How is digital imagery like the plastic arts? The simplest, and perhaps most flippant response, is that with digital imagery, the characteristic ‘look’ of the plastic arts has been reduced to a set of simple and effective algorithms. The ’styles’ cultivated by so many of history’s great artists are reduced by Adobe Systems Inc. into a simple and electronically-reproducible set of image filters. Thus, we have perhaps the truest and clearest expression of the convergence between photography and the painted image in the digital realm: the ‘watercolour filter.’ But to assume that this glib and self-evident response plumbs the depths of this relation would be absurd. As such, rather than giving my slapdash digital image-painting more critical attention than it deserves, I would like to explore the problematic contemporary relation between truth and the digitized image by way of a number of other intriguing examples of this inter-media cross-pollination.

How are digital images like photographs, and how are they like paintings? In the simplest sense, a digital photograph remains a photograph. Right? The digital image remains, as Sontag would have us believe, in some sense a ‘piece of the real,’ (4) the traces of light captured from reality and re-expressed elsewhere. And yet, when we consider it, even on the most basic physical level, the digital image is nothing like the photographic print. Light is less ‘captured’ or ‘traced’ than it is simply ‘sensed‘ and translated into electronic signals. And when we view the digital image, we are not viewing a secondary reflection from a trace of reality fixed to paper, but rather, we are viewing an entirely new pattern of light, transmitted over time, space, and universal serial bus, and reformed ex nihilo for our gaze. These simple physical disparities translate into a vast phenomenological gap between these two media which share the name photography. In classical photography, the light is the law: it is captured by film, and fixed into permanence. As Sontag aptly notes, even in this older and more autocratic form of photography, images are “reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out” (4). And yet she nevertheless adheres to the by-now archaic position that a photograph is ’stenciled directly off the real, like a footprint or a death mask’ (154).

Why archaic? Because in the era of the digital image, light has ceased to be the law of the image, and has become only its origin. The digital image (usually – but we’ll return to this later) begins as light, just like the filmed image. But where the image on film remains a form of congealed light, always dependent on the control and manipulation of light for its development, post-production, and ultimate exhibition. And that which is dependent on natural light is thus subject to its vagaries: the traced reality of the image-on-film can be manipulated, to be sure, but nothing new can be plausibly created. For we can almost always tell when a negative has been sliced, or an image painted over the negative. We have little trouble distinguishing the Cottingley Fairies as fakes, for instance — though it is perhaps telling that its contemporary audiences were by no means as discriminating.

With digital imagery, the photographer is freed from the tyranny of the photon. We know little about manipulating the ephemeral particles that make up our universe, and what we do know is used for ends predominantly descriptive and destructive. We know a great deal about the systems we have created for ourselves, however, and by translating light into the binary vernacular, we are able to remake reality creatively. This, like most developments of the twentieth century, was driven by pornography. No longer was it necessary for one’s preferred object of desire to actually appear unclothed in public view in order to match one’s fantasies to an image. Indeed, no longer were consumers of pornophotography required to ‘collect photographs of anonymous examples of the desirable as an aid to masturbation’ (16). Instead, the face of a recognized celebrity could be digitally grafted upon the body of such an anonymous sex-object: digital-erotic chimerism. The ‘celebrity fake’ is perhaps the most prominent instance of digital photography’s increasingly shady commerce with truth. The levels of absurdity can be peeled away like an infinite onion. By pasting a celebrity’s face – herself really only desirable anonymity, named and photographed – onto the body of an anonymous model, one only compounds the anonymity of the composition and the celebrity system as a whole. The celebrity, as anonymous sex-object, is so generic, that any old pair of breasts will do.

And yet, the technology and ideology of digital imagery are developing quickly beyond the prurient, and indeed are starting to take on some of the best elements of the plastic arts. I have always found that one of the most questionable tenets of photography theory is the notion that photography somehow creates a more ‘realistic’ image than painting. Merleau-Ponty submitted this notion to a certain form of critique in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ drawing from the psychology and phenomenology of human perception to critique the notions of ‘photorealism.’ The photograph does indeed trace directly from ‘the real,’ but to proclaim that the photographic image is universally more realistic than the painting is extremely problematic. I recall the quote that Mitchell draws from Aaron Scharf, who asserts that Eadweard Muybridge’s horse photography meant that ‘the meaning of the term ‘truth to nature’ lost its force: what was true could not always be seen, and what could be seen was not always true’ (25). There is certainly a grain of truth to this statement: often, in isolating a moment from the progression of time, we can see what is obscured by temporal isomorphism. But to assert that the photograph is more ‘true’ than the human gaze is to remove all humanity from the notion of truth, and to judge human experience by the standard of a machine.

It is certainly not always the case that a photograph is more ‘real’ or ‘true’ than the human experience of reality. This is self-evident in the case of a doctored photograph, but perhaps more difficult to pick out in the case of an unretouched original. The origin of this discrepancy lies in the fact that vision, like reality and truth, is a temporal process. When we observe a scene, we do not observe it in undifferentiated clarity, or as a static whole. Rather, our eyes jump from place to place, adjusting to the light in each corner, picking out each salient aspect, and constructing a mental image — this mental image is what the painter paints. By contrast, the image of the camera is a product of a single cyclopean and static eye, capturing a (relatively) instantaneous and uniformly exposed pattern of light. This scientific uniformity of exposure might represent a coherent and elegant definition of ‘reality’ to those of a particular Enlightenment ideology, and yet it has little to do with our actual perception of the world. The image of an instant is useful, fascinating, even; but it remains a supplement to human vision, not the standard by which it is to be judged. This is fundamentally tied to the ‘reality effect’ that Mitchell gestures towards, in that photographs have acquired such a profound connotation of realism, that reality itself has unfortunately come to be judged with reference to the photograph.

Consider, for instance, even a work of great power, like Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes: this is an image which could never be conventionally photographed. The same goes for nearly anything by Monet, Cézanne, and practically all other artwork that came after the advent of photography. The problem with photography is that it matches a scientific and institutional notion of reality, but often corresponds little with our actual perception of the world. Shadows are too dark, bright spots too bright; the vagaries of film exposure have long been the bugbear of the amateur photographer. Painting after photography sought to respond to this by replicating those quirks and ‘inadequacies’ of human perception on canvas.

Digital imagery, however, has to some extent addressed these issues. Consider a beautiful, arresting image like this (click for large size):

This is evidently a photograph, and yet any photographer looking at it would know that there is something almost ‘unnatural’ about it. Even an amateur photographer can tell that ’something’ isn’t right about this photo. Everything is too well exposed: there is an eerie, painting-like quality about it. Flickr user Trey Ratcliff made this image using his digital camera, and a recently developed imaging technology called ‘High Dynamic Range’, which uses a number of exposures of the same image to obtain a range of contrast unattainable with one aperture and exposure setting. HDR imaging effectively replicates the human gaze far better than conventional photography, by allowing the photographer to replicate the entire range of contrast and saturation that we perceive in our mental image of a scene.

Interestingly enough, the digital convergences between photography and the plastic arts are being initiated from both sides. While many in academia have proposed that realism as a virtue in art all but died off with the advent of photography, there is an intriguing subculture of those who aspire to photorealism in their hand-created digital images. These efforts toward photorealism have gone to sometimes-absurd lengths. Consider, for instance, this blog posting in which the author uses a series of image layers in photoshop to make it appear as though he hand-drew the photorealistic image in question; it was later revealed in his comments that it was in fact a photograph, to which the erstwhile poster had applied a series of transformations in order to decompose the photograph into progressively less detailed images.

And finally, perhaps the most interesting example of convergence between the plastic and photographic arts, however, is ‘Ray tracing,’ a form of computer graphics which generates the image by effectively simulating a photograph. This image (note: huge file) is almost indistinguishable from a photograph, even at full resolution. It was created using a ray tracing program, which creates a static image of a constructed scene by selecting the perspective of the ‘camera’ and then mathematically working backwards, modeling the trajectory of each individual ray of light that would arrive at the camera. Thus, the plastic arts have become like photography, in that the only acceptable ‘realism’ is one based on scientific calculation and instrumental ‘tracing’ from a mathematical model. Ray tracing is simply the tracing of a reality that just happens not to be real.

For the contemporary Western audience, this is a photograph steeped in otherness. We are presented with all the conventional signifiers that have long since melded together into an indistinct and diaphanous notion of the ‘oriental,’ or, more particularly, the moyen-oriental – the Middle East. The tight, concentric rings of the man’s turban; his dense, wiry beard; his ornate robe and archaic blade; all of these signify a specific (albeit unreliable and frustratingly reductive) notion of a certain ethnic, racialized Other. His complexion and bone structure seem likely Turkic, perhaps Persian or Mongolian, although such ethnic distinctions are likely beyond the grasp of the average North American interpreter of today, overshadowed as they are by the man’s evidently foreign accoutrements. With his right hand posed over his genitals, and his left hand clasped about that troubling second phallus, those of a Freudian bent might propose that the Other in this photo is overtly threatening to colonialist notions of masculinity.

Those of a Freudian bent would have had to wait for many years following the creation of this photo to bend in such a fashion, however, as our dear Sigmund was but fifteen years of age when it was taken. In this lies the most striking Otherness of the photo, the temporal otherness which lays bare the contingent and constructed nature of the ethnic other. This photograph, now encountered in a perverse digital medium, was taken by one Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (above) in 1911. Prokudin-Gorskii was granted a special dispensation by Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, to travel around the entire Russian Empire, documenting what Nicholas evidently hoped would be his legacy. Of course, the true historical fascination with these photographs is expressly because Gorskii’s photographs were greatly overshadowed by that other notable event in the reign of Tsar Nicholas: its end. Only six years after this photograph was taken, the Bolshevik Revolution would sweep the Russian Empire and forever reshape Western notions of the great Asiatic empire and its people. Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs thus constitute some of our only surviving visual contact with a pre-Communist Russia, all the more incredible for their vivid colour and absurdly high resolution (to speak in an anachronistic digital vernacular). Indeed, the subject of the photo in question, one Mohammed Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara, and last descendant of Genghis Khan to rule a nation, would find his tiny emirate overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1920, a brief nine years after the creation of this photograph. A great deal of my fascination with Prokudin-Gorskii’s work stems from my awareness of what was to come, which, given my historical distance, constitutes almost a sense of dramatic irony. I know what’s going to have happened — and the Emir didn’t.

Thus, the allure of this photo comes from a trinitarian juxtaposition of ethnicity, history, and ephemerality, speaking through a discourse of saturation and hue which has come to signify the modern. The discourse through which the photograph speaks, however, is of preeminent importance in this case. I am oddly reminded of an old story arc in Calvin and Hobbes wherein Calvin’s father successfully convinces Calvin that the world prior to 1960 was in fact only black and white; the story is likely a familiar one to many, from any number of different sources. The phenomenological truth in such comedic little anecdotes is that our relation to history is necessarily a technologically-mediated one, and one which is also necessarily mediated by a number of archaic historical technologies. The entire notion of colour as expressed in ‘grayscale’ is the product of technology. Saturation and lightness have always been easier to capture than hue, but prior to the technological harvesting of photons, these abstractions of ‘colour space’ were simply inconceivable. The gray scale was the product of technological inadequacy, and yet it is no longer encountered as such. Why would there still be productions in black and white, but for the fact that the gray scale has become a signifier in itself, a connotative framing of the entire image as historical, archival material? The grayscale thus also breeds an implicit distance between the viewer and the subject of the photograph, almost a reassurance that history is indeed well and truly past. Thus, this image, when we know its age, becomes utterly compelling: the (relatively, in postmodern terms) ancient world speaks in the dialect of the modern. This is especially so when viewing the image on a computer screen: we can even see its digital resolution in the top of our browser window, and know that Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographic method has resolution equivalent to nearly ten megapixels.

When considered in its historical context, what might otherwise have been simply a nondescript picture of a Middle Eastern man takes on a number of new levels of signification, all of which operate simultaneously. The emir’s cocked eye might lead one to question whether he was already thinking of the future of his realm, for instance, which might lead us to certain other questions concerning his attitude towards the Russian photographer of the piece. Did he regard Gorskii’s expedition as a noxious colonialism, or was he pleased at the prospect of having his picture set down for posterity? What of his medals? In which battles were they won, and for what? Indeed, his entire costume raises interesting questions, not simply regarding its utility (what might that braid be for?), but also the position of ethnic groups vis-à-vis certain styles of dress. Like Rosler’s photographs of the native family, historical photographs of subjugated ethnicities recall a time when traditional dress was merely tradition, rather than reified and saleable Otherness. There is therefore a certain orientalist fascination with the Khan’s garb in the photograph, in that we can appreciate it in itself, without that nagging liberal self-consciousness that is endlessly questioning authenticity.

The other principal interaction of the photograph is between the everydayness of the colour snapshot, and the foreign, posed construction of Gorskii’s colour plates. Black and white photography not only signifies historicity, but it also signifies and generally accompanies a certain staid, constructed, and formal quality which is common to almost all photos of a certain era. Most historical photos to which we are exposed are black and white portraits, which largely adhere to the conventions of artistic portraiture, while most modern photos are ’snapshots’ or candid moments, which adhere to their own banal documentary logic. Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs took as long, and perhaps longer to create than other greyscale photographic processes of the era. And yet, the ‘in the world’ setting and vivid colour of the image means that it seems to follow the documentary conventions of modern photography more than most other photography of the early twentieth century. The effect is difficult to shake, even when one is fully aware that the photograph is necessarily a posed image which nonetheless speaks in the dialect of its era. Something about this image makes me feel somehow phenomenologically ‘closer’ to the subject than I feel when encountering black and white photographs of my own ancestors. Posed as they are according to archaic notions of elegant portraiture, something always rings false when I examine them.

And thus we see the true power of this photograph. When colour comes to signify the present, a history in colour underlines the ever-present presence of the historical. Black and white photographs present us with history as history, since the absence of hue has itself taken on a layer of signification. Since the absence of hue must signify the historical, its presence must signify the contemporary: and so, the immediate visceral impact of Prokudin-Gorskii’s work stems from the fact that it presents us with history, without any intervening time having passed. The history of the present is accomplished through the presence of history: a history in colour.

See ‘the image in question’ here.