The photographer Deborah Baker — a colleague — \u00a0and I have both been wondering what to call a kind of photography that 1.) cheerfully ignores any responsibility to be “true” to vision or history or morality or whatever, \u00a0and \u00a02.) relishes the creative possibilities of digital codes–the technology of breaking anything down into bits and bytes and recomputing it, differently. \u00a0Deborah came up with “data photography” one day in passing–actually in trying to assign names to groups of students with shared interests (with lots of students and no time, as usual). \u00a0It’s a pretty promising term, I think…respectable old Latin plural, short, a bit alliterative…algorithmic?<\/p>\n
We were talking about Juan Fontcuberta, and his work does seem to \u00a0be an exceptionally clear example of the thing from various angles. \u00a0It’s\u00a0photography that shows some understanding of its own status as data, some acceptance of an obligation to confer meaning, rather than discovering or transmitting it. I’m borrowing from Flusser again. \u00a0This time (in Into the Universe of Technical Images<\/em>), he’s going on about the world as unthinkably many tiny particles, moving at unthinkable speeds, all below anything human beings can perceive. \u00a0It’s no place for us to live. \u00a0So the best thing to do is to team up with our apparatus (actually, “apparatus” is ordinarily a blend of human being and some sort of advantageous technology, e.g. a camera) in a positive, constructive–creative–way, rather than always doing what comes “naturally” to apparatuses, which is to bore us silly.<\/p>\n The image is one of Fontcuberta’s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The photographer Deborah Baker — a colleague — \u00a0and I have both been wondering what to call a kind of photography that 1.) cheerfully ignores any responsibility to be “true” to vision or history...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"Better than True: Data Photography","bgseo_description":"By treating a photograph as some quantity of data, rather than as something with a lot of obligations to be something it cannot be, namely \"true,\" a world of potential invention opens. ","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31,32],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-data-photography","tag-fictional-photography"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1941,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/1941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}