dw3844 (33 months ago) cool, cool, cool!

A snap-shop of the Current Context of Photographic Knowledge: The picture to the left was captured by "Rachel on holidays (sometimes)" on December 15, of 2007 at 2:15 in the afternoon. She uploaded it to her photostream two days later at 9:46 in the evening. This information is taken from the Exif data for the image. Flickr.com explains: "Exif data is a record of the settings a camera used to take a photo or video. This information is embedded into the files the camera saves, and we read and display it here." This image received seven comments. Similar to what we notice in the filtering of wikipedia, all of the commenters here are ranked "pro." These comments range from someone mistakenly thinking that Rachel had mispelled the type of beer that was mistakenly thought to be pictured, to someone thinking that she might was to get checked out for diabetes because Rachel has been drinking so many San Pellegrinos (commented on in the caption to the image), to someone commenting on how nice her "greens" are.

The image that I have included to the right of "Rachel on holidays (sometimes)" is the camera that she used to take this picture. New on Amazon, this camera costs $400.00. The graph below this image is recording "DMC-TZ1 Usage this Year." So, we see that its popularity on Flickr is dropping off.

1987-2010: The first camera I had was given to me by a neighbor. It was the flat kind that used 110 mm film and had those flash packs with 10 single-use bulbs that snapped on top. Today, I do not own a camera, per say, I have an iPhone with a camera app. Most of my pictures will never be printed.

__________

Question: Given the shifting materiality of the photograph, the shift in ratio between viewing and consuming, and the exponential increase of “noise in the channel” of the photographic, how would you reflect on your assertion that photographic knowledge can never be “ethical or political knowledge”?

Thoughts about this question:

While I’m not sure that this question by itself would be a good one to ask, I’ll trace how I arrived at it. As I say, on page 24 Sontag writes: “The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge.” It seems, however, that as she nears the end of the text she moves away from this assertion in some fairly substantial ways. While this was plausible in 1973 when most people did not have access to a camera and the process both in terms of materiality and process was much different, today, many more people have access to a technology that can produce, manipulate, and publish their images. For many this process either involves or culminates with the Internet either through a posting site, submission to a printer, or e-mailing relatives.

After discussing photography as a means of appropriation at the beginning of the book, Sontag returns to the topic of power and control towards the end. Here, she discusses “photographic recording” as a means of control. Advancing technologies have made “photography an incomparable tool for deciphering behavior, predicting it, and interfering with it.” In this, photography, like language, is a medium and not an art. These statistics from flickr affirm this: 6,071 images posted “in the last minute,” 558,832 things tagged with urban, and 4.6 million things geotagged this month. Here we are told very little about the content or artistic quality of these images, but lots about photography as a medium of both creation and, perhaps, circulation in the case of flickr.

It is in these later moments of On Photography that Sontag asserts photography’s potential for control “that could not even be dreamed of under the earlier system of recording information: writing.” Here, while we could say that the alphabet itself does not really carry ethical or political knowledge, written compositions (applications of a medium) certainly do. So, if writing is a medium and a system, can we move towards saying that photographic (a medium and a system as well, according to Sontag) knowledge is coming closer to ethical and political knowledge?

Given the above example from flickr, and the countless other examples that we could come up with, the ethical and political knowledge that accompanies a “photographic knowledge,” is perhaps a different way of knowing that is conveyed much differently than other “knowledges” that Sontag may be thinking of when she refers to “photographic knowledge.” When “photographic knowledge” moves from print-dependent to digital – the circulation, the meaning of the image, as well as the kind of knowledge that is produced may be changing. The “atomic reality” that she describes may still be atomic, but the channel is so full of noise that the distance between moments is shrinking as flows of images course through structures that support a digital “photograph knowledge” in the 21^st century, structures that no longer rely on the 110 mm film and flash bulbs of my little pink camera to produce the material that holds them up.