Digital Photography

Similar to an analog camera, a digital camera is activated by light. However, a digital camera electronically records the image as a computer file. Digital photography was invented in the 1950s, but digital cameras were not widely marketed until the 1990s. Digital cameras are ubiquitous today in smart phones, but smart phones are only a 21st century phenomenon. Like analog photography, developments are related to improvements in focal quality and shutter speed among other functions. And just as analog photography transformed the amount of images people had access to and the way they thought about and experienced the world around them, digital photography also transformed the way that people experience themselves and understand the visual world.

Photography and New Media Art

As you learned in the previous chapter, Photography is connected to the elements of New Media Art because it allows artists to invent new realities, to make multiple copies of an image and to manipulate the images they create. It increased the number of images people saw in a lifetime. Photography changed the way people thought about time. It impacted memory, and shifted the way people thought about space, allowing people to see images of places they would never be able to visit on their own and events that they weren’t able to see in person. Photography also allowed average people to create their own images and tell their own stories through the images they made. Imagine how our knowledge of history would be different if average people were able to tell their own stories in medieval illuminated manuscripts. The public began to gain more access to images when printmaking was introduced to China and later Europe, but how much more would we know about life in the past if everyone had been able to use images to tell their own stories? When photography was first invented, few people owned a camera, but by the 1950s, photographic images had become the daily visual diet of of everyone living in urban centers of the world. And of course, thanks to digital technologies, everyone’s daily visual diet of images has changed even more dramatically.

By the turn of the 21st century, digital photography was rapidly displacing traditional analog cameras. Chemical film and light sensitive photo papers were being used less, and the computer and printer had begun to replace the darkroom. In this chapter, we’ll consider how digital technology further transformed the ways people engage with images and understand the world around them.

Photographers in the early 21st century began to use digital technology in many different ways. Some scanned photographic negatives or prints and digitized them into data that could be manipulated with software and printed with inkjet printers. Other started creating images directly with digital cameras that automatically create a raw data file. In both cases, the resulting images could be easily altered using programs like Adobe Photoshop and other digital image editing software.

Remixing, Borrowing, Copying, Appropriation

Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) is an artist who is best known for her digital photography, but who, like many of the other artists in this book, also works in film, digital video, installation and performance art. Her works tell complicated stories about history, along with race and identity in the US. In some of her projects, Weems has been interested in how visual culture, including photographic images, impact people’s understandings of history. While watching the interview with the artist linked below, consider how her project Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008), engages with this question by restaging iconic mass media photographs from the 1960s and 70s. This project was a collaboration with students from the Savannah College of Art and Design where Weems was teaching and in the video you’ll hear some of the students talk about their experiences working with Weems. Consider this approach to learning about history that Weems shared with her students. What are some of the questions that you think she wanted her students to wrestle with? What are some of the ideas this project proposes about the historical record and history classes?

In the same video, Weems begins the interview by discussing an earlier project titled From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96). To create this project, Weems selected original daguerreotypes from the nineteenth century. You can read more about daguerreotypes in the previous chapter about Nineteenth Century Photography. The daguerreotypes she selected were small images printed on tin or silver. They were originally made in 1850 by J.T. Zealy (1812-1893), commissioned by a man named Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) to “prove” his racist ideas about Black people, during a time when slavery was still legal in the US. As you learn in the interview linked below, Weems made copies of the daguerreotypes she selected and enlarged them. She then printed them in red and added words, etched into glass covering the prints. These creative interventions not only changed the look of these racist daguerreotypes, but they subverted the images and exposed the violence of slavery and racism, hidden beneath the supposed objectivity of the camera’s lens. What are some of the differences between the way this project involves remixing and the way Weems remixed historical images in Constructing History?

Watch & Consider: Carrie Mae Weems

Start by watching this interview with the artist Carrie Mae Weems from Art:21. (14:47 minutes)

You can also explore all of the projects Weems has worked on throughout her career, including projects directly related to COVID during the pandemic by visiting Carrie Mae Weems’ official website.

Questions to Consider:

1. What kind of questions is Carrie Mae Weems raising about history?
2. What does Weems suggest about the way photographs impact memory?
3. What does it mean to say that images aren’t just neutral representations of the world? How did Weems use appropriation to demonstrate this lack of neutrality?
4. What are some ways that Weems takes advantage of digital technologies to explore her own personal stories and broader historical narratives?

After spending time consider Weem’s early work, watch this short Art:21 video about a performance Weems created in 2016 titled “Grace Notes”. Weems created this piece to commemorate the deaths of young Black men like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and reflect on what the violence towards them means for the US as a community of humans. While Weems is primarily known as a photographer, in this piece, she employed projected video, dance, music and spoken word to explore the Black Lives Matter movement, a new US Civil Rights movement that began to grow in the early 21st century.

Selected Bibliography

Bonét, Sasha. “Carrie Mae Weems Confronts the Fraught History of American Photography“. Aperture.  April 9, 2021.

Cotton, Charlotte. Photograph as Contemporary Art. 4th edition. Thames and Hudson. 2020.

Davis, Ben. “Ways of Seeing Instagram”. artnet. June 24, 2014.

Delmez, Kathryn E. ed. Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. Exhibition catalogue. Yale University Press. 2012.

Finkel, Jori. “Tracing the Roots of Photo Sharing from Mail Art to Instagram”. New York Times. April 4, 2019.

Jurgenson, Nathan. The Social Photo: On photography and social media. Verso Books, 2019.

O’Hagan, Sean. “The digital age reshapes our notions of photography. Not everyone is happy“. The Guardian. July 2, 2016.

Lee, Yaniya. “The Freedom of Existing on the Edge” interview with Carrie Mae Weems. Canadian Art. May 1, 2019.

Lister, Martin. The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. Taylor and Francis. 2013.

Lipkin, Jonathan. “Digital Photography”. Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press. 2013-2020.

Manovich, Lev. Instagram and Contemporary Image. August 2017.

Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography. 5th edition. Abbeville Press. 2019.

Wells, Liz, ed. The Photography Reader: History and Theory. 2nd edition. Routledge. 2018.

Wells, Liz. Photography: A Critical Introduction. 6th edition. Routledge. 2021.