Fred Ritchin writes in "Into the Digital" from After Photography (2009) that the influence of digital has and will continue to undoubtedly change photography. Ritchin begins his argument by explaining the way digital is titled. Names like "mouse" and "apple" are used in the language of digital to create a connection to the real world when the objects are obviously not alive or the same as their actual meaning. The automobile is also used to illustrate a way of thinking about photography turned digital. The automobile still uses words like horses to describe the power of the engine. Horses obviously coming from the horse and buggy which was once the main mode of transportation. Like the word horses sticking to the automobile, the words of analog photography stay with digital. To think about a way that digital will change the viewer, Ritchin reminds us how the automobile includes all of its comforts and luxuries as well as the construction of massively expansive and webbed networks of concrete road systems that change the landscape world wide. I think its also important to bring up the idea that because the digital is infinitely and consistently reproducible, the original loses its meaning. Ritchin correlates this to the ipod or digital music file compared to vinyl recordings. The experience of the sequence of an album now has the option of being shuffled at random which changes the way the album as a body is received. It also changes that experience uniquely form person to person. What I believe Ritchin is getting at is that our perception of the physical world is completely mediated by the image. Once the world is photographed and distributed, we live through the representations as opposed to actual personal experience.
This is a photograph of a piece by Walead Beshty. He has taken one of his photo grams and then edited the actual code that makes up the information of the image. This is somewhat of a piece that is related to Ritchin when he is discussing the change of analog to digital and how the image is now made up of code as opposed to a continuous tonal object.
Jorge Ribalta sees the take over of digital making photography more "molecular". Essentially he is saying that the image has become "increasingly disposable" and that the print is no longer needed because of the preview. The explosion of photography is happening in a way that is now non material which connects it to the visual culture that is using it. However this shift according to Ribalta effects the photographs ability to work as an index and can no longer be viewed as reality. The idea of photography as document is dead because the photograph no longer can be viewed as having the ability to also maintain realism. "Photography without realism is irrelevant photography, literally dead since it has lost its historical mission and its ability to create opinion and induce social transformations". Ribalta believes that we must reinvent realism in the photograph so to "reterritorialize photography" and that will have the "potential of new articulations between art, social science, and politics.
Dzenko is looking at this in a much different light. He believes that the digital images still holds the ability to represent reality and that the viewer has maintained a belief in this function. He does however discuss the digital image as index and how that relies more so on a physical criteria of materiality. Dzenko believes that the fears of what digital would do to the viewers trust in photography are off because the development and introduction of digital was done so in a way to mimic analog that the viewer will continue to "be rooted in previous social uses of photography".
I feel that the use of digital does have its challenges but I do not believe that within my work it creates anything problematic for the viewer. I shoot film and then output digitally. I also feel that it is within the subject matter that I shoot and the kinds of images that I make I am in a way able to detour around issues within the digital argument. I do not shoot images that tend to have elements or clues that would make the viewer question the reality within my images. I tend to use more formal strategies like lighting and composition to draw the viewers attention. I suppose that any viewer of any image can have the internal question of weather or not the image is real but I would be surprised if that would be the first thing someone would ask me about one of my images, artist or not.
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