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Reframing the Authentic: Photography, Mobile Technologies and the Visual Language of Digital Imperfection
Book chapter   Peer reviewed

Reframing the Authentic: Photography, Mobile Technologies and the Visual Language of Digital Imperfection

Lisa Chandler and Debra Livingston
Learning to See: The Meanings, Modes and Methods of Visual Literacy, pp.227-245
Brill
2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848883024_019
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https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848883024_019View
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Abstract

Visual Arts and Crafts
Photography's emergence in the early nineteenth century enabled new ways of viewing the world and experiencing time, space and events. It led to the creation of new visual conventions, affected notions of truth, realism and authenticity, and established a visual language distinctive to the medium. Digital mobile technologies have extended the potential of vernacular photography through the introduction of small, flexible, affordable devices that allow even the relatively unskilled to create impressive images that can be easily transmitted and shared. Photo-software for mobile devices is generous and forgiving, allowing the user to crop, correct and enhance images at a single touch. However, this capacity to create 'flawless' imagery has been countered by a movement towards the reinstatement of signs of imprecision and the photographer's presence. This chapter examines some ways in which artists and amateur photographers have sought to counter the hyper-reality of digital flawlessness, not through traditional media, but by employing mobile technology applications that simulate the visual language of analogue photography. This chapter considers how the visual signifiers of analogue photography - including the random, serendipitous possibilities that it enables - have been encoded in digital form to allow users to create an aesthetic of digital imprecision and analogue nostalgia. The visual signs of memory, age, time, place, medium and substrate can be combined to generate a simulacrum of analogue authenticity, allowing the creator to feel that they have produced something distinctive through the image's creative imprecision. The tension between this synthesis of the authentic and visually constructed photographic processes is investigated in this exploration of the visual language of digital imperfection.

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