In Our Own Image (Reading)

  1. What does Ritchin mean with the “fluidity of the digital”? Give an example of digital imaging/digital photography that exemplifies this.

Definition: From the foreword, we can see “the fluidity of the digital means that we come to the “post-photographic age” and develop a new medium formed with pixels in the computer, so we can express more opinions in photography and transmitted them more widely and fluently. However, this “fluidity” may also make the appearances less objective to trust and cause hoaxes.

Example: As the benefits of the “fluidity” are pretty obvious, I want to give a negative example, which is BBC filters. Someone find out that BBC often use strange, dark and lifeless filters to shoot Chinese documentaries.

We can see BBC change such a small detail like making the color scheme more dark and cold in these screenshots. The atmosphere of this place suddenly changes. Therefore, BBC makes use of the “fluidity” to deliberately spread its own ideas with maybe prejudice.

2. Reflect on the extent to which photography is capable of capturing reality; and compare it to other media (technology) (e.g. text, video, virtual reality, books). 

If the photos are original and not edited, then they can be reliable with their objectivity to some extent, which means they are capable of capturing reality. Of course, editing with one’s subjective opinions will weaken the ability of capturing reality. But if the camera is super old or damaged and catches blurred images with low resolution, then this kind of photography can’t capture reality well. So, at this time, editing images with softwares like photoshop is a way to recover the function of the image as recording the reality.  

Compared to other media like texts and books, photography is more specific and direct. We need imagination to understand texts and books while we don’t need anything else but eyes to see the photos. And with the technology developing, editing videos is not a big deal now and it’s similar to photography.

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