Photography, since its inception, has always been about ritual and ritualized experience. Human beings depend emotionally and intellectually on ritual as a way of making sense of the chaos that living can bring about. Rituals provide order and logic to an otherwise endless and often times senseless series of experiences. Rituals, in this way, can be thought of in terms of either secular ceremonial acts or as established routines.
A classic example of a photographic ritual can be seen when someone is asked to have their picture taken. "Can I take your picture," I say. "Sure," you respond. "What do you want me to do," they add.
"Say Cheese?"
This most predictable response between observed to observer has been played out for more than 150 years.
Sociologist Erving Goffman (1967, 1969) studied interaction rituals between peoples. Goffman suggests that interaction rituals are based on a set of unspoken expectations and obligations. In the example above, since I have the camera, there is an expectation that I must know what I want or that I know what I am doing. Along with the expectations I hold of making a picture, the observed also feels a sense of expectation as well as obligation. The observed's sense of expectation about the image will depict them after it is made, however, places the sense of obligation back on on me. This is the cycle of expectation and obligation that happens in a ritualized practice.
Along with expectations and obligations in the photographic ritual, there is also a strong sense of performance or theater that is played out both in front of as well as behind the camera.
Goffman’s Interaction Ritual suggests that that relationships between photographer and subject may be influenced by the immediacy of the digital camera. Social relationships between photographers and subjects constitute a complex symbolic universe of visual rituals that signifies a culture of surveillance. Goffman suggests:
Interaction rituals impinge “upon the individual in two general ways: directly, as obligations, establishing how he is morally constrained to conduct himself; indirectly, as expectations, establishing how others are morally bound to act in regard to him” (p. 49).
Goffman’s model of interaction ritual provides a richer context for evaluating the complexities of professional conduct and ethical behavior in photography
To take this argument even further, photographic rituals are situated within cultural practices that symbolically reorganize sensory experience.
David Tomas (1982) contends, “Photographic activity can therefore be considered a ritual, for it represents a formal sequence of acts, an ordered pattern, the purpose of which is to transmit a collective message to ourselves.”
The characteristics of digital photography eliminate sequences in the ritual process of image production, which was traditionally comprised of three major stages of production: “the taking of the photograph, the development of the negative, and the printing of a positive.”
With digital photography, as in the Polaroid process, the traditional “liminal” period of the latent image—one that transforms the subject into a negative and then back into a positive print—is altered. Symbolically, the liminal period granted the photojournalist a greater degree of autonomy from the subject.
Historically, according to Tomas, the ceremonial ritual of separation in photography consisted of two distinct rites, the capture of an image in a viewfinder followed by processing and development in the darkroom. Therefore, the symbolic transformations of reality occurring between the subject, photographer and viewer correspond to face-to-face interaction rituals on one hand, and optical-chemical processes on the other hand.
In digital photography, the transitional rite of exposing, developing and printing is accelerated in the age of an instance—one which provides the photographer more creative control over the image by what is referred to by professionals as “chimping.”
Chimping is a colloquial term used by photojournalist because the actions of reviewing frames on-site appear similar to the actions of monkeys preening. What are the implications of a visual encounter in which the subject is no longer symbolically "separated" from the world through periods of liminality and latency?
How does photographic ritual change in a digital age? How does the immediacy of the digital experience intensify the image-making process for both observer and observed?
Digital photography's capacity for intensifying relationships
temporally and spatially has yet to be fully explored or understood. We must think of the act of photography as a communicative exchange between the observer and the observed that is based on the series of expectations and obligations that come from the creation of interpersonal exchange. This exchange, however, in a digital age intensifies relationships by the immediacy of fixing a moment in time and space that differs from previous experiences with film.
The digital camera also levels the playing field of specialization in the picture making process. Just as the Kodak One and the Brownie camera popularized and democratized photographic practices and routines for the average person in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so does the digital camera in the 21st century.
As people adjust to and move away from the liminality embedded in the ritual of making images with film to the immediacy and intensification of digital photography a period of angst and discomfort is underway.
The rituals of digital photography alter how we consume visual images without the extra time or liminality film gave us to fully digest the experience. We no longer are patient with ourselves in fulfilling our sense of expectations or obligations with digital photography. This is the "I wanted it yesterday" generation played out to its fullest sense.
Previous analog experience with film forced us to digest the act of recording simply because of the liminality of film. Some photographers fear that they are losing control of the autonomy they once enjoyed when using film. No longer can photographers expect to go unchallenged over the control over when an image is viewed by the subject.
Personally, I feel the experience of sharing helps to build rapport and trust between the observer and the observed. I think our responsibility as photographers rests in our ability to affirm the human condition through images when words fail us. I see this with my students' work and how hard it is to teach photography as a transformative experience not only for the photographer but also for the subject.
Digital may make some aspects of photography easier for many people, but it may also complicate things as well. Using a digital camera I do not have the same feeling of permanency as I had with film. With digital, the process makes me feel like I am dealing more with data than with the relationship between the tangiblities of such things as tonalities and contrast.
In the end, however, photography is still about relationships and about ritualized experience. Images still need to be about immediacy, intensity and intimacy -- even if fleeting.
