After reading "Toward a Hyperphotography"
In the eighth chapter ("Toward a Hyperphotography") of his book "After Photography", Fred Ritchin explores one of the great characterizing elements of digital photography: the ability to be hyperphotography, and therefore to get out of the physical dimensions of the developed and printed analog photo.
Personally, I had mixed reactions to Ritchin's thesis. In the initial part, the author juxtaposes analog and digital photography to find the common points, to the point of stating that even the analog photo, like the digital one, represents reality through small squares.
In the following text, he gives various examples of how digital photography can be pushed beyond the boundaries of the image, to add contents, meanings, functions (including the ability to represent a vision of the future), which, personally, I believe are undeserved.
Perhaps I am influenced by the fact that I am a professional computer scientist and I have a disenchanted and cynical vision of the digital medium. Nevertheless, I think that the triad "digital camera/ digital file/image editing system" is just a set of tools through which to manage every single and ever-smaller point on a surface, in order to get any content in the form of an image.
The digital system is, in my opinion, only a means to reach an end, then a potentially and totally manipulable image. If this is the means, what is the end and what does it depend on?
When we refer to a painting, we refer to the brush, the colors, the canvas. But the final outcome is determined by the painter's imagination and ability to use these tools in order to translate his idea into a physical representation.
Similarly, the photographer's imagination and skill make the difference in obtaining the result, using light and the digital system as a means of representing his idea, up to the extreme of using only the digital editing system to "paint", starting from an empty file.
"The digital photograph, unlike the analog, is based not on an initial static recording of continuous tones to be viewed as a whole, or teased out in the darkroom, but on creating discrete and malleable records of the visible that can and will be linked, transmitted, recontextualized, and fabricated."
(Fred Ritchin, AfterPhotography, W.W. Norton, Page 141)
Digital photography, as a set of points and their representation in binary digits, overshadows the physical dimension and enters the multiple dimensions of the virtual world. Similar to digital music, digital photography is the result of the sampling of reality, and it translates its continuity into many discrete steps.
Thanks to technology, these steps are becoming so small and groupable in complex wholes, that their boundaries are no longer distinguished and their whole becomes more and more similar to reality itself.
"Temporally the analog photograph is also discrete, representing only a fractional second, responsible for slicing the world into segments that are nearly always rectangular. "
(Fred Ritchin, AfterPhotography, W.W. Norton, Page 141)
In this fascinating and at the same time paradoxical speculation, Ritchin proposes a juxtaposition between analog and digital photography: both represent reality through discrete segments, sampled over fractions of time. In my opinion, this is not the point and it is not enough to gather around the term "discrete" or the "fast cutting capacity" of the shutter speed to endorse a similarity between these two techniques of representation.
The ability of digital editing to individually manipulate these microscopic segments frees up immense possibilities of exiting physical space and entering hyperspace.
Here digital photography stops being compared to analog photography and becomes a "meta-image": it conquers its own precise identity, through its infinite capacity to be "hyper-different".
"Rather than as a window or mirror, the digital photograph can also be thought of as an excerpt from a screen.....
....Its Cartesian pixel grid may also eventually be reconceived, extended to limn the twenty-six dimensions of string theory or to explore the possibilities of parallel universes, so that as a result the two-dimensional photograph may seem rather basic."
Both consciously and unconscious} y, the emerging imagery will help
people to understand the universe through strategies that were relatively inaccessible to analog photography, including multiple temporal and spatial perspectives, nonlinear and relativistic histories, contrasting cultural points of view, internal spaces such as the body, quantum mechanics, artificial life, and genetics.
The new photograph will be read and understood differently as people comprehend that it does not descend from the same representational logic either of analog photography or of painting that preceded it."
(Fred Ritchin, AfterPhotography, W.W. Norton, Page 142)
Therefore, what makes the difference, according to Ritchin, is not the means but the way to benefit from the outcome.
Starting from this statement, all considerations on the numerous possibilities of use allowed by digital photography can be freed, and the "hyperphotographer", finally provided with his identity and dignity, is equally free (as has happened in recent years) to create new dimensions of representation, dissemination, information. The "places" of use and the channels of dissemination have become the most varied, and Ritchin gives some examples along with the chapter.
Then a question arises about the content, and whether it, in a context where technology allows even the single pixel to be manipulated, should still have and maintain a relationship with reality.
However, the scenario is paradoxical, given that if a single image (even analog) can condition the perceived reality using a certain point of view, in turn, hyperphotography, with its ability to take us in multiple dimensions and in multiple points of view, it can take us totally out of or totally into reality.
The contradictory "double image" is cubist; reality has no single truth. .....
......The additional photograph asks the question "Is this for real?" ....
......What is actually happening that is being described by the media?
....People will better understand that a large percentage of photographs pretending to depict something significant are showing only its simulation, often created by the photograph's subjects themselves."
(Fred Ritchin, AfterPhotography, W.W. Norton, Page 147 - 149)
Finally, digital photography, as "different", has been given an identity and a recognition of its representative power.
Through the affirmation of its "other" possibilities and freeing it from the constraint of being a mere imitation of other practices or a mere representation of reality, the possibilities of manipulation can be promoted as forms of expression with a documentary or artistic function.
A social function of digital photography emerges, as a support for raising awareness of future consequences and, through the representation of a future reality, the drive to prevent it.
"The photograph in the digital environment can envision the future with enough realism to elicit responses before the depicted future occurs. Whereas analog documentary photography shows what has already happened when it is often too late to help, a proactive photography might show the future, according to expert predictions, as a way of trying to prevent it from happening."
(Fred Ritchin, AfterPhotography, W.W. Norton, Page 151)
Ritchin's is mainly focused on the documentary function of hyperphotography.
The possibility of multimedia links is at the service of determining the "true" meaning of the image. In fact, assuming that the photographs can "speak" through a multimedia link, hyperphotography proposes fruition of the images that leaves no room for misunderstandings or personal interpretations.
We are thus in a context opposite to that proposed by many artists, in particular of the postmodernist current, which promotes images, without captions, with possible multiple meanings and where the viewer can freely build his own personal interpretation.
All this is at least paradoxical, in a context where reality can be totally upset.
Hyperphotography thus becomes the best friend, in being the worst enemy, of the truth of reality.