On Beauty, Science, and Nature
Photography- A Cultural History
Mary Warner Marien
Laurence King Publishing Ltd
2002
At the start of the twenty-first century, the most discussed topic in photography was the future of computer-manipulated images, and the least considered subject was the outlook for beauty. Throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century, beauty was held accountable for photography's lapses and misdeeds, especially in the area of social concern. In his enduringly influential essay, "On the invention of photographic meaning" (1975), photographer-critic Allan Sekula savaged art for art's sake, writing that "the ills of photography are the ills of aestheticism," and that "aestheticism must be superseded, in its entirety, for a meaningful art, of any sort, to emerge." Critic Hal Foster concurred in his popular anthology The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), whose title was drawn from a phrase fashioned in Walter Benjamin's authoritative essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (see pp. 269-70, 305-6). Foster questioned whether the aesthetic was now a threadbare illusion. Time and again, beauty was sent packing to the cobwebbed attic of outmoded ideas.
Expunged from much of contemporary art practice and academic concern, beauty acquired the allure of the forbidden, especially for undergraduates, whose academic study of the arts and humanities had evolved into a long interrogation of received ideas and disguised social contexts. The seductiveness of banished beauty propelled American critic Dave Hickey's The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) into an underground book on campus, even though Hickey shied away from a direct discussion of beauty to focus on the psychological experience of visual pleasure and repulsion. For this advocacy, Hickey received a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius" award in 2001. The notion of beauty as transgressive also launched the careers of French collaborators Pierre et Gilles, who have been making sensuous, often homoerotic photographs since the mid- 1970s.
In addition, a few American and European galleries cautiously made beauty the subject of exhibitions. At the Hirshhorn Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., curators Neal Benezra and Olga M. Viso put together a 1991 exhibition. called Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century. Realizing that they could not escape the shadow of postmodern questioning, they acknowledged that, "approaching beauty... at this point in human history may seem a frivolous, even futile, endeavor." Their show inevitably included such artists as Cindy Sherman whose work was at the forefront of postmodern interrogations of stereotypical feminine beauty. Also displayed was the work of German artist Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952), whose photomechanically reproduced posters collectively called Beauty cleverly undermined the sunny global humanism of the "United Colors of Benetton" advertisements as well as the axiomatic contemporary concern with "race, gender, and ethnicity.” Trockel trained as a painter, but now works in new media, such as video and installations. She bluntly rejects the postmodern notion that words and pictures are deceiving, and attempts to draw the viewer into the experience of seeing as a route to new knowledge.
Conjecturing what beauty might mean in the year 2096, critic Peter Schjeldahl suggested that it would become a quality of experience, not of things, and not, as Trockel suggests in her posters, a fixed and predetermined aspect of human appearance. Mindful of the lessons from the recent past, a few critics, artists, and photographers modestly began to propose what might constitute a post-postmodern beauty. For Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959), beauty is as tentative as the hesitant step being taken by the adolescent boy she photographed in Berlin's Tiergarten. Measured against the stark, blank faces of Thomas Ruff's photographs, Dijkstra's portraits are lush, informative, and loving.
German-born photographer Uta Barth (b. 1958) is mindful that, as Schjeldahl wrote, the aesthetic "has been quarantined from educated talk." Compare, for example, Barth's hesitant depiction of light and color with the more aggressively hued shot taken by William Eggleston. Both prefer fragmentary images from the panoply of visual experience and both dissolve narrative in a mesmerizing show of light and color. But Barth's blurry pictures are like memories of Eggleston's boisterous revelries. Where his work is assured and on an even keel, hers is restless and often off-kilter, like an unfocused eye fidgeting from place to place. Barth's pictures deliberately fix on an imaginary plane in front of a wall, thus throwing what might be the subject of the image out of focus. Her photographs express the impossibility of clarity and certain definition, as well as the desire, however repressed, to seek pleasure in looking. Her technique recalls the attitude of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, for whom photographic focus had to fit the mood of the subject-matter, not necessarily mimic the clarity of normal optical vision.
The black-and-white series by New York-based Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) shares with Barth a regard for the fragile beauty of uncertainty, expressed in grainy atmospheric effects. Sugimoto often works in series, beginning with his eerie photographs of wildlife dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and including his lush black-and-white images of early twentieth-century movie theaters across the United States. For more than two decades, he has traveled the world seeking high vantage points from which to aim his camera at the point where the sky and ocean come together at the horizon. The boundless vistas he portrays are reminiscent of Pictorialism's thronging gray tones. Sugimoto's work manifests the dichotomy between the rapture of visual pleasure and the cold comfort of human systems of measurement.
The relationship of photography, a technologically based medium, to advancements in science has long been a matter of concern. More than a century ago, Peter Henry Emerson asserted that photography had to reject the canons of established art and follow the cutting-edge of science for up-to-the- minute instructions on how a photograph should look. Today, the human relationship to nature and to science is examined from a point of view far from Emerson's understanding. Some contemporary observers, such as Jungian psychologist James Hillman, see science not as an ever-unfolding source of aesthetic options, but as an immense force that demystifies nature and thereby stifles human perception of beauty in nature.
As we learn more about the depletion of the rain forests, global warming, and the extinction of species, and take an expanded custodial attitude toward the planet, the wonder born of innocence and detachment from nature is likely to change. Where people are unable to experience feelings of awe in their regular surroundings, they tend to seek amplified experiences. In the United States, national parks such as Yosemite that offer extremes of natural magnitude in sheer cliff walls and waterfalls have become overcrowded. Another response is conveyed in Derek Johnston's image of Havisu Falls, near the Grand Canyon in Arizona. In the image, wild nature is bottled and displayed as a specimen contained in a plain gallon jug.
Where nineteenth-century inquiry focused on the visible manifestations of nature, such as geologic transformation and biological evolution, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries attention turned to the invisible, yet crucial building-blocks of nature, from sub-atomic particles to the human genome. For South-African-born New York City resident Gary Schneider (b. 1954), science and technology have permanently altered the portrait, shifting it away from external appearances— a traditional source of beauty— to the irreducible kernel of identity lodged in the human chromosome. As historian and curator Ann Thomas observed, Schneider's series of photographs, Genetic Self-portrait, is simultaneously a depiction of his uniqueness and a portrait of our time, which tries to square cultural conditioning with the strength and scope of biological determinism, implied by the fact that, across the human spectrum, individual differences reside in only I percent of our genetic make-up. Despite its title, Schneider's series extends beyond nuggets of genetic information to personal interpretation. Simply prepared photograms of Schneider's hands and ears accompany chromosome sequences. The medium he uses—the platinum print— was a favorite of the Pictorialists.
High resolution, sometimes computer-aided microscopic imaging allows the eye to look through the body at its smallest particles. The increasingly common experience of viewing DNA, in both the scientific community and the public realm, marks another crucial stage in the historical process of seeing inside the body, which began with the X-ray, and now includes such techniques as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound scanning. Each of these techniques employs non-photographic means that are translated into computer-enhanced images, which are informally called pictures or photographs. Tomography, an advanced X-ray process, produces thin cross-sections of the body, not just from one point of view, like a photograph, but from 360 degrees. The ongoing Visible Human Project combines photography with the latest imaging devices to draw together an exhaustive archive of cross-sections of the human body to be used for medical research.
The dual response of fascination and revulsion that such investigations into the natural world can inspire has been taken up by American Catherine Chalmers (b. 1957). She poses home raised insects in front of shiny white backgrounds, as if they were fashion accessories. In her series of images called Food Chain, she adapted fashion photography to the diminutive realm of rapacious insects, who reduce each other to scattered limbs.
By contrast, Suzanne Bloom (b. 1943) and Ed Hill (b. 1935), both pioneers in DIGITAL IMAGING who work under the name MANUAL, see an encouraging watershed moment in humankind's relationship to nature augured in digital information and imagery. Using image manipulation software, they made combination pictures of forests and abstract shapes. Their installation of these photographs, The Constructed Forest, was subtitled "(‘This is the End- Let's Go On'—El Lissitzky)." It seized the Russian artist's idea that a new society must renounce the old Romantic art of self-expression and embrace industry and machine art, including photography, as the new wave of the future.
For MANUAL, photography is now an impotent Romantic art, and the computer a means through which social progress might be made. Nature and culture—the forest and a new, digital art— come together in MANUAL's work, pointing away from the old promise of industrialization toward the positive potential of cyberspace.
No other technological innovation in the history of photography, a medium regularly jolted by inventions and their commercialization, brought on such drastic conjectures about the future as did electronic or digital imaging. Computer-assisted picture-making made a largely unremarked-upon appearance in a 1966 work by American John Mott-Smith (b. 1930), shown in John Szarkowski's 1978 book Mirrors and Windows. Extensive discussion about the social consequences of computer-manipulated images sprang not directly from art practice, but from the public's reaction to stunning special effects in such movies as the Star Wars series, which began in 1977, and through the rapid spread of computers in the late twentieth century, which supplied the print and broadcast media with enhanced capacity to alter photographs easily and expertly.
When the cover picture of the February 1982 issue of National Geographic showed two of the famous pyramids at Giza in Egypt somewhat closer together than they are in fact, digital imaging overstepped a previously inconspicuous line between socially accepted fiction, such as Star Wars, and unacceptable tampering with the appearance of optical reality. National Geographic gave the public the jitters about the capacity for computer-assisted pictures to lie.
POST PHOTOGRAPHY
THE END
In 1839, when photography was disclosed to the world, painter Eugène Delaroche, a supporter of photography, is rumored to have declared, "From today, painting is dead." The attribution is probably apocryphal, and in any event painting is still a very living art. Nevertheless, the remark became part of photographic folklore and has been repeatedly enlisted to insinuate that an ironic, cosmic cadence is at work in the history of the medium. If painting was killed by photography, then photography might be destined to die by means of a new medium. For example, while lauding the success of color photography in a 1985 issue of Creative Camera, Susan Butler claimed that "From today black and white is dead." Before long all of photography would be declared vanquished at the hands of an even more robust and welcome reformer.
In the 1990s, the critic Nicholas Mirzoeff looked back and identified traditional camerawork's time of demise, announcing that "photography met its own death some time in the 1980s at the hands of computer imaging." Likewise, William J. Mitchell, an early advocate of digital manipulation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, paraphrased Delaroche, announcing in 1992 that "from this moment on, photography is dead—or more precisely, radically and permanently redefined as was painting one hundred and fifty years before."
A more measured yet minority view was expressed by Spanish photographer and critic Joan Fontcuberta, who noted that, because the computer has become "a sophisticated technological prosthesis we cannot do without," it is not surprising that artists would use it as an accessory to their work, like a filter or a telephoto lens. Fontcuberta pointed out that previous technological improvements did not fundamentally alter the medium, and that "the metamorphosis from silver grains to pixels is not itself that significant." After all, he cautioned, "the silver-grained structure of actual photographs has already been replaced in the print media by the photomechanical dot." Moreover, he reasoned, from its inception, all photography has been "altered" in the sense that the camera frames and focuses on a chosen subject, thus eliminating other topics. Manipulation, Fontcuberta argued, "is exempt of moral value." What should be judged is the intent of the manipulation, not the process itself.
Deceitful photographs, perhaps the most prominent concern from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, did not start with the computer. In the 1870s, photographer Eugène Appert staged scenes with actors and used old-fashioned cut-and-paste methods on the resultant photographs to contrive political subtle propaganda for the forces opposing the French Commune. Comparable attempts to alter recorded history were made on behalf of Joseph Stalin during his dictatorial rule in the U.S.S.R. from 1929 to 1953. Officials such as Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) who fell from favor were physically eliminated and their portraits were air-brushed out of group photographs. Still, the availability of the means to falsify photographs does not mean that photographs will be routinely adulterated.
Anxiety about the effects of digital technology is the latest appearance of photography's oldest ghost, technological determinism, which continues to evoke illusory beliefs that, in its relative simplicity, past photography was more innocent than contemporary modes, and that "straight" photography is the norm of camerawork. During the 1980s and 1990s, concern for the possibly malevolent effects of computer-manipulated photographs overshadowed other powerful ways in which photographs have been and will continue to be deceptive. Omitting images, such as the scenes of forced labor that Aleksandr Rodchenko excluded from his series on the building of the White Canal, can be as deceitful as reshaping pictures. Moreover, in a medium that thrives in multiples, a potential taken further by computer replication, important subjects can be hidden in plain sight in the midst of a plethora of distracting pictures.
Analyses of photographs of the Gulf War (1990-91) reveal that news magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report ran pictures of military hardware more than any other subject. Virtually no pictures of actual combat were shown, and the few photographs of American casualties that found their way into print followed the iconography established during the Korean War, as in David Turnley's (b. 1955) image of a grieving, wounded soldier accompanying the body of a dead comrade on an evacuation helicopter. Most television coverage was of military briefings and interviews with politicians and experts." Nevertheless, the public perception persists that Operation Desert Storm was witnessed up close on television screens across the world. Delaying the publication of pictures is yet another form of concealment.
During the Gulf War, Time magazine and the Associated Press wire service (AP) both refused to publish or distribute grisly photographs of the charred bodies of Iraqi troops killed along the so-called "highway of death." Eventually Time published one of these pictures, in a year-end round-up issue, about nine months after the war. Potentially, computer-assisted and disseminated images may fall into any or all of these modes of misrepresentation. Indeed, computer-assisted photographs have largely followed paths already heavily trodden by past photographic practice.
KEITH COTTINGHAM, Untitled (Triple), 1993.
Digitally constructed color photograph.
Digital triplets pose the Three Graces of Greek mythology. The too-perfect shadow on the standing figure's abdomen, the breadth of his collarbone, which seems to sweep over his shoulders like the ribbons on a cape, and the highlights in his hair that resemble brushstrokes, remind the viewer that these figures are fabricated.
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Describing the work of Mexican artist and photojournalist Pedro Meyer (b. 1935), Joan Fontcuberta observed that Meyer's pictures run the gamut from snapshots to digitally altered images that obviously stray far from the appearance of optical reality. In general, that range describes the great extent to which computer-assisted imaging is used in newspapers, books, art, advertising, propaganda, and even pornography. A few photographs benefit from being unretouched, while most are adjusted to differing degrees on the computer screen. Computer manipulation has largely replaced and upgraded darkroom techniques of retouching photographs.
Although it is possible for computers to compile data and create pictures that mimic the appearance of the world without ever using visual bits of information captured from optical reality, at the present time that practice is largely confined to entertainment vehicles, such as animated films and computer games. Most digitally modified pictures are processed so as to make them look more "real," and thereby convey notions of truth that have freighted the medium from the first. To denote this state of looking real by being made through digital means, Joan Fontcuberta invented the term, the vrai-faux (the true-false) and applied it to Pedro Meyer's particular use of the illusion of three-dimensional, photographic space in his magical, digitally-altered photographs.
Critic Katy Siegel recently remarked that Andreas Gursky's photographs "look loud," because he "digitally tweaked the colors for maximum saturation, to almost hallucinatory effect." Gursky's "tweaking" also extends to transporting or removing forms and figures, but not to the point that it is evident to the casual viewer. For Gursky and many other digital technology users, the computer facilitates the production of clearly detailed enlargements. Perhaps the best example of the persistence of photography as an idea issues from the millions of cyberspace- dwelling vernacular images of births, parties, and vacation trips, taken with digital cameras or made chemically, printed, and then scanned into computers. These images are widely understood by their makers and viewers to be historically continuous with chemically-based photographs, regardless of their electronic means of recording and dissemination.
Just as the notion of photography as optical truth has lived on in the digital era, past themes, concepts, and styles carried through into the present. Canadian Dyan Marie (b. 1954) employs digital techniques to soften and swirl forms, in the manner of Surrealists such as Salvador Dali, in whose best-known work, The Persistence of Memory (1931), pocket watches melt like warm cheese. The ease with which computer software can appropriate, intermingle, and also dissolve images ensures the perpetuation of Surrealism's appeal to the incongruous, what the French poet the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) (1846-1870) famously called the beautiful "chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" (Les Chants de Maldoror, 1868).
Digital processes have also been used by social campaigners and critics such as Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, for whom they facilitate copying old photographs and collaging them with bits of appropriated imagery, to create pointed yet humorous indictments of Eurocentric points of view. In his work, Taiwanese artist Chieh-Jen Chen (b. 1960) has moved from performance art to digital photographs, in which he inserts himself into disturbing historical images of Chinese history. Like many users of computer-assisted software, Chen paints and draws using the pen attached to the digital touchpad. Some electronic processes rely on a computer mouse to select and merge images, where others depend on traditional manual dexterity. In other words, computer-assisted image production has not completely superseded traditional drafting skills. Perhaps that is why critics lauded Canadian Jeff Wall (b. 1946) for reinventing painting in the 1990s.
Wall continues to work in the pre-digital format he developed two decades ago. He stages episodes for the camera, and displays the resulting images as large transparencies placed in front of light boxes, like those used to illuminate advertisements. Sometimes he has concocted scenes of contemporary life, making visual reference to famous paintings by Édouard Manet (1832- 1883) or Paul Cézanne (1839-1906); in other instances, he updated the genre of history painting, transposing it to views of current events. His use of computer assistance is not usually evident in his final images, except in their large size, whose overall clarity is more readily attained with the assistance of software. For Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, Near Mogor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986), actors depicted an incident reminiscent of epic history paintings such as Antoine-Jean Gros's (1771-1835) Napoleon on the Battlefield at Eylau (1808), which filled a large canvas with a harsh winter battlefield, sensational gore, implausible heroism, and an incidental character who looked accusingly at the viewer.
Where Wall brings postmodern quotation into the present, Japanese photographer Yasumasa Morimura (b. 1951) pursues the movement's uneasiness with fixed notions of gender and ethnic identity. Before and since digital assistance became very widely available, Morimura made self-portraits in the guise of famous pictures. He inserted himself into the self-portrait by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), which showed the artist with a bandaged ear. In his more recent work, Morimura enacted celebrated photographs of Western movie actresses, including Marilyn Monroe, in her famous pin-up pose published in Playboy. Since the computer could have been used to conjure a more convincing imitation, one assumes that he intended to show the artificial breast-bra, polyester wig, lipstick-enlarged lips, and whitish make-up. Especially for a Japanese audience, these accoutrements are reminiscent of Japanese kabuki, a traditional form of theater in which men play all the women's roles.
Mariko Mori (b. 1976) similarly stars in and produces her own work, employing cutting-edge digital devices. In Pure Land, her candy-colored galaxy is inhabited by futuristic images culled and combined from postwar monster movies, popular toys, and even bubble-gum flavors, such as artificial blueberry. Pure Land also recalls the Japanese concept of the "floating world." Once a Buddhist notion for transcendence of the material world, the floating world was appropriated in the seventeenth century to characterize transient pleasures, and eventually applied to the elaborate erotic etiquette of the geisha, whose robes Mori seems to be wearing. Like Morimura, Mori jumbles references to tradition, commerce, fashion, and Japan's infatuation with the West into pictures that play on the persistent bearing of the past on the present.
Unexpectedly, the time saved by digital means allows some image-makers to make wider use of older, more time-consuming media. For example, Keith Cottingham (b. 1965) electronically hybridizes photographs of his soft-clay sculpture and anatomical drawing with appropriated images of race, gender, and age. The resultant image, as in his Fictitious Portraits series, recalls the cool light and sensuous skin tones of late Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Electronic reproduction permits Cottingham to "use and abuse photography's myth, its privileged claim to the real." Like Andres Serrano's images of bodily fluids, Cottingham's pictures, are, in his words, "both beautiful and horrific," playing on the psychological longing to substitute the picture for the real thing.
Perhaps in response to a world in which humans increasingly interact with machines, some image-makers have adapted the photograph to electronic environments that reciprocate the movements of visitors. In Polish-American artist Miroslaw Rogala's (b. 1954) Lover's Leap, computers track a viewer throughout the installation. Lover's Leap is far removed from Edward Steichen's Family of Man exhibition, in which the viewer's path through the exhibit was as carefully determined as the images that could be seen there. Describing Rogala's installation, curator Lynne Warren voiced an increasingly familiar declaration: "This is the post-photographic image. The image-maker is no longer the godlike determinant of perspective and viewpoint."
Rogala's work is physically based in a gallery, but long-time critic of American foreign policy, photographer Esther Parada (b. 1938), has taken advantage of digital montage for almost twenty years, and for a while made work that was entirely web-based. She orchestrated interactive sites, such as Transplant: A Tale of Three Continents (Wherein a Victorian love story between a Chicago heiress and an English aristocrat reveals a web of colonial maneuvers connecting the United States, England, and India).
Viewers were invited to follow their own path among photographs that are plainly or enigmatically labeled. A story about a young bride "transported" from her family home and then to India unfolded in an indirect, non-linear way, with clickable asides about such topics as British imperialist conduct in India during the nineteenth century. The essence of this phase of Parada's work-extensive series of photographs, framed by suggestive text, and made available on the World Wide Web—captured the imagination of those who long for inexpensive means of disseminating images and text beyond established institutions such as newspapers and galleries.
Democratic access to images and to information developed as a permanent ideal in Western culture during the Enlightenment. It became attached to photography by the mid-nineteenth century, as in the enthusiasm expressed by an anonymous writer in an 1858 issue of the English journal The Athenaeum, who foresaw an educational revolution caused by stereographic photography, such that “perhaps in ten years or so the question will be seriously discussed... whether it will be of any use to travel now that you can send out your artist to bring home Egypt in his carpetbag to amuse the drawing room with." Of course, international travel is an everyday event in the West these days, but remains beyond the economic means or political access of viewers in many countries. Indeed, it has been estimated that 95 percent of the world's computers are in the developed countries.
While websites may eventually offer more users a global reach into visual information, a strong countervailing trend developed at the beginning of the third millennium. Image-makers, museums, galleries, news organizations, and image archives have responded to the commercial possibilities of the web by commodifying more and more pictures in extensive pay-per-view-or-use operations. For example, Corbis.com, an image-bank holding over seventy million pictures, was established by Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 1989. It resembles a nineteenth-century photographic studio from which users could get images in many sizes and qualities, ranging from postcards to archival prints. In image-banks, the name of the photographer is often omitted in favor of subject-matter. Mark Getty, founder of Getty Images and descendant of the family that founded the Getty petroleum firm, also owns about seventy million photographs. He succinctly summed up the economic potential of images when he remarked that "intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century." Together, Gates and Getty control almost 50 percent of the nearly two-billion-dollar imagery business. Armchair travel on the web, through photographs of historic events, as well as the world's vistas and its art, may eventually acquire a price tag.
FACE VALUE
The Fall 1993 cover of a special issue of Time magazine used computer software to create a female image of multiethnic America, combining physical attributes of Anglo-Saxons, Asians, Africans, and Hispanics, with those of people from South Europe and from the Middle East. To keep her from looking like the fabricated product she was, designers gave her an engaging semi-smile, and used shadows to imply the slightly asymmetrical face of real humans. The concept of merging portrait photographs has a long history, going back to the late nineteenth-century combination portraits of English scientist Francis Galton. During the 1980s, American Nancy Burson (b. 1948) achieved notoriety for her eerie computer-generated composite pictures that blended the facial features of politicians including Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Hitler, and Khomeni, or film stars such as Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe. Her blend of Black, Asian, and Caucasian features into an ominous mugshot struck some critics such as Allan Sekula as a pointless use of the computer's skills.
Today, Burson's smudgy black-and-white computer-assisted prints look dated and graceless, because more recent digital equipment and software, pioneered in television and advertising production, offer crisp, ultra-naturalistic, and seamless production values. Contemporary computer imaging in art, journalism, and commerce tends toward sharp realizations, oddly reminiscent of the daguerreotype, whose mirror-like surface simultaneously gripped foreground and background visual detail, challenging how the human eye sees. With a little know-how, the average personal computer user can achieve a professional-looking image. In fact, computer-assisted imaging has universalized the appearance of advertising pictures. Insofar as image-makers are attracted to changing high-tech systems, they are involved in an incessant and expensive game of catch-up brought about by the vast proliferation of image-enhancing techniques, and the rapid obsolescence of software and computers. Digital devices age rapidly: today's state-of-the-art gear will soon show up at the beauty salon to offer customers a chance to try on new hairdos.
PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICE
Even commentators wary of inflated digital enthusiasm are convinced, with Joan Fontcuberta, that "the true computer- photography fusion gives rise to a powerful electronic laboratory, which introduces factors too decisive for us to sustain our conventional views of image making." From the vantage point of 1995, he predicted that the widespread use of digital-imaging by amateurs would vanquish the notion of photo- graphic objectivity while permitting a faster and larger dialogue among artists and the public. Ironically, both digital ardor and digital angst owe to earlier postmodern attitudes, which questioned the truth-value of traditional photography while simultaneously hailing the social power of mass media. By the nature of its production techniques, digital imaging seems to have undermined the authority of the traditional photograph as an index of the material world. At the same time, the union of the photograph, the computer, and high-speed, broad-band transmission chimes with cultural dreams about a democratic art. Unfortunately, picture-theory and philosophy, while helpful, are not adequate to the job of assessing the domain of digital imaging, because this realm is extending at such high speed into all areas of commerce, government, and private life.
The wider picture is glimpsed in The Dystopia Series created and commented upon by Aziz & Cucher (American Anthony Aziz [b. 1961] and Venezuelan Sammy Cucher [b. 1958]). In their large prints, sitters pose thoughtfully, while computer-generated skin closes their eyes, mouths, and ears. These "desensitized" humans, whose minds are cut off from direct perception of the world, stand for the pair's suspicion of blind faith in digital futures, which they perceive as similar to the naive confidence that people in the second half of the twentieth century had with regard to the promise of nuclear power and the rewards of space travel. Recognizing that cyberspace brings with it the potential "democratization of the artistic impulse," they still counsel that uncritical attitudes toward the cyber world will only deepen the individual self-centeredness promoted by an online life, while diminishing the collective experience they deem crucial to society's welfare. Aziz & Cucher accuse technophiles of hymning a new romanticism, drawn from the jargon of biogenetics, computer science, and popular psychology, to exalt "a smooth universe of interfaces, amazing speed, multilocality, and superconductivity, populated by friendly cyborgs, artificially intelligent machines and the shallow creations of our transpersonal selves." "No one seems to care," they admonish, "that this idealized world functions on the basis of extreme human isolation, mediated experience, and global consumerism."
At photography's inception, when thinkers such as François Arago and William Henry Fox Talbot speculated about the medium's future, they saw it integrated into art, science, and industry, without a peep of protest on the part of those affected by the changes it might bring. The idea that photography so faithfully indexed the world made it seem objective, an aloof scribe, not an excitable, rabble-rousing partisan. Their scientific training disposed them to recognize that the medium's accepted neutral vision would become attached to the ideal of free and open information systems. They could not have foreseen that their medium would largely be responsible for generating the notion that mediated experience was to be dreaded, because it brought with it alienation from other humans and the shriveling of existence into an obsession with material pursuits. Nor could Arago and Talbot have anticipated that photography's compound of human wrongdoings would become the catalyst for conjectures about the medium's future.
A positive, even lyrical perception of mass media was constructed by the Cuban-born artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who mused about how to rephrase the medium's contradictions while waiting tables. Improvising on Alfred Stieglitz's renowned series of Equivalents, a set of cloud photographs made to demonstrate that symbols of transcendence were freely available to those who looked for them in nature, Gonzalez-Torres stacked in a gallery hundreds of inexpensively produced pictures of clouds to be taken away by visitors. Whereas Stieglitz's Equivalents eventually sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, Gonzalez-Torres's mass-produced pictures were free.
Photography's future is not a leaden certainty because people such as Gonzalez-Torres view the inconsistencies in its network of history, ideas, and practices as chafing faultlines whose energy can be routed to spark new insight and promise. However much we must be on our guard for the negative social effects of new media, we can also stay alert for and encourage new visions.