Transcending photography:

An insight on visual culture.

By Eva Paredes

The world of photography is divided into infinite extremes. The digital, is the easiest thing
to address because that is an economic way to create something disposable. Therefore, the
valuable part seems to be the easiest fragment to assault, so that's what seems to align with
other means in order to validate itself. Apparently, photography consists of a logic that
continuously returns to its starting point. In other words, it becomes its own “medium”.
According to this, each of the historical paradigms photography has presented has been part
of a ghostly graphic history. Each fact part of the demise of photography has postulated the
need to question our understanding of the mere concepts of "life" and "death". Given the
new processes of the image, photography could actually be on the verge of losing its
privileged place within modern culture. This does not mean that photographic images will
not continue to be created, but it points out the possibility of a dramatic transformation of
their meaning and value and therefore, its current connotation. However, it must be
clarified that such alteration will have to grasp both in epistemological and substantial
revolutions within the arrival of the digital image. By the same token, Photography will
cease to be a dominant element of modern life only when the desire to photograph and the
peculiar arrangement of knowledge and employment that that desire represents is
reconfigured as another social and cultural formation. “The death of the photograph must
necessarily imply the inscription of another way of looking - and of being. " (Batchen,
Geoffrey, 2011, p.143) Customary methodologies towards photography and the assortment
method between them are progressively anachronistic. Contemplating the photographic
landscape that surrounds us - the pictorial world and the creation of imageries that we
inhabit - makes it obvious that photography has undergone dramatic changes in its

TRANSCENDING PHOTOGRAPHY: AN INSIGHT ON VISUAL CULTURE 1

technical, cultural and critical composition. These changes are difficult to make sense of
within the existing critical and practical framework of photography theory; therefore, the
question is: Is the photographer as creator beyond that? In addition to this, Photography
has developed rapidly in a short time from Heliography to ever-improving roll film, digital
camera, and the latest integration: the smartphone. New advances have always brought new
possibilities and changes in art, business, society and the media. The smartphone
photography has led to an unimaginable mass of photos, which is further potentiated by the
distribution over the Internet. It has taken on a new role in communication and the media
through social media. The mass of images seems to overrun us and overwhelms our
perception, threatening a loss of meaning in photography. Therefore, is photography what
carries value, meaning and truth dead? When outlining some possible reasons for the
leading thinkers and professionals in photography to ask themselves if "photography is
over”, we can consider the dramatic changes that have taken place in the photographic
panorama during the last decade or so, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask whether a
traditional notion of "photography" has ended. But if a traditional interpretation of
"photography" is inadequate to make sense of the photographic landscape of the 21st
century, then how do we begin to think about what "photography" has converted and is
nowadays is turning into?

In the visual realm, the digital "revolution" has caused a commotion in the photographic
panorama. It is reasonable then that the producer and consumer of images constantly reflect
on what is the place of photography in society when there are now more than 250 million
photographs on social media (with an additional 350 million added daily), where the
average person sees more than 5,000 ads per day, and where photography has come to
inhabit the same core of our "technological a priori." photography has become so
fundamental to the way we see that "photography" and "seeing" are becoming increasingly
synonymous "The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge for curators,
professionals and critics, who are faced with deciphering whether "photography" has
become so impregnated that it no longer makes sense to think of it as a discrete practice or
research field. In other words, perhaps "photography", as a significant cultural trope, is

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over. During the first few weeks, start thinking about how to start thinking through the
emergent photographic landscape of the 21st century, and the ways in the two photographic
practices and photographs themselves are changing. To do that, I shall develop an expanded
definition of photography, and exploring the implications of that expanded definition. I will
start with the introduction of the idea of photography as machines that see and explore
questions such as: How do we see the world with machines? What happens if we think of
photography in terms of image systems instead of images? How can we think of images
made by machines from other machines? What are the implications of a world in which
photography is both everywhere and, curiously, largely invisible? As a consequence, to
scenarios rise from these questions: In the first instance, the rise of digital photography and
image processing software has altered the perspective that exists on analogue photography.
Digital cameras are cheap and ubiquitous; Image processing software (either the camera's
firmware or applications like Photoshop and Instagram) has made it extraordinarily easy to
produce an image quality that was previously only possible with years of specialized team
training, the technique of shooting, and printing methods.

The de-specialization of photography is an area of great concern among the curators

responsible for classifying what is worth paying attention to, and for professionals who
have seen their ability to make a living get much, much harder (close to witness the
collapse of photojournalism as a profession). In this sense, perhaps the advent of digital
photography and automated image processing means that Traditional photography is
largely a "personal discourse about the object portrayed. Especially taking into account that

"As digitization emerges as a modern method of encoding photographic images, the

very foundation and position of the [photographic] document is put into question.
The first effects of this process accumulate and suggest that the breadth of this
tremendous change will be amazing. However tenuous the continuity that may have
existed between the photograph or the digitized images and their message, could be
shattered, pulverizing the whole problematic concept of representation "
(Batchen, G., 2011, p.204)

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The panorama of the theory of photography has changed completely due to an ambivalence
of opinions. On the one hand, the digital revolution and the landscape of the creation of
images everywhere, has created a situation in which curators and critics specialized in
photography have to define the very narrow field in order to have an "object" of the speech
at all. For the purpose of criticism, only a very small part of the photographic perspective
can be worked on and separated for discussion, topics such as "artistic", "documentary",
"historical" photography, and even "analogue" photography. That is to say, as a
consequence of the reduction of research objects in such a dramatic way, the critical
discussion around photography inevitably ends up admitting only a small range of
photographic practices in its field of competence. In parallel, critical debates take shape
around a small range of images and practices that are exceptions to the extreme
photographic rule. Furthermore, computer manipulation means that it is no longer possible
to believe that a photograph depicts a particular object in a specific place and time, that it is
no longer possible to believe that the photograph is objective and 'genuine'. This precise
peculiarity of photography, the persuasive power of unconditional authenticity with the
seemingly absolute reliability that it once had, has finally been taken away from it. The fact
that there used to be a negative from which positive prints were made, the possibility of
manipulation was very limited, because the negative (original) was not changeable and the
positive prints were changeable only very limited in the darkroom. Therefore, the idea of an
objective’ photographic image could be formed without any subjective human intervention.
Unlike digital photography: Here there is no longer a fixed negative, but 'only' virtual
image archives (now the originals), which can be changed at any time and by anyone: This
does not require a highly complex Photoshop program, even with the simplest programs of
this kind you can, for example. Remove objects; completely change colours of the image,
etcetera.

As a consequence, the so-called objectivity was completely gone. This belief in the
accuracy, in the impartiality of the camera image that emerged at the time of the
Renaissance in the 16th century with the spread of the camera obscura and other optical

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devices - not only in the 19th century, as many think - and then the unenlightened vision
helped overcome thinking, is today for the first time fundamentally shaken by the
appearance of computer-manipulated images. Without intending to do so, the new
technology questions what has been going on for almost 500 years, something to believe in
even though it never really existed, and as always with such drastic changes, it causes great
uncertainty and therefore contradictory behaviours, similar to the invention of chemical
photography in the 19th century (?) At that time, Painting was largely influenced by the
confrontation of two media that sought and avoided each other, with the advantage of
photography. Painting had the choice of standing or fleeing. Consequently, painting
retreated to positions where photography could not follow; the abstraction turned into its
sanctuary. Who would have thought that a few decades ago that this invention would
completely lose its meaning in 'only' 160 years? Unlike the critics who complain about the
lack of craftsmanship, the computer returns the camera back to where it was before
chemical photography was invented. The computer has brought photography closer to hand
drawing and painting again. The software uses terms such as "palette," "brush," "pen," and
so on. The handmade image shows a human vision, and, paradoxically, the computer brings
us back the ability to make human images with a machine, which was previously chemical
Photography was not possible. A new technique is painting and drawing by hand directly
in the computer to be printed on paper or canvas. Today's devices have improved so much
that you can work quickly and freely with colours and lines. It's not about feigning,
imitating or reproducing other media or materials (such as oil or watercolour painting), but
exploring and applying the peculiarities of the new medium. As a real art form, it takes
time, maximum concentration and a lot of work, and as with the traditional art media, it
always has to do with skill. To sum up, this new medium is an important extension of our
time. But that does not mean that I will neglect the traditional media such as oil or
watercolour paintings. On the contrary: things that have been developed in the new media
fertilize the work in oil painting and vice versa.

The creative possibilities expand in all media and for me it is always surprising what comes
out. The projected lens image remains: Exciting times are ahead of us. But a look back to

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the time of the invention of the chemical photography shows: Just as the painting then, so
in the future, photography as art will not disappear, it will go new ways. The theory and
criticism of photography has less and less to do with form and focuses more on how it is
actually practiced most of the time. Most people who use photos for painting do so to make
pictures look like photographs, they want to imitate the "true to nature" in order to pretend
something they can not. The use of image editing software only attends to refine pictures to
make them look the way they can be seen in these wearisome journals or on television,
where everything looks the same. If someone sees these pictures in a decade or two, they
will not see anything on them, the consequence of this narrowing of the field is that the
conversations and problems of traditional photo theory have become clearly exhausted. In a
nutshell, there is probably not much more to say about problems such as "indexicality"
"pretension of truth", "the rhetoric of the image", and other touchstones of the theory of
classical photography. And what remains to be said about these photographic "problems"
seems increasingly alien to the larger photographic landscape we inhabit.

"Technology alone will not determine the future of photography, but new
technologies, as manifestations of our culture's more recent world view, can at least
give us some vital signs of their current state of health. Digitization, prosthetic and
cosmetic surgery, cloning, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and virtual
reality - each of these expanding fields of activity questions the supposed distinction
between nature and culture, human and non-human, reality and representation, truth
and falsehood-, all of them concepts on which the epistemology of the photographic
has depended up to now."
(Batchen, G., 2011, p.213)

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To Print or to perish?

While art historians are aware of digital publishing and its complexities, some underlying
conceptual issues have not yet been considered. In particular, what constitutes publication
in the digital world is the new forms of online publishing are valued in the same way that
maybe they will ever be the equivalent in value to print publications. The discipline
currently sees digital publication through the lens of its printing precursor. However, the
very notion of publication is expanding as new online forms emerge that have no paper
equivalent. However,

"Given the emergence of new procedures for creating images, photography can
really be on the verge of losing its privileged place in modern culture. This does not
mean that they will stop making photographic images, but it indicates the possibility
of a decisive transformation of their meaning and their value, and therefore of their
significance from now on. "
(Batchen, G. 2011, pp. 215-216)

While many in the history of art do not believe these formats to be publications in the sense
they attribute to the concept, most agree that the limits have been extended. The current
digital publishing efforts in the history of art, since they are innovative, still convey a sense
of "publication" that is embedded in conventional norms. It is easier to accept digital
publications when they can be understood through a metaphor of traditional publications,
and to devise ways to include this type of scholarship in current evaluation systems. It is
therefore necessary that every artist is related to this area or not, choose to recognize its
high value for research and study.

Nevertheless, when viewed from the perspective of evaluation criteria instead of

publication format, originality, research and intellectual effort invested in digital resources
or research projects often equal or superior to that of a published monograph. In this sense,
it becomes more difficult to justify why the latter is assigned a higher academic value than

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the first. Within art, each discipline is struggling with how to evaluate digital projects and
distribute credit for the people who work in them. Part of the difficulty is that these projects
are never "finished" in a conventional sense: they undergo much iteration as they develop
and evolve. A current instantiation of a project could no longer contain visible traces of the
previous work, and on the part of the photographic image, something similar happens:

"Photography will cease to be a dominant element of modern life only when the
desire to photograph and the peculiar organization of knowledge and attributes that
this desire represents are reconfigured in another social and cultural formation. The
end of the photograph must entail the inscription of another way of seeing - and of
being -. "
(Batchen, G. 2011, p.216)

On the other hand, social media is increasingly used as way of educational communication.
Through these channels, it is possible to participate in discussions about techniques,
subsequent explorations related to art, photography and what else. At the same time, they
transfer relevant information collecting a vast registry of intellectual operations -.

This new system allows the viewer to access to a large amount of visual information
already available on social media platforms. Besides that, these spaces offer numerous
opportunities to share research results, as they reach far wider audiences. Social networks
project a wider network than personal treatment; broaden the scope and impact of the
discipline of an academic community as a whole. More importantly, the use of these
passages helps move the research process further into the digital realm. Performing
academic communication through social media channels essentially puts another part of the
research workflow in this field as well. By doing so, the functional perception of the online
world extends from being "a place to search" to "a place to interact." Justifying the natural
desire of the human being to produce his own aesthetic experience, as a resulting or
particular objective, the aesthetic sense appears in the everyday Is not a part of the human
unconscious, rather it is the expression of reality that each individual seeks to realize as a

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final form. The question that arises is to ask what happens with art since it is part of the
non-theoretical formation and creation of digital and real life networks which increase the
number of people through these channels. In other words, from the moment the spectator
chooses his identity - regularly implanted by the mass media - he begins to ignore the fact
that he exists in a discontinuous moment of great tension, which appears to be a decadent
drift (unpunctuality, excesses and ignorance constitute his main element) but that it is really
a frozen moment in time, that does not advance in any direction other than in the pathetic
and impassive longing for better times.

Undoubtedly, visual culture still plays a fundamental role in the functioning of 21st century
societies. So while in one sense, the photograph could be "lost", when talking about digital
media it seems that it has just begun. And we have not seen anything. This could well be
revealing of a discipline that, the expressed feelings are representative of this field. Hence,
visual media opens a new theoretical path: It helps us solve issues impossible to discard: its
contemporary dominance in the aesthetic of our everyday lives.

Bibliography:
Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning in Desire. The conception of photography. Translation.
Antonio Fernández Lera. Trans. Eva Paredes. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2004

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