Throughout this article, an argument is slowly built that the modern digital "snapshot" has lost the indexical quality of photography, because the physical photo to paper has been replaced by digital pixels. In this loss, the snapshot has lost identity as a piece of artwork, and has become instead forgettable and unoriginal, generating a new identity as a type of "stock photo" in which tags have led to each new snapshot becoming just like another before it, a way of communicating between the picture creators through tags and comments rather than a new piece of art.
Personally I am seeing this as a bias from a writer that has studied photography in London College of Printing (1) and though he has done research in new media, he is older and out of touch with the changes in media that someone more my age would see. Growing up in this new culture, I see digital art as a new type of photographic media, not forgettable at all, and certainly not, like a stock photo, just like all the other digital snapshots before it. Rubinstein is seeing this new wave of photography from his basis in fine art photography and assuming that new art photography should be tied back to old art photography in order to have worth. While it is true that digital photography has lost indexical quality in the sense that physical light no longer reacts with paper, the camera is still seeing light to create a picture, whether there is a physical chemical reaction or not.
My further reasoning leads me to believe that why should this be necessary at all? In this new digital age, why can't the idea of the photo in the old sense die, and this new digital identity become a new way of creating art? Just because it is easier to snap a photo does not mean it is no longer art to create it. Anyone can pick up a pencil, but not everyone can draw, and the same goes for digital art. So there are a few people that have digital cameras just for the immediacy of creating memories...so what? There are many more artists that have digital cameras and are using them to create real art. In a few years there may not be such a thing as a dark room any longer. Does that mean that phototgraphy as an art has died? No, I say it has been recreated, and indeed, improved. Photography has always been on the rise with technology. It was a huge discovery in the past age when it was first created, and it took a long time for a photographer to learn how to use the bulky cameras. Does this make him more of an artist than currnet digial artists, just because it took him longer to learn how to use a camera? Certainly not! Technology has improved, and photography as a medium has changed, and evolved into something new and fresh. I don't think we can look at photography in the same way as we did before. This new medium is much more exciting and has many more possibilities than it did before, because we are no longer restricted by bulky new technology. Now anyone can create a picture, anywhere at any time, and art can take on a new face because more people now have access to it. Who knows where photography will take us in a few more years? A whole new, interactive art has emerged, and I think we are yet to embrace it properly.
Works Cited
1)London South University. 14 March 2008. 12 Sept 2008.
https://phonebook.lsbu.ac.uk/php4/curriculumvitae.php?id=4556&template=ahs&divtemp=aam
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