Is Digital Photography?

Betulanimbusi, reproduced here, is one image from the elegant new catalogue of Deborah Baker’s photographs, In Paradiso.  Her exhibition opened in London on Thursday, September 4, at the William Morris Museum.  The catalogue includes my essay, “Is Digital Photography?” which picks up the threads of a few conversations Deborah and I have had over the years, about whether digital photography is a completely new medium, or is simply giving us a clearer understanding of the possibilities that were always inherent in photography.

For a few years, Deborah and I ran the MA Photography course at Falmouth together. We both valued the opportunity to actually talk about photography. We wondered, for example, whether digital photography, so radically different the film-based, darkroom and enlarger sort of technologies of not so many years ago, should still be called  photography. I thought it should.

Flusser insists that photography is, and always was a projection, a fiction. As he describes it, a camera is an apparatus that can reach into an inherently meaningless and incomprehensible swirl of particles that comprise and surround us– protons and quarks and  hadrons far too tiny and fast to actually see.  Rather than recording an existing meaning, the device reaches in and confers meaning, as no painting or drawing ever could. All cameras, always, did this, however difficult it is for us to break our habits of thinking otherwise.  So the challenge is to stand firm and look back–even at news photographs and identity shots, and not see “truth”, but always human decisions, choices.