This blog post will focus on the text ‘Post Photography, or are past photography?’ by Andreia Alves De Oliveira. Throughout the text what got me focused into it more was Andreia’s discussion on photography, its practice and how it has been transformed by computers and the internet. “The screen is how we now view photographs” This quote included in the text is a clear indication of how photography has changed throughout history, emphasising the rarity of photographic prints since photography’s creation in the mid-19th Century.
The text includes a discussion from William J.Mitchell’s book “The reconfigured eye: Visual truth in the post-photographic era” This book argues that digitisation brought a reconfiguration of the relationship between photography and the truth. I personally agree that digitalisation and also the fact that photographic manipulation is too easy in the media world contributes to the remodelling of photography and how it can bring doubt upon what is the truth, especially in relation to photo-journalism, if certain parts of an image are taken out, that isn’t portraying the full truth.
Andreia includes two arguable quotes by Martha Roster and Geoffrey Batchen. Martha Roster discusses that manipulation is essential to photography and Geoffrey Batchen discusses that the absence of truth is an inescapable fact of photographic life. Looking at Martha’s point, I personally feel that manipulation isn’t essential in photography if you are to portray the truth, but arguably Geoffreys point on how manipulation is something you cant always avoid is true, its very difficult in the 21st century to come across an image that hasn’t been altered in any way possible, even the slightest filter on a photograph is seen to be manipulation.
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