MANOVICH Paradoxes_of_Digital_Photography

image.[16] This image exists outside of our consciousness, on a screen -- a window of limited size which presents a still imprint of a small part of outer reality, filtered through the lens with its limited depth of field, filtered through film's grain and its limited tonal range. It is only this

apparent. Just as Medieval masters guarded their paiting secrets now leading computer graphics companies carefully guard the resolution of image they simulate.

If this is so, Mitchell's notion of "normal" unmanipulated photography is problematic. Indeed, unmanipulated "straight" photography can hardly be claimed to dominate the modern uses of photography. Consider, for

3. Real, All Too Real: Socialist Realism of "Jurassic Park" I have considered some of the alleged physical differences between traditional and digital photography. But what is a digital photograph? My discussion has focused on the distinction between a film-based representation of an image versus its representation in a computer as a grid of pixels having a fixed resolution and taking up a certain amount of computer storage space. In short, I highlighted the issue of

reports about things in the real world."[13] Digital images, being inherently (and so easily) mutable, call into question "our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real"[14] or between photographs and drawings. Furthermore, in a digital image, the essential relationship between signifier and signified is one of uncertainty.[15]

information."[9] Here again Mitchell is right in principle: a digital image consists of a finite number of pixels, each having a distinct color or a tonal value, and this number determines the amount of detail an image can represent. Yet

consequences."[4] In other words, the 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 difference in their cultural perception.

uses, the difference disappears. Digital photography simply does not exist.

in William Mitchell's recent book "The Reconfigured Eye:

image once represented the inhuman, devilish objectivity of technological vision. Today, however, it looks so human, so familiar, so domesticated -- in contrast to the alienating, still unfamiliar appearance of a computer display with its 1280 by 1024 resolution, 32 bits per pixel, 16 million colors, and so on. Regardless of what it signifies, any photographic image also connotes memory and nostalgia, nostalgia for modernity and the twentieth century, the era of the pre-digital, pre-post-modern. Regardless of what it represents, any photographic image today first of all represents photography.