After Photography – Fred Ritchin
Summary of Chapter One – “Into the Digital”
By Victor G. Banigo
“Photography is a reflection of the societies that have spawned and embrace it.” Ritchin is saying that photographs show our unnoticed real world to us. However, we have to accept photographs for them to make meaning to us.
Ritchin described photography as “powerful instigator” which I think means that a photograph can set an agenda and raise rational discourse.
Ritchin emphasized that the digital age has introduced the “Digital revolution”, where the media brings our past experiences in a new form popularly called the new media, social media and open media.
Ritchin gives examples of how digital devices are given names from nature and our daily utilities – like “apple, mouse, web, windows, word, firefox…”
The poetic author in describing the analog system quoted one MIT Psychologist Sherry Turkle, who observed that the ancient Desktop produced by Macintosh was not user friendly. In the same vein, Ritchin highlighted the view of another writer, Umberto Eco who ridiculed the analog system as a step-by-step to salvation process with the MS-DOS like the Protestant group while Windows took the Anglican-style schism.
The digital system has created an evolution in the media as Ritchin highlighted some of the features of the digital media:
- Leverage abstraction – reveals everything we see in a photograph or movie.
- Nonlinearity – is the behavior of a circuit, particularly an amplifier, in which the output signal strength does not vary in direct proportion to the input signal strength.
- Circumvention of nature
- Stimulates new philosophies of life
- Translate everything into data
- Images can be output as music
- Music can be turned into text
- Sounds can be mixed to produce different sound
- Playing with data – change format
- Architecture of infinitely repeatable abstractions – original and copy are the same and as such, the original loses its meaning. (During our enrolment, our documents were scanned and we were told that if we misplace our originals, we can come and make another original from what was scanned.
- Changing / reshuffling of books, movies, photographs sequence
- Right to “Consumer choice”
- Photographic act – omnipresent communication strategy: you can take a photograph and print it immediately.
- Introduction of Webcams – Live telephone conversation
- Introduction of Satellite – Live broadcast via the internet
Despite these features, Ritchin quoted Microsoft executive Linda Stone who described text messages and e-mails as “continuous partial attention”. I think she is correct because most of us spend hours reading and replying messages. Moreover, it is a challenge to some couple as they do not have time for their marital responsibilities.
Ritchin compares automobile to photograph as he says that photograph creates new realities making us view the world as photographic. An example of my study of the photographic world is the “Unphotographable” by Michael David Murphy.
However, Ritchin quoted a sculptor Alberto Giacometti who 40 years ago did not see the world as photographic: “My view of the world was a photographic view, like I believe that it is for almost everybody, no?… One never sees things, one always see them through a screen.”
Concluding, Ritchin stated “Once the world has been photographed it is never again the same” which I think implies the art of distortion through photography.
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