The Paradoxes of Digital Photography

The Paradoxes of Digital Photography Notes

·            Digital imaging represents a radical rupture with photography

·            Physical difference between photographic and digital technology leads to the difference in the logical status of film-based and digital images and also to the differences in their cultural perception

·            To consider concrete digital technologies and their uses

·            A digital image that is a thousand generations away from the original is  indistinguishable in quality from any one of its progenitors

·            There is much more degradation and loss of information between copies of digital images than between traditional photographs

·            Lossy compression is increasingly becoming the very foundation of digital visual culture

·            In theory digital technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise

·            Noise that is stronger than traditional photography

·            Another difference between traditional and digital concerns the amount of information contained in an image

·            A digital image consists of a finite number of pixels, having distinct color or tonal value, determining the amount of detail an image can represent

·            Current technology has reached the point where digital image can easily contain much more information than anybody would ever want

·            Straight unmanipulated photography as the essential, “normal” photographic practice- we presume it hasn’t been reworked

·            A technological difference between photograph and digial image

·            Difference between imaginary and the real

·            Destroys the innocence of straight photography by making all photographs inherently mutable

·            Digital images are not inferior to the visual realism of traditional photography. They are all too real.

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