My thoughts on In Our Own Image
In the book, Ritchin said, “One could say that we were entering the ‘post-photographic age’ in the sense that the fidelity of the mechanical age was being replaced by the fluidity of the digital.” So, I think the fidelity of the mechanical age and the fluidity of the digital are two opposite concepts. In other words, the fluidity of the digital implies the ability to adjust and modify digital images, audio, and video with modern technology, which let the digital project looks different from reality.
It is really common in our daily life. For example, we took a lot of pictures, but because it was cloudy and the light was bad, the pictures of the scenery and people were not as good as we expected. To solve this problem maybe we will use photoshop to let the picture looks brighter and more colorful and pictures can’t reflect reality at that time.
From my perspective, photography is capable of capturing part of the reality, not the whole.
According to Ritchin, “We were also rediscovering the initial meaning of ‘photography,’ ‘writing with light,’”. In other words, the basic element of photography is light. So, photography needs can’t create something out of thin air, which increases its capability. But because people are the “writers”, who can control the angle of the picture and even can set up the scene beforehand, photography shows the world that the photographer wanted us to see. So maybe it isn’t the whole reality. Compared with books, especially fiction books, photography is a much more reliable reflection of reality. Because writers can create anything in their book as long as the logic in the book world is smooth. But compared with videos, photography is less capable of capturing reality. Because it is much harder to let a video playing smoothly with a perfect connection between every sound and picture after editing.