Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

168 Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction
transmit as any other type of digital file. However, their claims to truth are
compromised partly for this reason; images that exist as a digital signal are
easy to modify in ways that may cast them into doubt as signifiers of things
that “really happened.” Hence digital photography has a different kind of
power in relation to the management of memory, especially in relation to
the domestic and familial sphere.
Much has been written about the particular changes wrought on photographic
practice and theory by digital imaging technology. In The Reconfigured
Eye, William Mitchell notes the ways in which analog images are enduring,
stable, or finished in the ways that digital ones are not, and observes that
“notions of individual authorial responsibility for image content, authorial
determination of meaning, and authorial prestige are correspondingly diminished.”
61 Thus, unlike analog photography, which had a privileged status in
relation to memory, all digital photographs call the idea of truth and authorship
into question. I would contend, however, that both the photograph of
“Little Livy” and the Abu Ghraib photographs are resistant to this dilution
of truth value inherent in the digital. These images are, like the funeral
photography displayed in Lesy and Van Schaick’s book, intensely and purposefully
posed; like them, they are not “snapshots,” and they perform a ritual
function of public mourning in the first instance and militarized racialization
in the second. It was noteworthy that when the Abu Ghraib photographs
were released, nobody thought to question their authenticity despite
their obvious status as digital images; they possessed a cultural truth that
exceeded their always already questionable means of production. Likewise,
the image of “Little Livy” is very much meant to be a “real” versus a fictional
image; unlike the pregnant avatar cartoons and fairylike images of miscarried
“angels” and “vanishing twins” memorialized in Holly’s signature,
Olivia’s is decidedly meant to invoke the sense of “something brought before
the lens,” as Sontag puts it.
The achievement of authenticity in these cases of bodies in pain and
mourning transcends the ordinary logic of the analog versus the digital
photograph because these bodily images invoke the “semimagical act” of
remembering types of suffering that are inarticulate, private, hidden within
domestic or militarized spaces that exclude the public gaze. The truth of
these images remains unquestioned because the notion that someone might
purposely falsify them seems incomprehensible. Women’s digital signatures
on babydream.com perform the important work of visualizing previously
hidden body narratives, and most importantly they do so in a way that juxtaposes
an amazingly broad set of signifiers in the same space: images of happy