Photographic Body In Crisis, Wells Reading

In the Wells reading, The Photographic Body In Crisis, the opinions of several critics/theorists are discussed in relation to the advent of widespread digital technology in photography. Digital imaging, according to some, changed the very nature of photography. Within the last 20 years, digital photography has increasingly becomes the norm among photographers and photojournalists, with film photography becoming an expensive and “against the grain” choice. According to theorist Ritchen, because digital photography was much easier to access and manipulate than traditional wet darkroom photography, we would no longer be able to trust images. This would inevitably harm the ethics of photojournalism, and result in our loss of reliable information about current events in the world. These concerns were shared by other critics, such as Mitchell, who felt digital imaging was “the dawning of a post-photographic era”. Wells, However, looks towards art history of photography, and points out that even before digital, photographs were manipulated. Wells asserts that photography itself is a manipulation, therefore the real anxiety caused by digital photography is the loss of the humanist subject as “the rational centre of the world.” As someone who has grown up in a sort of “in-between” phase of film to digital photography, this argument to me is very interesting, but also somewhat lost. My first cameras were film, and when I moved into digital it didn’t seem that significant to me. Considering these dystopian perspectives, it seems to me that photography is always a manipulation via a series of choices, and it’s interesting that to some digital seemed to threaten an already fragile set of ethics.