Quotes by
Geoffrey Batchen

Everyone concedes that photography is now a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation.... photographing has become “the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter.”

All of us tend to look at photographs as if we are simply gazing through a two-dimensional window onto some outside world. This is almost a perceptual necessity; in order to see what the photograph is of, we must first repress our consciousness of what the photograph is.

Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.

Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for “real” powers that always originate elsewhere.

So there is a lacuna in photography’s history, an absence. And we are talking absence not just of vernacular photographies themselves, but of a cogent explanation for that absence.

Photography apparently figures time itself as a progressive linear movement from past to future. The present during which we look at the photographic image is but a staging point, a hallucinatory hovering that imbricates both past and future.

As their name suggests, digital processes actually return the production to the whim of the creative human hand (to the digits ). For that reason, digital images are actually closer in spirit to the creative processes of art than they are to the truth values of documentary.

...the “that-has-been” temporality of photography once described by Roland Barthes has been replaced by a “what-is-going on,” a sharing of an immediacy of presence.

You have to learn it yourself. Go out and shoot a roll or two; make prints, then stick them on the wall and do constructive criticism. You go to museums and galleries, you see shows, you look at magazines, you do some reading but you do more looking. That’s how you do photography.

The main difference seems to be that, whereas photography still claims some sort of objectivity, digital imaging is an overtly fictional process. As a practice that is known to be capable of nothing but fabrication, digitization abandons even the rhetoric of truth that has been such an important part of photography’s cultural success.

Remember that image of Truman holding up the premature issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune declaring his defeat by Dewey? It is in the Corbis catalogue. Remember Malcolm X pointing out over his crowd of listeners, the airship Hindenberg exploding in the New Jersey sky, that naked Vietnamese child running towards us after being burned by napalm, Churchill flashing his V-for-victory sign, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Patty Hearst posing with her gun in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army banner, LBJ being sworn into office aboard Air Force One beside a blood-splattered Jackie? Corbis offers to lease us electronic versions of them all; it offers to sell us, in other words, the ability to reproduce our memories of our own culture, and therefore of ourselves.

[A digital snapshot] is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical.

Human experience comes suspended in the sickly-sweet amniotic fluid of commercial photography. And a world normally animated by abrasive differences is blithely reduced to a single, homogeneous National Geographic way of seeing.

As a medium based on contiguity (the condition of being in contact), what photography gave to modernity was not vision, but touch (or, more precisely, vision as a form of touch). This visual touch allows photography to establish a special relationship between its subject and ourselves, a kind of carnal knowledge unique to the photographic medium. It has also allowed photography to claim a special relationship to memory.

Photographs are always catalysts for, and foci of, [the] desire invested in looking.

And within the logic of [the electronic economy], the identity of an image is no longer distinguishable from any other piece of datum, be it animal, vegetable, or “experiential” in origin. Indeed, given the rhyzomatic structure of the electronic universe, the point of origin is no longer of consequence. All that matters (in every sense of the word) is the possibility of instantaneous dissemination and exact reproduction of data.

Everyone concedes that photography is now a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation. A digital snapshot is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are as ephemeral as speech.