Remember the industrial world of film or analogue photography from yesteryear? It wasn't that long ago. The grey haired ones, if they are still active, were encultured in it. Since it was yesteryear we can look back at it.
In the early and mid-twentieth century -- probably up to the late 1970s or early 1980s in Australia --- we understood photography in a specific way. We carefully shot the scene, ensuring our originality, then culled carefully down the accumulated photos on the contact sheet to the best Images. We were carefully taught to examine a contact sheet and pick out "the good ones" and circle them with a red pen.
What were the good ones? Those that represented the Truth (an objective representation of the way things really are) or expressed significant form. We then carefully printed the good ones on paper in the chemical darkroom making sure that what was eventually produced was the fine print.
The photograph was a carefully made singular object, to be revered and inspected closely. It was fitted into that Enlightenment, linear, mechanized, system of being centred around progress. The idea was that it showed us Truth (though significant Form) about the nature of things. We were informed that we should accordingly inspect the picture carefully (or at least pretend to) and give it the respect it is due with a close reading. Only a few could make being a photographer. The art galleries and university departments adhered to modernist values—the authority of the artist, the expertise of the curator and the discourse of the modern as the new,
That world has long gone. In the 21st century digital photography is our current world. We are in a new era of photography that is shaped by the internet, social media and the smart phone. This is an image world of fleeting, fragmentary impressions, instant likes, pretentious Influencers and persuasive hucksters offering the real deal. Social media, the internet and their computational mode of production transform a marginalized film photography's precarious existence into something other than what it once was -- the internet transforms it into a networked image that is viewed on a screen. The analogue photo is a hybrid as it is shaped by an algorithmic logic, is treated no differently to a digital image, and it is no longer culturally significant how the image was produced.
What once was --the industrial world of the 20th century --- has gone and its terrority is a cluttered with ruins. So it is reasonable to wonder or to ask: is photography the same thing or object when it is seen on a screen, on paper, as a reproduction or in an exhibition?
Little is to be gained by returning to that 1960s world and saying that photography is what happens on paper through chemistry or even looking for the masterpiece in the extensive digital archive. It's a cut de sac. Nor should we shoehorn the networked image into the culture or modes of the obsolete medium of the analogue image as the difference between the analogue and digital al image is an ontological one.
