GALLERY - University of South Australia

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the real. However, because of human intervention, this real was always
manipulated in some way. Framing, cropping or contextualising the real,
was there from the very beginning: this was the way in which the stars
were transformed into signs.
Although many histories of the mechanical/digital image are grounded in
the progress of technology as a means of analysing modes and styles, it is
not the technology in itself that is captivating. It is the way in which the
technologies are capable of exploring the meeting of magic and science,
the way in which they engage us psychologically.
It also needs to be noted that mechanisms, technologies, programmes,
instruments and software are all tools that have been designed to do
particular things. The camera obscura, for example, was said to reproduce
Renaissance perspectival space, a one point perspective which positioned
the subject/spectator at the centre of the viewing experience. But the
camera obscura is much older than the Renaissance, Helmut Gernsheim
notes that: “The optical principle of the camera obscura images was
known to Aristotle (384-322)”. 6 The scientific minds of the Enlightenment
may have valued the camera for its indexical and mimetic qualities,
however, it quickly became a very popular device. In the hands of the
operator the camera obscura was a theatrical device, a darkroom, a mini
stage upon which nature and culture converged.
From the inception of cameras, there has always been a desire by
practitioners and operators to stretch the limits and capacities of the
instrument. Add to this the desire and the imagination of the operator
and the spectator and one has an intricate map rich in metaphors which
impact on belief, memory, history and psychology.
Digital photography has been described as a kind of demon. A monster
that annihilates the analogue and indexical qualities of the medium.
These qualities were supposed to anchor photography to the real. The
promise of photography, in the service of art and science, was that it
would reproduce reality without the interception of the operator. The
idea that nature did the work was exploded by the simple fact that
humans pushed the button. The famous and relatively ‘innocent’ case of
the Cottingley Fairy photographs is just one example of the performative
nature of the medium in the hands of children and at the whim of desire. 7
This photographic hoax, like recent day UFO photographs, was spun out
for years and given credibility by Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the
Sherlock Holmes mysteries. The point is that human intervention is bound
to spoil science. In the realm of the visual, it’s predictable and endearing
that humans would want to mess up.
There has been a lot of debate about the status of the medium in art in
recent years. A kind of hysteria emanating from the October group and
Rosalind Krauss in particular. She fears that too much inter-media art and
installation results in the disappearance of the medium. This seems
to me to be strange from a scholar who championed “sculpture in the
expanded field” and did so much to support the postmodern impetus
in art which essentially undermined the medium as it had been described
by the late modernists in America. Yet retrospectively both Krauss and
Hal Foster, who now believes that design has infected the fine arts, have
come to question the pluralism of postmodernism which they believe is in
the service of global capital. 8 Thus those who once heralded a postmodern
turn now turn away and impel artists to return to the essentials of the
medium. To me this sounds like a retreat into high formalism, a return
to the ivory tower where art and popular culture are safely separated.
It also seems implausible, like a bid to stop time, to return to the glory
of a safer formalist avant-garde enshrined by Clement Greenberg in
the 1940s, and now by Rosalind Krauss who follows Greenberg in her
allegiance to the medium. 9
This tendency to retreat into the past cannot stem the flow of new
media and technologies. The time of mediums is over in its formal sense.
One must ask what is the medium of photography? Is it its analogue,
indexical and empirical truth, which has come under so much scrutiny and
criticism? Is it its filmic substance, those layers of skin that are stolen and
saved? 10 And then one would ask: is it not the magic and mysticism of this
process that is actually compelling rather than the thing in itself? Is it not
the process that enchants us? The promises that fairies actually might be
photographed? And, if this is the case, then surely what we are talking
about is the desire to invent things that are improbable. And now in the
twenty-first century the digital enters centre stage and says you can have
all of this and more. The digital and electronic media disperse the concept
of the medium. Each new media is predicated on the past but looks to the
future, to new possibilities, new means of production and distribution.
You push the button or click the mouse to invent your own fantasies.
Make fairies, ghosts, UFOs; create heroes out of miniature models,
crime scenes from ordinary suburban houses. Invest in your imagination,
photoshop will do the rest.
There is no going back to the medium as an essential entity but it is
apparent throughout digital photo and lens-based practice that artists
are looking to the past as much as to the future. Toy cameras and old
technologies are often combined with digital means of presentation.
My recent research suggests that the scanner, arguably a fairly mundane
piece of equipment, is the tool that is used the most in photo-based
production. 11 The scanner allows artists to scan almost anything (now
even three dimensional objects) and to create enormous digital files which
then allow the artist to print at scales unimaginable to the photographers
of the 1970s. It also allows for the picture to be printed on virtually any
surface. There’s nothing magical about a scanner, it’s essentially a copier.
But it’s probably the most important conduit in the chain of production.
Much like the simple modem that allows us to participate in the World