ABSTRACT
“The global” offers a new paradigm for thinking about photography. British colonial administrators adopted photography for a variety of purposes. The popular enthusiasm for “photographic likenesses, ” the relative economic and technical ease of making them—especially with the later automation of cameras—meant that photography became viable to more and more people within a few decades. The new status of photography as within computer systems has led some to call this age “post-photographic”, or an age of after photography. The specific lens and data coding of Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras have assumed a new homogeneity for what was once a highly differentiated field of 35mm film photography. Since the 1970s, photography collections by vast “super-agencies” like Getty have been accumulating massive quantities of photographic images, purchasing many preexisting photography collections and related archives. Stock photography offers a vast array of stereotypical images designed to work in color or black and white on a wide range of themes.
