William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The myth of digital photography has things exactly upside down. Instead of making photography less credible, less legitimate, digitization has produced a general “optimization” of photographic culture, one in which better and better simulations of the best effects of realism and informational richness in traditional photography have become possible.
Pictures of pain are not necessarily painful pictures, and this is why our response to them fluctuates between shame and delight, horror and pleasure.
...the fear of the image, the anxiety that the “power of images” may finally destroy even their creators and manipulators, is as old as image-making itself.
The “taking” of human subjects by a photographer (or a writer) is a concrete social encounter, often between a damaged, victimized, and powerless individual and a relatively privileged observer, often acting as the “eye of power,” the agent of some social, political, or journalistic institution.
We can identify certain historical moments at which the sudden crystallization of a new technology (such as printing, photography, or computing) provides the nucleus for new forms of social and cultural practice and marks the beginning of a new era of artistic exploration. The end of the 1830s—the moment of Daguerre and Talbot—was one of these. And the opening of the 1990s will be remembered as another—the time at which the computer-processed digital image began to supersede the image fixed on silver-based photographic emulsion... . From the moment of its sesquicentennial in 1989 photography was dead—or, more precisely, radically and permanently displaced—as was painting 150 years before.
Picture, what do you want of me?
Illusionism is the capacity of pictures to deceive, delight, astonish, amaze, or otherwise take power over a beholder; in the trompe-l’oeil, or the special effects of cinema, for instance, the point is to provide a simulation of the presence of objects, spaces and actions, to trigger a responsive experience in the beholder. Realism, by contrast, is associated with the capacity of pictures to show the truth about things.
The tools of traditional photography were well suited to Strand’s and Weston’s high-modernist intentions—their quest for a mind of objective truth assured by a quasi-scientific procedure and closed, finished perfection.
