25 Years After “Digital Imaging and the Death of Photography” — A Conversation with Geoffrey Batchen

In preparation for my review of the FotoFocus exhibition & symposium AutoUpdate: Photography in the Electronic Age, I tracked down a copy of the 1994 monograph Metamorphoses: Photography in the Electronic Age (after which the symposium takes its name). One of its essays, “Phantasm: Digital Imaging and the Death of Photography,” stood out to me as eerily prescient. Its author, Geoffrey Batchen, describes two then-crises in photography: one technological (can we trust images made with computers?) and another epistemological (will digital imaging usher in an era in which simulation and reality are indistinguishable?). Needless to say, such questions remain enormously relevant to aesthetic and sociopolitical realms of contemporary life. Smartphones and social network technologies alone are re-mapping our relationship to images in ways that are yet to be fully understood — to say nothing of AI, deepfakes, and the vast network of government and capitalist surveillance infrastructure.

With all this in mind, I decided to track down its author, Geoffrey Batchen, to find out if things have changed in his estimation. Batchen, a writer, curator, and Professor of art history at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand who specializes in the history of photography, graciously responded to my emails with some insightful answers. His responses were so great, in fact, I lamented having to select only a few short quotes for the review. So, with his permission, here is our conversation:

SK: You described two crises that were facing photography in 1994: One technological and one epistemological. Both dealt in some sense with photography’s indexical relation to the world (or in some cases a lack thereof). A quarter century later, have things changed? Do you feel like these are still the crises facing photography in 2019?

GB: The main issue, then and now, concerns how people choose to perceive the photograph. For reasons that bear thinking about, we want to believe in photographs, whatever their mode of production. Despite the fact that photographs always testify to the passing of time, and thus to our own eventual passing, we take photographs in order to deny the prospect of death and to declare “I am here,” as if the simple act of photographing is a magical talisman against our own erasure from history. In the midst of an increasingly secular world, photographing is a declaration of faith in the possibility of an afterlife.

Back in the 1990s, I imagined that a crisis would occur if everyone began to distrust the photograph, and that declaration came to be seen as a fraud. However, our faith seems to have survived. In my experience, people respond to photographs in much the same way as they always have — with curiosity, emotion or apathy, depending on the relationship to the subject of the photograph. Some scholars have argued that the latest crisis in the world of photography comes from “massification,” referring to the sheer number of photographic images that are now made and disseminated. Joan Fontcuberta, for example, has argued that “this rampant excess radically transforms our relationship with images, which are our primary means of engaging with the world, and therefore also changes our relationship with the world. Hence its inescapable political repercussions.” He claims that memory is one of the things at stake in this transformation, along with the capacity of any particular photograph to persuade and move a public audience. Of course, one might point out that, for any individual observer, a billion digital photographic images a day is no more or less overwhelming than the millions produced during the analogue era. But these, rather than questions of photography’s capacity for truth or falsehood, are the terms of contemporary debate.

SK: You talk about “post-photography” as a kind of expanded repertoire of techniques, in which photographic-like works are produced through non-photographic methods. Would you still use this term “post-photography” today? Or would you simply call it photography?

GB: I think I put it this way in 1992, when I first used the term: “Photography has become ‘photography,’ eternally framed by the quotation marks of historical distance and a certain self-consciousness (that embarrassment one feels in the presence of the recently deceased).” The reference to death, and to the death of photography in particular, was a constant refrain in those days, not long after the introduction of digital cameras (the first was released onto the market in 1990). Such discussions were taking place in the aftermath of considerable debate about ‘postmodernism,’ and therefore about the end of modernism and the advent of a more skeptical and self-reflexive kind of thinking about modernity and its cultural products. Hence my cheeky adoption of the term ‘post-photography’ as a way of describing this phenomenon in relation to photography. It was meant as a provocation. However, I’m sure others were using the same term around this same time, motivated by a similar set of desires. All terms have their use-by dates and perhaps ‘post-photography’ has already reached that point. I myself would simply use ‘photography’ today. However, we should embrace the difficulty of definition that the term ‘post-photography’ implies. If nothing else, it signals that photography is a complex phenomenon and deserving of constant questioning.

SK: Towards the end of the essay, you wrote “Photography’s passing must necessarily entail the inscription of another way of seeing — and of being.” We now have artists who are working with artificial intelligence to generate images using machine-learning algorithms, even framing their work as human-AI ‘collaborations.’ I’m inclined to think this qualifies as ‘another way of seeing — and of being.’ Either way, the human-machine relationship has become more complex. What are your thoughts on this?

GB: The human-machine relationship has always been a complex one, ever since we picked up the first tool and used it to extend the capacities of the body. I’m not convinced that the relationship has markedly changed, even if the technologies concerned have become more sophisticated. Again, it is a question of perception. The body and the machine are now indistinguishable. But have they ever been distinguishable? We need to resist the alluring thought that things were simpler in the past. Photography was accused from the beginning of taking the creative act out of human hands and consigning it to a machine. Hence the resistance to the acceptance of photographs as art objects. But those objections were foolish then (the real objection was to changes in the value of labor and skill, to economic changes) and remain foolish now. Artificial intelligence is designed and operated by humans, who are themselves artificially enhanced. If we get away from our insistence on maintaining boundaries between these two identities, then we can concentrate on more important political questions, such as who is controlling these technologies and to what purpose?

SK: This relates to the previous question. As I read your essay, I couldn’t help but think about how surveillance networks harvesting information and the untold (perhaps unknowable) petabytes of still images and video they collect. That’s billions or trillions of photographs that, by design, no one ever sees! And they’re assimilated into this seeing-apparatus that uses deep learning to identify objects or faces in order to negotiate some other function. I’m curious about your perspective on photographs that aren’t intended for human eyes. What happens to photography (or the photograph) when it’s placed inside these apparatuses, when a human to behold the photograph aren’t a part of the picture (so to speak)?

GB: The photograph today is a bundle of data, from which an image can be derived but also the place and time in which it was taken, and no doubt many other pieces of information too. I’m not sure that a human viewer was ever essential to photography’s function (again, we take photographs to affirm our existence, and that affirmation occurs whether or not that photograph is ever printed, or seen). So your question has more to do with surveillance, and the gathering and use of information, than with photography itself. We should all be concerned about such surveillance and its consequences. We should ensure that our governments enact and follow strict regulations about such gathering. And we should think carefully before we give away our personal information for free by posting it (and our photographs) on social media sites, to take just one example of a business model dependent on such information harvesting.