Photography has always been intimately connected with the notion of modernity, realism, and Western ways of seeing. Modernity also, as Don Slater notes in his essay "Photography and Modern Vision," makes magic disappear. The instruments of modernity, Slater argues, demystifies and distances us from experiencing the world in our own unique way -- instead, we relie on the media to provide its own version of reality.
What seems to trouble Slater is the realization that once we substitute our own imagination and critical consciousness for resemblences and representations something is bound to get lost. Modernity, of which photography has played a most impressive role, Slater observes, "... Is a project of disenchantment or demythification which rigorously reduces the world to its appearance, its visible surface; it reduces both the knowable and the existent world to the observable properties (colour, mass, shape) and behaviour of material things: the world is merely matter in motion."
It is worth considering how digital photography irrevocably changes our long-standing attachment to realism. The digital universe we now inhabit feels more malleable, immediate, and often more irrational, than in the past. The digital universe is also more experimental by nature. The line between verification and falsification has become increasingly more arbitrary and ambiguous. We can easily rationalize our dependence upon faster, cheaper, and easier to use photographic technologies, because we have become obsessed with immediacy and instant satisfaction.
Photo Credit: Warner Bros. "300"
The "green-screen effect" on ways of seeing and believing is a paradigm shift that moves us increasingly away from realism.
Today, the digital universe encourages the "green screen" effect of knowing and experiencing the world around us. The "green screen effect" is a process where background information is later layered and superimposed upon the subject. The digital universe and the force of the green-screen effect embodies a technological rationality that subjugates our senses and takes to, some extent the magic from the world.