It is interesting that both of the following papers were written twenty years ago. As historical documents this is not difficult to comprehend but the conclusion that we have to look at the past, present and future in a different way holds good today.

Obedient Numbers, Soft Delight by Geoffry Batchen (1998)

The introduction to this project advises us to read the essay (1) by Geoffrey Batches which discusses the origin of todays computers.

The article commences with the claim that the development of photography is very similar to that of computing.

The origin of computing can apparently, be traced back to 1833. Babbage invented his Analytical Engine.  Babbage was a close associate of early photographers and especially Fox Talbot  whose work he displayed during his soirees. Talbot was a mathematician as well as photographer and worked with Babbage on his machines. He ‘created’ his first image using a camera obscure. This, he claimed was nature drawing its own likeness. Babbage meanwhile was using his machine to mathematically ‘create’ a result hence, like photography, disintegrating natural philosophy.

Talbot started to ‘make’ his lace contact prints from which he could make copies which would be black on white if the original was white on black. He made a magnified image of a piece of lace thus demonstrating it was made up of pixels. This lead to the use of cards, by Jacquard, to ‘program’ machines to make lace. The french used a type of human computer to set up their ordinance maps. Babbage then replaced these humans by ‘intelligent’ ‘programmable’ machines. Babbage’s machines were used to create ‘life tables’ hence transforming human beings into data.

Babbage was followed by the mathematician Boole who proposed that things were represented by the number 1 and the absence of things by the number 0. This is the basis of computing when we add three basic operations: And, Or, and Not. It is also the bases of metaphysics according to Jacques Derrida.

Photographic history like computing history is inscribed in the past. What we need to do now is perceive the past, present and future differently. We are not given any indication in this essay about how we might do this.

Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age By Geoffrey Batchen (1998)

The ‘death’ of photography seems to be a favourite topic of writers on the subject. I find this a little strange as photography, like other technological  developments, is continually on its own spectrum of development. it is continually changing and mostly improving. It would appear to me to be in rude good health.

The arrival of the computer, according to the article, was supposed to herald the death knell of photography. As discussed, in this article, computers offered the possibility to ‘doctor’ images. Images could be ‘faked’. It would no longer be possible to tell any original from its simulations. Ethically the situation would be changed. Photography as it had been known was dead.

In the early days photography had its own detrimental effect on other artistic genres. Everyone was, as is still the case, fighting for their share of a market.

The author wondered why photography took so long to be ‘invented’. Its inception seems to have been born with the death of ‘Nature Philosophy’. It’s early days a dance of life and death since it needed light to exist but was destroyed by exposure to light. Talbot described photography as ‘the art of fixing a shadow‘. It is hard for us to be impressed by the idea discussed in this paper that photography permits us to see the passing of time. Today we can see a photographed event which took place in the 1800’s.  We can ‘experience’ the past. Barthes describes photography as allowing us to see, this will be, and this has been.

The idea that digital imaging will be the death sentence of analogue photography is discussed. Bill Gates saw the potential of digitising early images and bought Corbis which makes available a huge archive of digitised analogue images. This, for me, is a maturing of photography rather than a death knell. It uses available technology to preserve the past.

Digitisation does offer the possibility to alter an original image. It removes this ‘truth’ element of earlier photography. Newspapers and magazines were disquieted by this possibility in the early days. But they have always altered images themselves. I loved the case cited of National Geographical ‘moving’ the pyramids closer together, presumably to ‘fit’ them on to the cover. We don’t blink today at the idea of manipulated images being used in publications. But in earlier photography we knew that what was photographed was in front of a camera and then photographed. Something had ‘been’ even if it was subsequently ‘altered’.

Where all this is changing is with the possibility that the computer can be programmed or manipulated to ‘create’ an image of someone or something which never existed.

Digital images are in time not of time

None of this pronounces the death of photography it is, as it has always been, an evolving technology. it is, and will continue, for the moment, to be, a system of concepts and relationships. But nothing is written in stone and may change with advancing technologies.

Photographic, it appears, is a logic that continually returns to haunt itself.

The paper concludes with the idea that photography will only die if we cease to want to make images. That it will evolve is inevitable. We may have to change our way of ‘seeing‘ and ‘being‘.

I knew the Spice Girls by Joan Fontcuberta (p56-63)

Fontcuberta opens this chapter with a personal story for 1997. He went to a photographic booth to get a passport photo. he was offered the possibility of inserting his own image into a preset image of a celebrity image he chose the Spice Girls. This sowed the seed for investigation from where photography had come in its analogue days to where it had arrived in 2014, the date of writing the book.

Photography in its early days produced, with the aid of chemicals, an object which could be looked at and archived. It represented what had been seen and reproduced. It contained information. It spoke ‘the truth’. It could not be easily manipulated except in expert hands.

Digital photography is ‘constructed’ with pixels. He likened it to the application of paint on a canvas with a brush. He felt that digital imaging should be the development from painting but somehow photography intruded in between fine art and digital imaging.

Digital photography differs from analogue in that it is easily manipulated. It can no longer be relied on to represent what had been in front of the lens at the time of making the picture. It can be easily distributed electronically and altered and re-altered along the way. The images are volatile in cyberspace. Can we rely on digital imagery in photojournalism? How much manipulation should/could be allowed. Will digital imaging set its own values in the future?

If anyone was to listen to President Donald Trump it is all fake news anyway…..

Many interesting question are asked in this chapter. Some questions, Fontcuberta indicates, he will attempt to answer in later chapters. It will make interesting reading.