"The digital photographer and all those who come after her-potentially plays a postmodern visual disc jockey.
Once the world has been photographed it is never again the same. (This is where Eve and the apple come in) Once the images begin to replace the world, photography loses much of it's reason for being. Into the vortex, then, comes the digital."
-Fred Ritchin "After Photography"
I walked into B&N this Saturday with the intent to kill some time until Vanessa's bus got into the city from Philly. I've been studying photo essays there, thinking about some of the experiments I want to do with my own picture taking. Last week, I'd spent almost an hour looking at a Taschen Collection of Polaroids. They were amazing, nothing like the dark, yellowy pictures I used to get when I used the family Polaroid in the early 90s. On Saturday though I walked into the photo essay isle and picked up a book of critique on digital photography. Some words on the subject that were not purely instructional were way overdue. And I expected the first thing I read to be about how wonderful and expansive digital was, how it gave so many more people so many more possibilities. But instead I was given this totally legitimate if a bit morbid view of the way in which digital photography is like this monster of technology which will eventually consume itself because of it's overwhelming accessibility and tendency towards endless post production manipulation. Of course people have been manipulating photographic images for centuries, since the advent of photography but the difference then was that only a select few had access to this capability and even then, they never manipulated images on the same scale that people do now. Who had the time?
When I went to go see the orchid show, I have to admit I had to block out the sheer number of people and children running around with digital devices, clicking and recording and basically experiencing everything through a lens! Including me of course. I noticed it at the presidential inauguration in D.C. as well. But it was at the orchid show that I realized in an unavoidable way that something slightly disturbing was happening and that I was a part if it. I think it was because when I was little and my mom used to take my brother and I to the botanical garden in Brooklyn, we were able to have this very present experience of everything. Sure, my dad was the designated photographer but he didn't take pictures all the time. He couldn't. With film, there is always an inherent finality. The roll will be done. You have to wait to see the images. You put the camera down and get on with life. But with digital you can conceivable take hundreds of photos a day, even thousands if you carry around extra memory cards. I bought two extra memory cards myself recently. 2 gigs each. In this way, the documenting and recording never stops. You could go all day never connecting with anything, merely capturing and collecting moments but never really being apart of them. It's addictive in this myspace, facebook age of connecting as peripherally as we do but only rarely ever checking in fully. It certainly appeals to me but at the same time when I see this same sort of lifestyle replicated so massively everywhere I go I get a little nervous. That's why I still try to shoot film as well as digital. Thank God I was born in the 70s.
