I’m trying to work out some stuff about digital photography. I want to write a piece about digital photography but I am having trouble finding good literature out there on this subject. I can’t believe there’s not good stuff, it’s simply that I can’t find it. The books I have on digital culture are already getting on for a decade old.
For me the past 10 years has been dramatic. Now I have email, web, a camera, a video and voice recorder on my phone, a scanner, film editing software, photo manipulating software, a blog (obviously), a domain name (coming), multi-track music recording software, a digital SLR, a pocket HD video camera at home. This is all domestic market stuff, it’s relatively inexpensive – not professional. The population at large have the tools and the means to disseminate whatever they want. My question is – are they making art? Could we consider YouTube and Flickr and numerous blog sites a democratised, less mediated new gallery/museum/publishing system?
The massification and the unprecedented reproducability of digital photography has strengthened the aura around art/analogue photography. I am interested in the digital image and how Walter Benjamin’s revolution may actually be taking place now, 80 years after he wrote his essay on the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. But do I have 4,500 words on this?
Intellectual Simulation 