In Our Image

Ritchin argues that the traditional understanding of photography as a record of reality is being challenged by increasing digital manipulation and the blurring of the line between reality and analog. He also explores the potential of photography to address social and political issues in new and innovative ways.

Ritchin defines “the fluidity of the digital” as the fact that it is much less difficult to edit and quickly transfer digital photos because they are reorganized into different pixels in the computer.

For example, a few years ago, we find out that there is photoshop that can help us edit photos to change reality, to make ourselves look nice. And nowadays, there is also a tool that can edit videos. Thus we can see, editing images become easier and easier right now. Even when you are moving, the image still can be changed. Also, like virtual reality, it even doesn’t need to capture reality, it can create reality through digital methods, and it is easy to edit since it is made digitally.

I think photographs, can catch reality in a moment. Unlike books and text, it is something that can prove to be true, it is evident in the things that happen in the reality. But it also has its disadvantage, compared to video, the photograph only captures things that happened in one second. The problem is the picture of a moment may have multiple understandings, we sometimes can really tell what is the truth. But the video doesn’t have this problem, the video is continuous, and we can see the whole event from the video. And virtual reality, can give us a feeling of reality, and media like photographs and videos, can let us feel reality only visually, but virtual reality will give people multiple feelings, through touching, seeing, and hearing. But for virtual reality, since it is not the true reality, thus some details in virtual reality may not the same as reality.