Thoughtfactory: Leica poetics

Leica, film, snaps, chronicles, cliches

The photographic style

As photography started to open up to digital imaging technologies  the territory has changed,  rather  than the 'digital' being another artistic practice.  What has emerged from this opening up is the idea of  the photographic style in which images are produced that look like photographs. 

This is work using  digital imaging technologies that is done 'in the manner of photography',  and it represents the marriage of the photographic with the graphic (hence the term 'photographics'). 

A style might be called 'photographic' when the reference to a photographic reality is left intact.  The  photographic style is an image's ability to reference a reality, as it would look in a photograph. Before the advent of image computation, photographic reality could only be represented in photographs, whereas in our digital age photography is no longer a prerequisite for the achievement of photographic reality.

The term 'photographics'  does not reflect a new medium that became possible with the advent of new media. It describes the changed working methods of contemporary photographers resulting from a changed understanding of photography and a changed understanding of graphics in image computation.

What this suggests is that the  ‘threat’ of the digital is now a dead issue. Nobody cares.  Digital has become so familiarised that within the current conventions of photography the analogue and the digital are functionally continuous with each other.  Photography is  inseparable from the rapidly transforming field of digital technologies and it forces us to consider  it in terms of  speed, intermittence, blurring and fragility. 

Digital technologies require us to reconsider culture on the basis of the  idea of the transitory and to question the  entrenched  opposition between the ephemeral and the durable which defines  the former as a sign of barbarism and the latter as the touchstone of true art.