Digital photography developed some 30 years ago as a requirement of space exploration. Essentially, technicians faced the problem of how to send images across vast distances: there is no point dispatching a probe to photograph Saturn’s rings if it subsequently drifts off into deep space with the film remaining on board. A system had to be found for recovering the images by transposing them into information capable of transmission via radio waves. This problem was solved by translating visual information into a binary computer code (ones and zeros): hence the term ‘digital imaging’. In this process, the image we see is made up from a myriad of picture elements, or ‘pixels’, each of which contains particular information. A good way to envisage this technology is to imagine a grid superimposed over a conventional photograph. Each component of the grid, or pixel, holds information on luminosity and/or colour. In this way, an image can be generated either by translating a conventional photograph into digital information via a scanning device, or directly with a digital camera. In some respects, digital photographs are similar to television images: TV screens are also made up of lots of individual picture elements, which are activated through broadcast transmission. There is no permanent image on a television screen: the picture changes in response to impulses switching individual pixels on and off. To fix these images, they have to be recorded on film or magnetic tape.

So far, there is nothing particularly contentious in this account. However, in one fundamental aspect digital images differ radically from all previous photographic forms. Conventional photographs register intensities of light through the physical changes in chemicals (typically silver), but digital images result when light is electronically translated into a code. The consequence of this is that each individual pixel can subsequently be transformed by altering the code. Initially, doing this involved computer programmers entering complex algorithms into a computer, but now programs are readily available that allow changes in the image to be made through a series of simple commands. At the touch of a button (or a keystroke), a colour image will shift to sepia tone. More fundamentally, to give just a couple of examples, an edit facility allows images to be compiled, almost seamlessly, from multiple sources – a landscape from here, a person from there, another from somewhere else. A cloning tool (which enables users to copy a section of an image and repeat it) means that unwanted features can be removed and replaced, leaving little evidence of the former presence. These changes leave virtually no trace in the final image.

One commentator has, rather graphically, suggested that this technology allows editors ‘to reach into the guts of the image and manipulate it’. As we have seen, photographs have always been ‘manipulable’: the choices made by the photographer play a large part in determining what appears and how it appears, treatment with a brush or montaging elements allows existing images to be changed, but the new technologies make all this much easier. Stalinist censors had to go to a great deal of trouble to remove the likes of Leon Trotsky from photographs; this kind of intervention is now much more straightforward.

The digitalization of photography has changed not only the means by which photographs are made, but also the way that they can be stored and circulated. Digital photographs are eminently suited to storage on computer memory devices, and it is now a relatively simple task to produce complex narratives in which pictures appear in sequence, often in dissolves, and to provide accompanying sound tracks or to overlay type. These edits can be stored and viewed on computers or displayed via data projectors; alternatively, they can be posted in cyberspace. Techniques like this mean that a large number of people now have access to relatively professional forms of display. The New York Times recently observed that US soldiers had edited photographs and music to create memorial presentations for comrades killed in Iraq. (Interestingly, officers insisted on ensuring they featured nothing contentious.) The home computer is increasingly replacing the album as the preferred storage site for family photographs; these pictures can be simply stored this way or edited into more complex family memories. The web means that digital images can be publicly circulated without significant recourse. The internet is now awash with sites containing photographic presentations made by individuals or small groups. This relative ease of distribution makes official control of images very difficult.

Photography and the internet is opening up new possibilities for the use of images. Things may change in this respect, but at the moment the internet allows access to all manner of images and makes it relatively easy for groups or individuals to circulate photographs in innovative and critical ways, which would previously have been unavailable or difficult to view. While it is clogged with amateur porn sites, neo-Nazi propaganda, and billions of sales pitches, the web is also an arena for critical projects, artists’ interventions, and ‘unofficial’ witness pictures. For those who are interested, photographs can be accessed form all parts of the world that that have not been filtered for conformity with the approved perspectives of governments or business concerns. For every tourist brochure there is now an activist site decrying the impact of economic development on the local environment and indigenous people. While the established news media appear increasingly locked into permitted ‘safe zones’ around the world, alternative sources of information are all readily available to those who have a computer and a phone line. At a time when the official media seems increasingly part of the consensus on the supposed benefits of privatization and free capital flows (but not free movement of people), the internet has come to play a vital role raising alternative perspectives. Indeed, on some crucial issues the internet is almost the only way, for most people, to find out what is going on in the world: ordinary witnesses post pictures of the insurgency in Iraq or the situation of the poor inhabitants left to cope for themselves after the hurricane devastated New Orleans; alternative media outfits circulate their findings; and campaign groups elicit support and mobilise supporters through the web. This is not to say that national states do not have their ways of policing what appears on the internet – they do, but it has made it much more difficult to maintain the virtual monopoly of information they have previously enjoyed, and opponents of the official vision are becoming increasingly savvy in using this alternative network of distribution. In this sense, digital photography probably provides the best opportunity for the circulation of serious photographic work since the demise of the picture magazines.

 

References: Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography: from the
Camera Obscura to the Beginning of the Modern Era, London:
Thames & Hudson, 1969 Lucia Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography, London: Penguin,
1939 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (5th edition) New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982
Michel Frizot ed., A New History of Photography, Cologne: Könemann,
1994 Jean-Clause Lamagny & André Rouillé eds, A History of Photography,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 Mary Warner Marion, Photography: A Cultural History, London:
Laurnce King, 2002
Gisèle Freund, Photography and Society, London: Gordon Fraser, 1980. (This book was based on, what is said to be, the first PhD on photography, which Freund presented at the Sorbonne in 1936)
See also:
Val Williams, The Other Observers, Women Photographers, 1900 to the
Present, London: Virago, 1991 Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, New York:
Abbeville Press, 1994
Vicki Goldberg ed., Photography in Print, Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico, 1981 Liz Heron & Val Williams eds, Illuminations: Women Writing on
Photography from the 1850s to the Present, Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1996 Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper eds, Dialogue with Photography, New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979 Nathan Lyons ed., Photographers on Photography: A Critical
Anthology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966 David Mellor ed., Germany: The New Photography 1927–33, London:
Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979 Beaumont Newhall ed., Photography: Essays & Images, London:
Secker & Warburg, 1980 Reninah R. Petruck ed., The Camera Viewed: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography (2 Vols.), New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979 Christopher Phillips ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European
Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989