The statement, ‘New media is less tangible’ refers to the idea that digital media is less tangible because you can’t hold the internet in your hand like a book. To a large extent, this statement is very true and applicable to the digital media landscape, but yet, this statement also subtly implies that because of this loss of tangibility, new media is less valuable. This is a notion put forward by many critics of new media, as well as particularly by older generations who look back with some fondness to the age of bulky cameras and photo albums. Indeed, who makes a photo album these days that is not of the Facebook kind?
I decided to explore this statement by focusing on the role of photography, interrogating how it has developed, and whether it has become less tangible, or less valuable. I produced a short animation, presented as an infinitely looping GIF. I photographed myself holding various objects in my hands, including a picture slide, an SLR film camera, a printed photograph, a DSLR camera, and a mobile phone. These objects are supposed to represent an evolution of different mediums spanning the last few decades – the picture slide has been replaced by the mobile phone as a primary medium of capturing memories in photographic form. The photograph I pulled from an old family photo album – it is a photograph of my mother. All theses objects are family possessions that are quite important to me because of their nostalgic value. I enjoyed having the opportunity to rumble through a box of old slides and a pile of photo albums to find these images. Both these processes are very different to the way I search through my own photographs, which are stored online and on digital hard drives.
“… early critics feared a loss of texture and authenticity, features that they believed were inherent in old image technologies and missing in the ‘cold inhuman perfection’ of the digital.’ writes Susan Murray about digital photography. She continues, arguing that digital photography has actually raised our standards for the quality of the image, by taking several photos, editing them, discarding ones that have errors such as the wrong shutter speed. Anyone that has used an analogue film camera will know that with film there are far fewer chances to get the ‘right’ shot, so the level of perfectionism that is present in the photo you took of your breakfast this morning would not be there if you took it with a film camera. But perhaps it is this level of im-perfectionism that makes old media so appealing.
I intend for the viewer of the animation to consider whether this transition to less tangible media, specifically the method of capturing and storing memories through photography, actually devalued media, or merely transformed it. What have we lost with digital media, or rather, what have we gained? Is a loss of materiality really a bad thing?
Works cited:
- Murray, Susan. (2008, August 1) ‘Digital Images, Photosharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.’ Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 7, Issue 2.
- Palmer, Daniel (2010) ‘Emotional Archives: Online Photo Sharing and the Cultivation of the Self.’ Photographies, 3:2, 155-171
- West, Nancy Martha (2000) ‘Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia.’ The University Press of Virginia, USA.