematic crews. While their subject matter is very different, these artists both use digital technology to push their images into the realm of hyper-photography, an impossibly perfect mode of heightened representation.3 This is the closest art photography has ever come to matching the visual seduction of commercial entertainment culture. In counterpoint to these eye-popping digital spectacles, we look at more modest works by Eva Stenram, Jon Rafman, Kenji Hirasawa and Richard Kolker. These photographers use a range of technologies – internet image appropriation, thermographic imaging and three-dimensional animation software – to reflect on identity, perception and experience in a digital age. Their works have spectacular aspects but take specific material forms that open up a discussion about the nature of contemporary spectatorship. Throughout the twentieth century, art photographers were expected to

maintain a critical distance from mass culture. Some of the photography examined in this chapter appears to affirm or even celebrate the production values formerly associated with mainstream cinema, computer games or highend advertising. How should we read such works? Are they meant to offer implicit critiques of the world they depict? Or are they offering something different from the critical stance that has long been the measure of seriousness in contemporary art? We enter this debate by revisiting the art-world discussion

around the society of the spectacle and examining some recent theories about the role of the artist, the artwork and the viewer. We will look at some of the ways in which both art photography and critical writing are tracing a shift in emphasis from the critique of the spectacle to the experience of the spectator. While this dynamic is present in contemporary art more broadly (and will be discussed further in the final chapter), here we will look at particular ways it is mediated in contemporary digital works. When digital photography was first introduced, there was a kind of hysteria

on the part of some writers and audiences, a panic that the new technology would undermine the truth-value of the photographic image.4 Some argued that images made up of infinitely manipulable code would no longer carry reliable traces of the visible world. Of course this anxiety rested on a misunderstanding of traditional photographs. As we saw in Chapter 3’s discussion of documentary, truth has always been subject to a photographer’s agenda and technique. Staging, editing and manual retouching were all prevalent within an analogue paradigm, bringing us falsified news images, the erasure of ousted Soviet political figures and the idealization of Hollywood gods and goddesses.5

Digital technology not only makes these kinds of alterations easier but also provides us with new tools for identifying them.6 Now that most of us carry a digital camera phone and many of us have some experience with the basic tools of digital image manipulation, we are more sophisticated consumers of visual images generally. Our culture is insatiably hungry for both photographed realities and photographic illusions. Digital photography feeds both these needs impartially and cannot be said to be innately more or less truthful than film photography. Some optimistic writers describe the introduction of digital technology as the

dawn of an era of infinite creative possibilities for photography.7 It is now possible to make virtual images, pictures that appear to be photographically realistic without bearing any actual trace of the scene they appear to show. (For an example of this kind of simulation, see Richard Kolker’s work discussed at the end of the chapter.) Any image is possible. Writers in the techno-utopian camp also write of the present as an era of unprecedented access. They argue that digital photography is part of a network of technologies, including mobile communications devices and social media, with the potential to enhance freedom of information, equality and human rights. Certainly it is true that digital camera phones and the Internet have allowed a boom in “citizen’s journalism,” and the global proliferation of images that would once have been much more difficult to make or share. Digital images have played their role in the revolutions that are currently unfolding across the globe, though their part has sometimes been gruesome and misleading as well as informative and empowering.8

Time will reveal whether the evolving digital technologies have more to offer to the individuals who use them or the commercial interests that drive them. It is becoming clear, however, that despite some predictions, the proliferation of vernacular digital imaging has not decreased the public’s growing appetite for art photography. On the contrary, its manifestations are multiplying.