Remediation: Understanding New Media

In the book, Remediation: Understanding New Media, authors Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin tackle the issue of mediation. At one point in this book, the authors discuss photographic truth as it relates to digital photography. The authors’ basic claim here is, again, similar to my own thesis, in that they believe that digital photography is challenging the traditionally and widely accepted belief in photographic truth. Essentially, digital photography threatens those who "believe that traditional photography has a special relationship to reality" (106). The authors also quote from William J. Mitchell’s book The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, a resource that I also found helpful for my research. I am continually surprised by the fact that my own research follows the path of many others who have explored this topic.
I can see yet another parallel to my own work when the authors of Remediation claim, "photographic ‘truth’ was not unassailable even in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." Again and again, we can see that the notion of photographic truth has always been on somewhat faulty ground. The authors mentioned that, "Impressionists claimed that their paintings captured the truth of light better than photographs could" (106). The authors also mention, like Mitchell, that combination printing had the ability to deceive viewers long before the advent of digital imaging. The authors present an example of combination printing that successfully deceived viewers, a photo of a young girl posing with cardboard cutout fairies. According to the authors, this photo "managed to convince much of the English public that fairies existed" (106).
In relation to photographic truth, the authors also discuss the CD-ROM work, Truths and Fictions by the photographer Pedro Meyer. (Again, I also found Meyer’s work to be helpful in my research.) The authors claim that because we know that most of Meyer’s photos are digitally altered, even the photos that haven’t been manipulated seem "artificial." Therefore, with this work, "Meyer is making Mitchell’s point that with the advent of digital technology the photograph has lost the simple relationship to the real that it previously enjoyed" (108). This relationship between truth and photography was essentially, an expression of what the authors call, our desire for transparent immediacy. In contrast, digitally altered images, because they make the viewer aware of the photograph as a medium, are considered to be a representation of that desire for immediacy. As the authors eloquently put it, "digital photography appears to complicate and even to mock the desire for immediacy that traditional photography promises to satisfy. On the other hand, because a digital photograph can sometimes be regarded as transparent, it too can express our desire for immediacy" (111). We can see then that both traditional photography and digital photography are dealing with opposing expressions of the logic of immediacy. The notion of photographic truth is no longer appropriate for examining photography; one must now examine a photograph according to its relationship to immediacy.