Ritchin talks about the development in technology, where the means to record the reality changed with time.The example of the 1990 Persian Gulf War has left me deep impression as it shows how the evil took advantage of the development of the fluidity of the digital and tried to hide their creulty and the objective fact.
Fluidity of the digital seems to be negative. In the past, although recording was harder, but meanwhile changing the recording was harder too, as was depicted in the mechanical camera’s role in earlier conflicts like the Vietnam War. But the fluidity allows easy adjustment of the picture taken, which enables people to alter the reality on purpose.
However, fluidity of the digital appears more positive nowadays,at least for me, it’s so. To take a popular photo editting app “Xingtu” as an example, young people will use it to add a filter to the photo to make it looks more appealing. In addition, Xingtu is really advanced in AI making up. I always use Xingtu to buffing my skin and change the color of my lip, which really works especially when the lighting of the photo is really poor.
Photography is really capable of capturing reality, I suppose, if the technique of photo editting never exists. Camera is a kind of optics device, so it’s recording is physically objective.
But photography is sometimes not so capable, let alone technology,such as text, video, virtual reality, books. As they are all media created by humanbeings, then they can be altered, or purposefully taken from the very beginning to pretend something didn’t exist happened to cater to certain people’s profit.Texts and books are the weakest as everyone can speak and write down something while videos are more solid as the previous ability to alter video is not so advance as that of photos and the technique requirements to alter videos is higher. But we have to admit that both videos and photos can be staged photography, so we have to take on careful attitude when judging the facts through photos and videos.