I give you the following two extracts without comment. I neither agree nor disagree …
“… In the sense of an information society, ‹instability› can be regarded as a positive value: It stands for dynamic transmission, unobstructed circulation, and for communication that is not bound to real space; it stands for virtuality as the ability to experience what is possible. In contrast, analog photography hangs on to what is past; its gesture is a clinging—to a state of visible reality, to public and private occurrences, to fleeting moments in everyday life. Its great subjects, the topography of urban and suburban life and the visualization of biography and identity are (or were) being sustained by a concept of remembrance that binds historical tradition and personal memory to material evidence. Fifteen years after the beginning of the debate over the ‹end of photography› one can establish that the radical change from analog to digital technology has not invalidated the notions of representation, identity and memory associated with the photographic dispositive—rather it contributes to a destabilization of these notions. In the environment of electronic media, digital photography constitutes a threshold phenomenon: It is located so to speak at the transition from old storage media to new communication media and their paradigms.”
– above (not below) is from this page in the Photographic/Post-Photographic section of medienkunstnetz.de (sorry about the strange punctuation: that’s theirs, not mine)
”… But what is really at stake? A preliminary answer would be: lifestyles. Lomo’s message of practicing a photographic style of real life can also be understood as the production of a ‹real lifestyle.› According to the specific aspects of the Internet put forward by Lev Manovich, it is one of the basic principles of new, computer-based media to supply lifestyles through variability: «In a postindustrial society, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and ‹select› her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices.… Every visitor to a Web site automatically gets her own custom versions of the site created on the fly from a database.» In this respect, the vanishing point of the everyday practice of photography is not, or no longer, familiality, but the playful and fun-oriented negotiation of tags or labels that mark temporary membership in a group…. “
“… A community online game does not predestine the aesthetization of the images, but of life. An aesthetization that is not carried out outside the realm of economic interests, by which the boundaries of sharing become visible: Both Lomography.com and Flickr offer the licensing of images placed on their sites. In view of these shifts from the figure of the photographic image as a cause for memory activity to the image as a permanent referent to presence, it is not only a media-economic assertion to declare a postphotographic age. And this not— or at least not only—based on the digital devices and technologies as such, but on the cultural practices that are tied to them and often embrace them in unforeseen ways. The altered photographic gestures and practices indicate, as Barthes wrote as early as 1979, that «the astonishment of ‹that-has-been› will also disappear. It has already disappeared. I am, I don’t know why, one of its last witnesses (a witness of the Inactual) …» “
– above is from the same site as the first, but a different essay called Instant Images. The quotes start on this page.
Again, these quotes are here for you to think about, not because I agree with them. I’m thinking about them myself.
-Julie
