After Photography

After Photography by Fred Ritchn (2009), digested by Diane Smyth

It takes a brave author to tackle digital media, a medium changing so fast that any attempt to read it looks outdated before the ink is dry. And yet that’s what Fred Ritchin did in After Photography, attempting to describe what’s new about digital photography and how it’s changed us. 

As the title suggests, Ritchin believes digital photography is a fundamental shift rather than a simple change of tools, and he backs up his argument by considering both its ubiquity and its malleability. Digital photography started when National Geographic modified a horizontal photograph of the pyramids to create a more aesthetically pleasing front cover, Ritchin argues, shaking our belief in the image as proof. 

The fact that we are all now armed with digital cameras, especially those embedded in our smartphones, means that we are all looking at the world second-hand via images, and also constantly presenting ourselves for image-based consumption. 

It’s a gloomy reading of a brave new world, but Ritchin also suggests new strategies – a shift into “an interactive, networked multimedia”, in which hotspots link into other images and more information. Ritchin’s references to YouTube and MySpace already feel outdated, and his thoughts on surveillance seem tentative now that Wikileaks has blown the lid off the NSA program but it’s a game attempt to draw a line in the sand. 

In his own words 

"Photography in the digital environment involves the reconfiguration of the image into a mosaic of millions of changeable pixels, not a continuous tone imprint of a visible reality. Rather than a quote from appearances, it serves as an initial recording, a preliminary script, which may precede a quick and easy reshuffling." 

"The multitudes of photographers now intensely staring not at the surrounding world, nor at their loved ones being wed or graduating, but at their camera backs or cellphones searching for an image on the small screens, or summoning the past as an archival image on these same screens, is symptomatic of the image’s primacy over the existence it is supposed to depict." 

"Even before the ubiquity of a billon cell phone cameras, we were already in rehearsal for the pose, the look and a diminished sense of privacy." 

How to sound as if you've read it 

The web is all around us; the only solution is to go further into it.