September 11, 2004

Books full of pretty pictures turn me on, and because I needed something to distract me on my ride to Toronto last week, I stopped by a used bookstore and bought Clarke’s history of The Photograph. The pictures enthralled me, and as an added bonus the book was also densely packed with critical theory.

Clarke examines how images create meaning, and how meaning is uncovered by viewers. He suggests that photographs can be read as symbols, and the whole book is one prolonged act of reading individual photos within a critical and historical context. This focus on theory rather than aesthetics is fine considering that the book was written in 1997, before the advent of digital photography, but unfortunately it fails to anticipate how the digital process completely smashed the critical frameworks of traditional photography more so than any other advances in technology up to that point.

I would argue that digital photography upset our understanding of images and the way we “read” them. But first, let’s look at what Clarke claims:

One of the points he develops early on is that context determines meaning, that the “declared status” of a photograph is fundamental to the way we understand and interpret it. A mugshot, he explains, is read differently if it appears in a passport than if it appears in the context of an art gallery.

And it’s hard to disagree with his argument that context shapes understanding. However, reading digitally published photographs is complicated because they lack context. We’re no longer talking about photos in galleries or passports, but rather photos that have become flickers of electrons floating outside traditional contexts.

Because the web is an intensely visual medium, driven by the users’ insatiable thirst for images, it has become impossible to distinguish between art, pornography, and commercial photography. It’s harder to attach value to photographs since everything blends in an uncomfortable mix that feeds our scopophilia.

This absence of context makes it hard to read photos within a critical framework. Meaning has imploded with the boom of digital photography as images have been scrubbed clean of context. They just exist in an infinite void, saturated in colour and drained of meaning.

As Baudrillard argues, photos are no longer the site of the production of meaning, but rather site of the destruction of meaning. And of course, they’re simply evil, as I’ve noticed with my own photos.

It would be nice to accept Clarke’s argument that photos have a meaning that we can decipher. The alternative is troublesome: if in a world saturated by images photographs no longer have meaning, then perhaps the world has little meaning.