Latent digital

ABSTRACT

What insightful connections can be drawn between the history of photography and today’s media habitat? Should they rely exclusively on discourse-modalities like ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’? And must these modalities, with their corresponding technologies, always be mutually exclusive? The zero-sum distinctions through which photography has traditionally been narrativized prevent us from properly theorizing other forms of media and art that have emerged since the advent of photography or from it. Instead, a properly defined ‘post-post-photographic’ enquiry should seek other networks for its operational cultures and contexts of production. This paper develops alternative definitions of photography as a prototypical form of media art. Such definitions no longer ascribe higher value to the creation of individual images but instead critically explore and transform the broader theoretical and technological contexts in which images are currently being created, whether these are electronic, digital, interactive or networked.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital photography
• post-photography
• silver halide
• zone system
• algorithmic art
• programmatic image

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Yanai Toister is an artist and scholar. Toister’s artworks have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions (including: Sandroni.Rey, Los Angeles; Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv; Kunstahalle Luzern, Switzerland; Maison Europèenne de la Photographie, Paris; the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany; Israel Museum; Tel Aviv Museum of Art). Toister’s writing has been published in various catalogues and academic journals (including: Philosophy of Photography, CITAR, Mafte’akh Lexical Review, Ubiquity and Photographies). Toister’s forthcoming book, Photography from the Turing Shroud to the Turing Machine, will be published in 2020 by Intellect/U.Chicago Press. Toister is currently director of the Unit for History and Philosophy, Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Israel.

Notes

1 Curiously we might now read Bazin’s oeuvre as an attempt to reboot this distinction (Bazin 1960).

2 Henri Van Lier alludes to a similar point in: Van Lier (2007, 16).

3 Strictly speaking there are no white silver halides because halides don’t turn white. They just remain unchanged.

4 The Daguerrotype process, contended Daguerre, ‘consists in the spontaneous reproduction of the images of nature received in the camera obscura, not with their own colours, but with very fine gradation of tones’. Reprinted in: Trachtenberg (1980, 11).

5 Of primary importance is that information circulates as the presence/absence or absence/presence. And with sufficient storage capacity, that circulation is immortality in technical positivity (Kittler 2012, 144).

6 Thus it was only recently that Planck was able to show that everything stutters (is ‘quantic’) … this implies that the clear and distinct (stuttering) numbers are adequate to the world, and that the fluent letters cannot grasp the world. That the world is indescribable but that it can be counted. This is why the numbers should leave the alphanumerical code, become independent of it. Which in fact they are doing: they are establishing new codes (like the digital one), and they feed computers (Flusser 1989, 1).

7 This sentence paraphrases words attributed to the mathematician Leopold Kronecker: ‘God made the integers; all else is the work of man’. This relatively obscure statement gained its popularity when Stephen Hawking used a part of it as the title for a book (Hawking 2007).

8 Starting in 1935 Evans did photographic work for the Resettlement Administration (RA) and later for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the southern United States. In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, Evans and writer James Agee were sent by Fortune Magazine on an assignment to Hale County, Alabama for a story the magazine subsequently decided not to publish. In 1941, Evans' photographs and Agee's text detailing their stay with three white tenant families in Hale County were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book’s detailed account paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty (Agee and Evans 1969).

9 This is a point many writers insisted on, from Arago to Benjamin (Trachtenberg 1980).