Logo image
Back
Reframing the Authentic: photography, mobile technologies and the visual language of digital imperfection
Conference paper   Peer reviewed

Reframing the Authentic: photography, mobile technologies and the visual language of digital imperfection

Lisa Chandler and Debra Livingston
Proceedings of the 6th Global Conference, Visual Literacies: Exploring Critical Issues, pp.1-15
Global Conference, Visual Literacies: Exploring Critical Issues, 6th (Oxford, United Kingdom, 03-Jul-2012–05-Jul-2012)
Inter-Disciplinary Press
2012

Is same as

Abstract

Visual Arts and Crafts Mobile Technologies digital photography visual semiotics iPhone and iPad photography analogue photography digital imperfection Instagram
Photography's emergence from 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 has this capacity to readily achieve photographic precision created a glut of visual sameness when images can so easily be captured, perfected and replaced? This paper 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 iPhone and iPad applications such as Instaplus, Picfx and Camera+ which simulate the visual language of analogue photography. It 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. 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.

Details

Metrics

12 File views/ downloads
4215 Record Views
Logo image