Digital Photography

"It doesn't really matter if this is photography or not. However, the new may turn out to bear more than a close relation to what has gone on before."

It is not an uncommon fact that new developments in digital technologies have caused a stir throughout the photographic art world. However it is only in recent years with such technologies becoming more accessible, both financially and through a larger distribution, plus the ease at which unspecialised people could pick up and use these changes that the stir has shifted to a more negative note. Questions are now arising on whether such developments should be used and in doing so what differences this will make to the outcome of the contemporary world.

Digital photography was created in order to aid our development in science. The very first digital images were sent back to earth from satellites allowing scientist to see the happenings out in deeper space. Its function was to inform, and provide us with the means of understanding the truth about our world and the ways it worked both from the outside and from the inside too, therefore in its early years digital photography was taken has portraying the undoubted truth and nothing else

"the photographic procedure, like ... scientific procedures, seems to provide a guaranteed way of overcoming subjectivity and getting at the real truth"

(Martin Lister 1995 P34)

Scientists are constantly updating their ways of inventing and photography was the latest stepping-stone in their path to understanding the truth, however it was soon clear that even digital photography had its limits causing a new solution to be found. They focused on the codes which light was transferred into in order for the digital image to be created and it wasn't long before they were able to alter these codes and in doing so were able to alter the overall image, or even create an image from scratch. Such people as scientists Marxist Bertolt Brecht and Ian Hacking believed that this update could actually prove more effective than the previously unmanipulated images, with Brecht explaining that an 'artificial, invented or constructed' image could create more useful information than a simple photographic image, for example a digital satellite photograph cannot capture the inside of unknown buildings. Hacking believed that manipulating a photograph to remove unwanted 'noise' wasn't actually removing information from the image, it was in fact making the image clearer to see.

Edwards has mentioned in his statement that digital manipulation bared a close resemblance to what has gone on before, however I think that in relation to science this isn't the case. I think that science is constantly updating and moving forward with its technology, always learning from the past but