As the surrealist poet Andre Breton once said about the photography of Man Ray: it is “an art richer in surprise than painting”. The age of camera-less photography had been proclaimed. Man Ray’s Rayographs and Moholy-Nagy’s photograms had succeeded in removing the camera from the center of the visual experience. Might we not then ask, particulary here in the digital domain which is the Internet, whether we are now entering a new era of an even more direct aesthetic experience. An era of “photography-less” photography, where film, print and camera alike are replaced by pixels cemented in an electronic matrix. Where the distinction between photography and painting – once hotly debated – has evaporated, as both are reduced to infinitely replaceable pixles hurdling through cyberspace.
