Technological innovation has always played a significant role in the history of photography. With innovations in digital technology––cameras, computers, image editing software and telephony––photographic routines in photojournalism are being driven by a relentless push toward faster, cheaper and greater quantities of information.
Digital technology increasingly intensifies and fundamentally changes the way people think, feel and act toward making images. Albeit an overly deterministic and simplistic comment, the consequences of shifting from film-based to digital photography are only just now emerging. It seems fairly obvious to me that there is a strong relationship between how productive and how empowered a photographer feels using a digital camera. However, do these facets of routine necessarily change the nature of photography?
Perhaps not in the way we think.
As many observers have argued, it has been suggested that the camera, be it film or digital, is a tool for communicating information and ideas between a source and a user. The camera is an extension of the seer and the seen. People tend to act predictably in front of and behind the camera, but the immediacy of the digital format is what alters the experience from prior experiences with film.
The speed in which communication takes place in a digital age does have the potential to impact the encounter significantly. Moreover, it is not only the camera that is changing the landscape of how we capture and exchange “moments” and “memories.” Along with the camera, the user must how become familiar with other technologies, including computers, software programs, and electronic storage, and telephony, especially cellular technology.
All of this complicates how we talk about digital photography, because it’s not just about taking pictures anymore. It is about how we take, select, size, store, and share the images with one another on printed page or computer screen. It is about how we decide to interact with one another when making pictures with a digital camera. It is about the science as well as the moral agency of making pictures in a digital age.
In a recent survey of professional photojournalists 75 percent of respondents claimed that they not received training in the use of the digital camera. In fact, most of the knowledge photojournalists have about digital technology comes from word of mouth or the Internet.
Even higher education has been hard pressed to keep up with these transitions. For Jon Jeffery, “New technologies have recently changed the universal body of knowledge that defines the foundation for teaching in professional photographic education.”
In the classroom, the changes in what students are required to know about photography is not just about making technically clean, well composed and meaningful images. The days of standing under the amber and red safelights in a darkroom watching prints develop are ending. Now, students must understand the techno-speak of computer geeks and photo gear heads.
Students now often face the harsh reality of technological malaise with concerns over increased image contrast, dot gain, editing and storage. In an all-digital environment, photogrpahy is no longer as mysterious, magical, or even as sexy and hanging out in a darkroom making a perfect print. Digital technology makes the process of producing images for publication more clinical and less quaint.
When we think about what photographers have to do now in order to make a publication deadline compared to what we did only 15 years ago, it is easy to understand the discontent and sense of frustration expressed by some professionals.
As Grazia Neri contends, “Reflection is necessary also on the subject of the new technologies: photograph scanning, digital transmission, the Internet. Many photographers consider the advent of digital technology a collective misfortune, which it is not possible to escape. The digital world is here to stay. It is a world that can be improved.”