Issues in Digital Photography
The essay summarizes and compares the arguments by two authors, Rachel Wells, and Carol Squlers on Digital images and photography in Digital age. The paper focuses on how the authors challenge traditional modes in image making while advocating their views. The chapter on “Digital Scale: enlargement and intelligibility in Thomas Ruff’s jpeg Series “inspects the use of pixelation in Thomas Ruff’s jpeg series1.Ruff looked into the disclosure of the pixel grid when enlarging digital images. He has long been interested in reproduction and manipulation of digital images. His jpeg series works on digital images found on the web that spans a number of different subjects. Ruff enlarges them by colossal ratios to reveal the gridded microstructure of the image. By enlarging those jpeg images, he examines the nature of digitalization. The compressed jpeg image contains a vast amount of data compressed together, and the obvious advantage of a compressed image is a small size.In Ruff’s words, his “images are not depictions of the reality but show a second reality, the image of the image.” The higher degree of accuracy reveals the faults in the image. The huge close-ups and magnifications blast the blast the prison of conventional reality. A digital image has limited spatial and tonal resolution and carries a fixed amount of information. Once the pixelation is achieved, the digital image reveals nothing once pixelation is revealed. In the eyes of the consumer, there are no pixels. Ruff and other contemporary artists are fascinated by the nature of pixel grid and the existence of a pixel. How to read those pixels has been a much-debated topic. Ruffs ‘work is described by as reserved cool and neutral by the critics.
_______________________1 Rachel Wells, Digital Scale: enlargement and intelligibility in Thomas Ruff’s jpeg Series (Leuven University Press, 2013), 205-221.
Still, his work finds a place in prestigious museums as his work emphasizes on the artificiality of the digital world. His jpeg series reflects the artlessness in the loss resolution images that are often captured by camera phones. His pixelated images are the fractured representation of authentic journalism in contrast to the deceptive fictionalized realism.
The enlarged digital images by Ruff reveal the limit of the intelligibility of those images. The enlargement and presentation through pixelation draw attention to the limitation of the image. The enlargement reveals nothing a new and the closer one gets to an image, the less intelligible it becomes. Ruff suggests that by making things arterially infinite, one ignores the distance and incompleteness. His enlargements show that the small world is incomplete and lacking.
“Ectoplasm, photography in digital age” by Geoferey Batchen starts with the comment that perhaps painting would be dead now that photography is here 2 . However, with the computer-driven images, the possibility of fake images to be passed off as real shook the faith of viewers in photography, which was expected to lose its power as conveyor of information. It seems as if the digitized images robbed the medium of its credibility. Another source of concern is that it is difficult to make out the fake one from the real. Hence, the field of photography is faced with two crises, one it was digitizing of it because of advancing technology and the other concern was the ethical one.
When photography entered the scene for the first time, it benefits many, for example, the portrait photographers. However, it brought doom for many other medium and art, for example, the established miniature painting industry. Photography was projected to carry a dual character just like the capitalism and it was both positive and negative at the same time. Its lineage shows
_______________________2 Geoferey Batchen, Ectoplasm, photography in digital age. (The New Press, 2000), 9-22.
life born out of death and a presence inhabited by its absence. Photography that was believed to bring the death of painting several more than century ago seems like it is struggling for its own life and survival. It seems to have lost its inherent accurate and truthful pictorial form. The concern arises from certain anxieties such as the introduction of computerized images. Still, photography is the visual narrative of the times gone by.
Is the digital imaging the cause of the death of photography, what with the expanding demand sin the field of advertising and photojournalism? While the photography still carries seem kind of objectivity, the digital imaging is an overtly imaginary process. The digitization moves away from the rhetoric of truth but gets closer to the creative process of art. Still, photography itself carries elements of manipulation in how the photographer controls exposure times, the light levels, the tonal ranges and so on. Thus, artifice remains an inescapable part of a photograph, no matter how authentic it is.
Photography involves complex phenomena and a number of procedures. Digital images can never replace the camera and in the 21st century, the lines are getting blurred already between what is real and unreal or what is human and non-human. It seems that the logic behind photography continues to haunt itself. It may be losing its privileged space in the modern culture because of the digested images, but one can say that there has been a shift in its significance, but it has still not lost its importance.
Both articles deal with the use of modern technologies in creating images. Ruff explores the enlargement of the pixel grid in the images in “Thomas Ruff’s jpeg Series” while “photography in digital age” worries about disappearance photography in 21st-century society. Batchen’s major concerns are about computerized digital images and the element of artificiality. It seems that while photography was thought to bring death to art and painting, it seems art has found its own ways to wriggle into the realm of photography with digitization. Batchen makes a fairly good point here that the medium has lost its credulity with which it arrived on the scene. With the advancing technologies, it is hard to say as to what is the reality in those images one sees. People suspect the truth-telling capabilities of photography as they get manipulate digitally. Perhaps people do not mind he artist work or have no choices but to see what is shown to them. Ruff speaks about the enlargement of digital images that manipulate the photographic medium. Through the expansion of those pixels, he draws attention to the limitation of the information contained in an image. Beyond a point the pixels have no further information to give and the image only gets less intelligible. He challenges the effective and interpretative promptings offered by photography and the risks of recognition without full intelligibility. Both essays touch the subject of digitation but from a different perspective.
Photography began as a pure and clear medium but over the years and with advanced technologies, it seems to have lost its credibility and seems to have become polluted. Still, it is a particularly challenging phenomenon to study photography and its role as long before digitization stepped in, it was never a perfectly zero manipulated medium. The photographers did manipulate the subjects they wanted to shoot, how they controlled the light and tonal ranges or the exposure. Thus, one could never place full confidence in the photographer or his images. Still, digitization has robbed photography of its importance and diluted it further in the name of art and creativity. What makes a photograph vulnerable are the different ways and possibilities that the medium can get manipulated not just because of the technology but by the photographer or the artist himself. It owes its existence to the elements present on the surface but which are actually absent. Batchen asserts on the no direct referent in an outside world in digital images while Ruff gets under the skin and pixels of those digitized images to show their emptiness.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Batchen, Geoferey.Ectoplasm, photography in digital age. (The New Press, 2000), 9-22.
Wells, Rachel. Digital Scale: enlargement and intelligibility in Thomas Ruff’s jpeg Series (Leuven University Press, 2013), 205-221.
