Digital Imaging

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Digital Imaging

Digital imaging inevitably undermines photography’s status as an essentially truthful medium. Discuss.

Until recently, at least, it was possible to define photography as a process involving optics, light sensitive material and the chemical processing of this material to produce prints or slides. Today though, that definition is subject to change. Technological innovations…are shifting photography from its original chemical basis towards electronics… It is not overstating it to say that the advent of this new technology is changing the very nature of photography, as we have known it. (Bode and Wombell 1991)

In the last decade computer technology has been introduced to photography yet again challenging the meaning of photography. This relatively new digital technology allows the photographic image to be easily manipulated or modified. The pace of change in how images can be produced, circulated and consumed has been rapid causing a tidal wave of journalistic and critical attention. It is viewed that the manipulation of the photographic image may lead to a profound undermining of photography’s status as a truthful form of displaying images. The photograph does no longer necessarily show the truth or the true image. Once digitised a photograph can be altered in many ways, the texture, tone, form and colour can be changed pixel by pixel, the focus can be sharpened, things can be taken out or replicated or the original image can be combined with another. It is also far more difficult to detect changes made with computerised alterations where as older methods of alterations are far easier to detect. With the increasing accessibility and use of digital imaging technology, anyone possessing suitably, reasonably well priced equipment, i.e. – a pc, relevant software and a scanner can make these alterations and radically alter the content and appearance of a photograph as well as create seamless interweaving of separate images.

In 1991 an exhibition called photo video: Photography in the age of the computer was held at The Photographers Gallery, London. In the exhibition and the book of the same title the authors sketched out the implications of encoding photographs as ‘units of electronic information’:

1) A shift in the location of photographic production; from the chemical darkroom to

the ‘electronic darkroom’ of the computer

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...d photography has been extremely advantageous even if it does take the truth out of it. These advantages have been felt mainly by artists and advertising designers. There are fewer problems with morals and ethics in these fields as art is not about showing truthful images and neither art nor advertising ever claimed to be unmanipulated. Artists now have a wider range of tools and effects they can use to create innovative and interesting images. Graphic designers have also benefited as they can now take a single photograph of something and digitally place it into a different photographic scene. It is also possible for designers to change things like the size, colour and shape of the subject in the photograph they are working with.

Digital technology is affecting photography and the photographic image in many different ways. There have been both advantages and disadvantages to be seen. It is apparent that the photograph is being thought of as less reliable but at the same time more interesting and artistic. After weighing everything up it is my view that digital technology has contributed in making photography a more powerful medium and that we stand to gain a great deal from it.

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