ABSTRACT
Since its advent in the 1820s as a technology of capturing light, photography has been associated with preserving the ephemeral. From Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of motion that was too fast for the naked eye to see, to Eugène Atget’s photos of a “lost Paris” giving way to industrialization, early experiments with photography established it as an evidentiary art of exposing and documenting what would otherwise be missed or lost. If photography was once a deliberate practice of preserving the intangible materially, then it has become a more perfunctory practice of preserving the material intangibly. In this chapter the authors explore how the technical affordances of digital cameras have contributed to this shift in the cultural techniques of photography. In particular, they examine the relationship between digital photography and attempts to preserve the intangible by considering the case of “Intangible Cultural Heritage.” It is one thing to mark a building or geophysical location as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for instance, but it is something different to preserve the cultural heritage of a long, drawn-out French meal, or a sunrise bathing ritual in India. Can digital photography help to preserve these more fleeting and intangible forms of cultural heritage? The authors argue that the material technicity of digital photography has made the practice itself a form of intangible cultural heritage—changing the communicable horizons of meaning for visual rhetoric.
