On pixels and priorities in our practice

September 8, 2003

Extremism: you have to love it if for no other reason than it provides great fodder for deconstruction and analysis. No matter how you dissect it or what the issue of fanaticism is, the misunderstanding is rooted in fear. Take, for example, polarization of opinions about writing and photography in new media.

Throw pixels into the art equation and all hell breaks loose. Some cry: there’s no art of photography in digital imaging! Oh yeah? Ain’t I a photographer?

In one corner is the dystopian club. Some are neo-Luddites. Others are plainly dystopian by the nature of their culture. All believe the digital world is the end of society and its objets d'art. There will be no more books to hold! What will we do when there are no more art galleries to visit?

Meanwhile, the utopian alliance believes digital technology will create a new and perfect place where people embrace one another no matter their race, creed, color or politics. Wired nirvana! Peace and love all over the place, like kudzu. Paint flowers on your CPU.

While the arguments of both factions make for fascinating fiction, it is my opinion that the truth of the matter is that neither camp will be the victor. The truth of it, I believe, is that traditional and new media will co-exist for several centuries as they have for centuries before us with one remediation following another. Creators of art and consumers will walk in multiple art worlds.

The term “new media” launches heady encounters among theorists and practitioners. It is artists who most concern me because some times, our priorities as artists go out of focus. We put more stock in the mediums of delivery than in our messages. It is easy to do in a world where mediums are converging, where the personal computer is a television, a radio and a mail system, where the wireless telephone is a camera, where the television is evolving toward being interactive: a movie screen, an email hub and an encyclopedia, a digital hearth.

I spent six months waxing prosaic about cultural perceptions of and uses for hypertext, so I shall not regurgitate my comprehensive store of essays on the issues of hypertext history and new writing practice, except to say that the print world and the hypertext community each has its share of radicals when it comes to discussion about the effects of hyperliterature on literacy and books. For those of you interested in my hypertext papers, I shall shortly provide links to some of the material I produced. Stay tuned … I mean connected.

Currently immersed in the study of digital photography, I am enthralled with my new five-megapixel, almost SLR, digital camera. I am composing, retouching and printing pictures and reading today’s experts in photo theory. From what I have read so far, the arguments for and against digital photography mirror those of proponents and opponents of digital story. Photography is dead! Pictures are no longer real! God save the film!

Let’s be reasonable. The death of photography is no more imminent than is the departure of the book. Still photographs, produced via chemicals in darkrooms, and corporeal books will be dominant artifacts through my lifetime and for several subsequent generations. For this, I am as glad as are my friends who still revel in using their LPs and eight-track tapes. Many consumers want it this way. Many artists want it this way. So be it.

My 14-year-old daughter, who would love, I think, to have the technological connectivity of a character in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, still prefers to read a physical book. No matter where in Pennsylvania I travel to facilitate book discussion, I find people of all ages and backgrounds eager to sit in a circle and talk about a print book they have read. In fact, I have waiting lists of people who want to join those circles to talk about print stories.

Many of my colleagues in print writing avow no interest in writing for the digital market. Hypertext? No way! They are content to produce content for traditional print markets. I am pleased to do the same, by the way, but I also want to work in new art practices and markets and to help students and colleagues see its usefulness as a stage and a tool for communications. After all, every artist is a communicator.

Fear not. Photographic film will be here. Consider the following from a user at the Photo.Net bulletin board.

“Will film survive? Yes, says a British scientist and photography expert. From Silver to Silicon is an interesting article in the British mag Amateur Photographer of 22 December 2001, by scientist Geoffrey Crawley - former B+W chemist for Paterson, and BJP editor for 21 years. A very technical article, but among his comments, Crawley writes: ‘most photographers - but not all - still find it preferable to work in black and white (in the darkroom). It gives a direct hands-on satisfaction that the computer keyboard, pre-set program routines and monitoring on a VDU somehow lack - especially if they already make everyday use of a computer in the workplace... As to the future, the full superseding by electronic means of silver halide systems could only occur if means are found to make still smaller pixels for the photo-sensor and more rapid and larger capacity image storage. Even then, film is likely to co-exist, as people enjoy having alternatives …And remember - it is what an image says that is most important, not the means used to make it." David Killick , March 16, 2002.

Peter Lunenfeld offers a reasoned observance about differences between film and electronic photography in his book Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures.

“… the truly radical transformation is not from chemical to digital systems or production – as (William J.) Mitchell (The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, MIT Press, 1992)and the others would have it – but rather in the composition of the output, which has shifted from the discrete photograph to the essentially unbound graphic. It is here that the ‘revolutionary’ shift can be located. The ‘unique’ photograph is now forced to merge, even submerge, into the overall graphic environment. There formerly discrete photographic elements blend even further into the computer’s digital soup of letters, numbers, motion graphics and sound files: what is crucial is that all of these and more are simply different manifestations of the data maintained in binary form.” (59)

Again, there’s that message about the importance of the story as compared to putting all our stock in the significance of the medium.

Most digital photographers make PRINTS of their pictures for their models and their communities. What’s more, in my experience as a newspaper and magazine photojournalist and as an art photographer, few people realize, or for that matter care, whether the photographer’s camera was analog or digital. They want to see the pictures of themselves, their friends, special places and events. Nothing more. So long as they have quality pictures to look at, life is good.

Just as digital media is not the ruination of books and photographs, it is no utopian savoir of society either. Too many people are without access to the technology and, as I discovered long ago and wrote about last semester, unhealthy social systems -- patriarchy for example -- persist in online communities.

With access in mind, I recently moved from dial-up to DSL modem and getting there was quite an event. What should have taken about five minutes in three steps took more than 10 hours to resolve. The problem? A 900-megahertz cordless telephone connected to the telephone line. Technology- it is not for the individual who unplugs when the going gets a little tough.

What’s more, broadband deployment is not exactly happening as promptly as planned. In my state, Pennsylvania, for example, DSL only recently became available in the rural area in which I live. Although I am beyond thankful to have it, I also find myself unsettled. Can we justify the push for broadband Internet access when our other vital infrastructure (roads, wires, sewage and water pipes) is deteriorating? Is it right to demand broadband access in an upscale residential neighborhood with significant buying power when so many other people don’t even have dial-up access or, for that matter, a computer? When so many don’t have access to a computer because the terminals they used are located in a local library, which, due to government budget cuts in states throughout our nation, is now operating on restricted hours?

And, what, you ask, does all that have to do with pixels? It involves truth, which Lunenfeld says is gone in the “value of the photo-graphic (69), although I disagree. One of the big debates about film versus digital photography involves whether digital photography is a method by which photographers manipulate images. Well, of course, they do. So do film photographers. Some control development for artistic propriety. There also are those who are dishonest, such as the photographer who uses his own props at the scene of car accidents, as though such a scene were not sufficiently emotional. This is no fault of technology. It is a character flaw.

“Straight photography has always represented just one tradition of photography; it always coexisted with equally popular traditions where a photographic image was openly manipulated and was read as such. Equally, there never existed a single dominant way of reading photography; depending on the context the viewer could (and continue to) read photographs as representations of concrete events, or as illustrations, which do not claim to correspond to events which have occurred. Digital technology does not subvert ‘normal’ photography because ‘normal’ photography never existed,” asserts Lev Manovich in his essay The Paradoxes of Digital Photography.

Those of us transfixed in areas of studies such as art history, media culture, psychology, cultural anthropology and sociology indulge in dissecting mediums for messages ala Marshall McLuhan and messages in mediums ala Tom Koch. The rest of the world pretty much just wants to be able to “see” the pictures, to “read” the stories, to “take part” in humanities programming as people have done since the dawn of time.

Herein are important issues for new media photographers and writers. To “see” the pictures, to “read” the stories, to “participate” in programming, individuals have to be interested in experiencing different sensory perceptions, developing new skills and/or using established procedures in new ways in arts consumption. They have to be willing to join new communities in which the body is not physically present, although many use webcams to project their bodies to others in their online groups.

Where photographs are concerned, here is what Kevin Robins says in Will Image Move Us Still? an essay in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture: “New images are, of course, substantively implicated in furthering the objectives of what is now called post-industrial or information capitalism (for it was the needs of this system that effectively summoned them into existence). The ‘image revolution’ is significant in terms of a further and massive expansion of vision and visual techniques, allowing us to see new things and to see in new ways. In this context, the teleology of the images may be seen precisely in terms of the continuing development of ever more sophisticated technologies for ‘getting at the real truth’. The objective remains the pursuit of total knowledge, and this knowledge is still in order to achieve order and control over the world (What would give us grounds to think that it was otherwise?)” (35)

Dystopia. Utopia. How about a little reality? Come right down to it – and this goes for artists and consumers -- to develop new ways of "seeing," we need new ways of thinking.