The camera's capacity to frame, freeze and fix experience in time has emerged from the basic human desire to shape, authenticate, and rationalize our relationship to the world and our place in it. Today, in a culture bombarded with visually-mediated messages, due in great part to the advance of digital technologies, the allure of creating and possessing increasingly personalized accounts of reality persists. The fundamental characteristics of photography -- the framing, freezing, and fixing of moments -- has become technologically less challenging and cumbersome in a digital environment. The ease and speed in which higher quality images can be made digitally empowers people to move beyond technology to concentrate more on visually storytelling. The challenge now becomes a question of how to interpret all these stories.
Today, anyone with a camera phone or point and shoot digital camera can be a visual storyteller. Advances in digital photography such as liquid lenses, faster buffers, higher resolutions, larger storage capacities, and wireless telephony signify the possibility of democratizing ways of seeing, knowing, and sharing the world with on another. Instead of looking at the advance of digital photography as a threat to privacy, the demise of photojournalism, or even an influence on decreased attention spans, the potential of building communities of observers and the observed emerges. The photograph as an extension of our desire to share, explain, celebrate, expose, explore, and denounce the human condition is being played out every day on the Internet through sites like Flickr and personal photo blogs.
However, the photograph is also very much a highly redacted and rarefied slice of life -- one in which the photographer's intention sometimes becomes suspect. Even at its very best, the photograph can never replace the array of moral complexities present at the moment of capture. At the same time, with the increasing advance of digital technologies there appears to be an urgency in questioning the authenticity of the image as well as the credibility of the photographer.
Tom Wheeler in his book, Photo Fact or Photo Fiction, explores this consequence of the digital age.
Wheeler notes:
Larger questions abound. What is the future of photographic credibility and, by extension, the credibility of all visual media, in an age when even amateur shutterbugs have access to increasingly affordable digital cameras...?
Johanna Drucker observes that the possibility of altering images digitally, and by extension reality, does not necessarily radically transform truth. However, what digital technologies have done, according to Drucker, is actually extend the "possibilities of sustainable disbelief." In other words, what digital photography has introduced into our naive and gullible ways of seeing the world is an increased sense of skepticism and disbelief of the visual. In a hyper-mediated world of instant everything on the Internet, this growing distrust of the visual will have positive and negative consequences. For example, since the introduction of the camera phone, we have already seen a knee-jerk crack down on making pictures in public spaces, especially in schools. However, on the positive side, the pervasiveness of the cameras in society represents the possibility for greater transparency in governance, community building and social responsibility.
As Marshall McLuhan contends all forms of media are an extension of self.
“ In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness” (McLuhan, 1951).