Holding The Past, Dearly...

Nineteen-ninety-five. Thirty years have since passed, and the technological seeds of the world in which we currently live were but nascent potential then, awaiting release into the wild. Five years previously, the Internet [it was capitalised in those days] was mostly just a military/academic/geek network with much connectivity but little structure. But one year into the Nineties, Tim Berners-Lee changed the whole ballgame by inventing the World Wide Web, whose nomenclature survives in vestigial form in the still-used 'web-page', although few younger than my now advanced age would ever refer to  even 'the Web' these days, so commoditised has the Gargantua that most now characterise as simply 'my internet', become.

Similarly, our attitudes to, and usage of, digital photography have mutated from niche activity to quotidian normalcy over the period; to a point where now, there are no boundaries between human activity itself and the recording of it as merely normal; effectively as invisible as people's autonomic bodily functions: merely reflexive in nature. Having said that, ever since Kodak produced the very first film cameras aimed at non-professionals: the 'Box Brownie' - '"You press the button, we do the rest!"', people have routinely snapped away at their everyday; but prior to the mass adoption of the smartphone [even that is no longer capitalised due its ubiquity], there was still a significant delay between the act of recording and the gratification of seeing the recorded: film needed to be 'processed', which often took several days, and cost money to have done.

By nineteen-ninety-five, however, things were starting to turn digital. Apple had produced the first consumer digital camera the year before, with the QuickTake 100, manufactured for the company by Chinon. The image quality was literally VGA screen resolution, and so pretty piss-poor by any standards, but it pointed the way forward to the future which currently we inhabit as our present. Back then, people were still trying to get their heads around the transition from the silver halide and chemical film era that had been the norm for more than a century, to the rather - then - abstruse world of the digital image and what it could offer. Back then, academics were still authoring papers on the subject, trying to fathom the ramifications of this new, barely-born medium for the future of photography.

In that year, Lev Manovich wrote such an essay in the catalogue for an exhibition entitled "Photography After Photography". The essay was "The Paradoxes of Digital Photography", in which is argued that a digital image is entirely different from its chemical sibling; that the mediation of hardware, firmware and software militate towards it being an entirely different artefact than a chemically-produced image. I of course agree, and have mentioned this previously [blog posts passim]. His assertion that digital images are not 'real' in the same sense as film is quite right. The image captured on film is after all, a direct analogue of the subject being photographed [I'm aware that this might seem to be a contradiction of my rejection of Barthes' thesis in his essay, 'The Rhetoric of The Image", which was the subject of my degree dissertation, but it ain't folks: again blog posts passim]; whereas the digital image is simply digital data: ones and zeroes, no more, no less.

These days, the mediation that one's 'device' imposes on one's daily image capturing borders on the more surreal and outré creations of sci-fi visionaries such as William Gibson and Neil Stephenson, with sundry 'corrections' for exposure, camera stability and even composition and 'styling' just passing by in the background of our snapping un-noticed. What passes for 'real' is actually AI-curated for us to produce the 'perfect' result that we think we are entitled to. So we are looking at images that have passed through the multi-layered filtration of software arbitration, curated at a distance by the software's creators, albeit dispassionately [or so we might imagine].

So what's real and what's not? One might argue that neither one of the two [analogue or digital] methods of image capture amounts to 'reality', but one thing is for sure, digital images, as Manovich stated thirty years ago, actually don't 'exist'; they are stored as plain text files consisting ultimately of binary data, with no effective corporeal existence than as printouts of varying degrees of quality and longevity: when the cloud dies, so do most peoples' 'memories', just as their memories die with them. The one thing however about chemical analogue images, is their physical form: they can easily be passed on from generation to generation, with care, in a way that these evanescent digitalia cannot. Billions of images are created every day. Most will simply cease to exist. I favour the boxes of family photographs and the physical archives held in countless libraries, academic institutes and council records offices throughout the world over the cloud any day, viz. Poliakoff's "Shooting The Past" aired four years later in nineteen-ninety-nine...