In recent years there has been much public discussion of the implications of the ‘digital revolution’. Far too much of this has been crystal-ball gazing of the most uncritical sort, while the effects of digital technology are making themselves apparent, sometimes painfully so, in our here and now. The increasing accessibility and use of digital imaging technology provides a good example of this. Anyone possessing suitable reasonably priced equipment - i.e. a personal computer, some specialized software and a scanner (or better still, a digital camera which converts light frequencies into graphics files that can be downloaded directly into a computer) - can alter the texture, tone, form, colour, etc. of a photograph pixel by pixel (1), enabling them to radically alter the content and appearance of the original as well as creating a seamless interweaving of separate images. With a high quality printer the resulting hard-copy picture can have all of the surface visual qualities of a photograph and yet possess representational properties different in kind to those possible with traditional photography. Indeed, digital imaging gives rise to the possibility of a new kind of picture, and this possibility has a number of implications for how we think of photography. It is these implications I will consider in what follows, though I will be particularly concerned with the implications of digital imaging for the aesthetic significance of the photographic medium.

The claim that digital imaging gives rise to a new kind of picture is based upon a simple logical distinction between two kinds of picture. A couple of examples serve to illustrate the pre-theoretical attitudes that help to underpin the significance of the distinction. Suppose an eminent scientist and explorer returns from a trip to the Himalayas and announces that he clearly saw a large hairy creature, half-man half-primate, wandering round the valleys. He then produces a number of drawings he made of the creature, each of which looks uncannily like previous drawings made by those claiming to have glimpsed the ‘abominable snowman’. Our explorer is a serious and sober scientist and it seems unlikely that he is trying to trick us or is lying. Nevertheless, the most we can safely conclude is that the drawings are evidence of what the explorer thought he saw. They are not, however, sufficient evidence for positing the existence of the abominable snowman.

Contrast this with the circumstances of the second example. This time the explorer returns with several rolls of exposed film that after processing yield several distinct pictures of something fitting the description of the abominable snowman. The negatives and the prints are closely examined by the best experts and all concur in the judgement that neither has been tampered with. We can even suppose the explorer to be as surprised by the pictures as everyone else, as a result of having failed to notice the mysterious creature when he took the pictures. What the explorer thought he saw is irrelevant to the photograph’s status as evidence for something having been there that had the appearance of the creature the photograph depicts.

What underlies this difference in the way we treat drawings and photographs as evidence of what they depict is a logical distinction between the kind of relationship each picture has to its subject matter. Drawings and paintings have an intentional relationship to their subject matter. That is, what they depict, and how it is depicted, is determined by the painter’s intentional thoughts and actions. It is for this reason the explorer’s drawings can only be evidence for what he thought he saw. By contrast, photographs have a causal relation to their subject matter which means that what is depicted and how it appears is almost fully determined by a causal process. As a consequence, the intentional thoughts of a photographer are virtually irrelevant to the determination of the representational content of their photograph. Moreover, having a causally determined representational content inevitably makes a photograph evidence of what it depicts. If there were nothing in front of the camera that looked like the abominable snowman, there would be no photograph of the abominable snowman. For there would have been no object to reflect the light patterns necessary to initiate the causal chain of events ending with a photograph of the abominable snowman.

With digital imaging it is possible to alter the photograph so much that it no longer makes sense to think of the resulting picture having any remnant of its original causal relationship with its subject matter, even though it may still possess all of the surface visual qualities of a photograph. It is for this reason that digital imaging gives us the possibility of a new kind of picture: ‘photographs’ that have an intentional relation to their subject matter. As the inverted commas indicate, the question immediately arises whether it is appropriate to think of such digital images as photographs, or even as photographic. We will be in a better position to answer this question after having explored the issues further.

The advent and growth of digital imaging has had, and will increasingly have, important implications in a number of areas. I have noted that my main concern will be with the implications for the understanding of the aesthetic significance of photography, but it is worth noting that there are important implications for media ethics and for the use of photography as evidence before the courts. For if a film director can produce a popular film (i.e. Forest Gump) depicting a contemporary actor meeting and shaking hands with John F Kennedy, what is to stop someone with malicious intent making a film depicting a respected politician meeting and shaking hands with a drugs baron? Consider also the use of digital imaging by a high circulation British newspaper (The London Evening Standard) to create a completely ‘fake’ photograph (of a leading figure in the British labour Party with a bottle of champaign) in order to illustrate an article that, in context, could be seen as a subtle slander. Of course it has been possible to create ‘fake’ photographs for a very long time: Arthur Conan Doyle was famously fooled by a retouched photograph depicting fairies dancing at the feet of a young girl. Digital imaging not only makes the creation of such fakes a much easier task, it also makes very high resolution fakes possible. Moreover, before the invention of digital imaging it was always possible, with the right training and equipment, to say with at least a very high degree of certainty whether a photograph had been doctored. This is significant because all kinds of evidence can be tampered with, but providing the tampering can always be detected and its effects isolated, what has not been tampered with remains evidence. Since digital imaging allows a seamless interweaving of animation and altered fragments of photographs into an image visually identical to an un-doctored photographic image, the resulting picture is no longer evidence of anything except the imagination and artistry of the computer operator. The plausibility of what is depicted in digital images is the best, and perhaps the only, test of its reliability as evidence.

Such implications are not wholly unrelated to my concern with the changes that digital imaging promises to make to our understanding of the aesthetic significance of the photographic medium. By giving photographers a new control over the representational content and appearance of their pictures, digital imaging opens up the possibility of an aesthetic interest in photographic representation. The possibility of such an interest brings with it a change in photography’s aesthetic status from an art that merely happens to be representational, to a representational art form.

It might at first appear odd to claim that traditional photographers lack control over the representational content of their pictures and the appearance of that content. It is certainly true that photographers typically choose their subject matter with care, and use various materials (e.g. lenses, filters, films, processing chemicals and printing papers) and procedures (e.g., lighting, exposure length, depth of field, multiple exposures, re-touching and eliminative printing techniques) to influence the final appearance of their photographs. Notice, however, that with regard to the choice of subject matter, the photographer (unlike the painter, sculptor or poet) is limited to a particular real or existing object or state of affairs. It is usually said, as a consequence, that traditional photography is ‘fictionally incompetent’ (2) - that is, it is a medium necessarily incapable of representing a fictional character or state of affairs. Of course, someone can be dressed up as Zeus and a photograph taken of them, but the photograph cannot thereby be said to represent Zeus. Rather, the resulting picture is a photograph of a person representing Zeus; and a photograph of a representation is no more a representation than a photograph of a painting is a painting.

Moreover, of the various materials and procedures for controlling the way objects appear in the final image, very few of them give the photographer control over the representational features of a photograph. Representation is a local matter; if a painting represents a vase (and nothing else), the representational properties of the picture will fill a specific limited and local portion of the picture space. But of the materials and procedures listed above, only re-touching has any purely local effect. Moreover, since it is a procedure that essentially consists of painting over small portions of the negative, it hardly appears a distinctively photographic means of controlling representational content. All of the other materials and procedures produce a global and uniform effect over the appearance of all the objects depicted. Global effects such as the above are, I would suggest, better thought of as a means of giving photographs expressive qualities the original subject matter lacked or emphasizing such qualities as the subject matter does have. Whatever effect the employment of these materials and procedures has over the representational content and its appearance, they could hardly be said to provide the photographer with the means to radically alter the appearance of an object in order to provoke a spectator to see it differently, or to express a thought about it. It is sufficient for my purpose, however, if a more minimal claim is accepted: with regard to control over representational content and its appearance, the pixel-by-pixel control of digital imaging makes it a method of picture-making potentially more akin to painting than traditional photography.

Control over representational content and its appearance has aesthetic significance because with it arrives the possibility of aesthetically interesting representation. To see why, we need to consider what is meant by an ‘aesthetic interest’. One of the most fundamental principles of modern aesthetic theory is that for something to have aesthetic significance it must be possible to describe a distinctive aesthetic interest in it. Such an interest is traditionally characterized as an interest in the object or feature for ‘its own sake’ or as ‘an end in itself’. Therefore, if photographic representation is to have any aesthetic significance, it must be possible to describe an aesthetic interest in the representational properties of a photograph. Such an interest in a photograph supposes attention is directed to the representational properties for their own sake and not merely as the best means available for satisfying a desire to see the objects a photograph depicts. If one’s interest in a photograph is merely a manifestation of one’s interest in the appearance of the particular real objects it depicts, then the value of the photograph is purely a functional one. For one’s interest in it would then be no more than an interest in it as a means to seeing what is depicted and therefore an interest in something other than the photograph itself. Such an interest would not be an aesthetic interest because it would not be directed toward the photograph for its own sake, but rather, for its ability to satisfy our desire to appreciate the objects it depicts.

A simple test of whether an object or some of its properties are the focus of aesthetic interest is to be found in a distinction between two different kinds of descriptive reasons that can be given for an interest. If someone were asked why they were interested in Ansel Adams’s “Moon and Half Dome” one kind of reason they might give consists of a description of something other than the photograph. Were our respondent to give their reason for an interest in the Adams’s print in terms of a description of their art history assignment, their decorative needs or the objects that caused the photograph to depict what it does, they would clearly not have described an interest in the photograph for its own sake. Alternatively, they might respond by describing features of the photograph itself. For example, they might describe the collection of lines, forms and tones that constitute the image and thereby indicate an interest in the photograph itself as an abstract composition. Alternatively, they might describe its expressive qualities - as William King does when he writes of this photograph: “The . . . contrast between rich blacks and whites, combined with a sense that the objects are closer than normal because larger than normal, gives the photograph a quality of unreality.”(3) Or perhaps they simply praise the photograph for its framing and composition. In each case the photograph itself is being described, and therefore, such reasons for an interest in the picture indicate an interest in the photograph as a work of art. It looks impossible, however, to describe an aesthetic interest in the representational properties of the photograph. For any description of what a photograph represents is identical with a description of the real objects that caused the photograph to have that representational content. If the answer to the question of why one is interested in a photograph consists of no more than a description of that bit of the world the photograph depicts, then it is not a description of an interest in the photograph itself .

If photography were to be a representational art it would have to be possible for the representational properties of a photograph to attract one’s attention for their own sake. What is definitive of those properties, however, is that they are the result of a causal process designed to produce pictures that are - from the point of representation - nothing more than relatively precise evidence of how something looked at a certain time under certain conditions. One would have to be indifferent to what is definitive of photographic representation in order to have an aesthetic interest in such representation. And that would amount to no less than a failure to grasp that it is a photograph that one is interested in. It is worth stressing, however, that the impossibility of describing an aesthetic interest in photographic representation does not imply there are no other properties of photographs that can attract aesthetic attention. My point is merely that an interest in what a photograph represents is indistinguishable from an interest in the real objects that caused the photograph to have that appearance. Neither interest can be given a reason that describes the photograph itself, and therefore, neither interest is an aesthetic interest. Consequently, the representational properties of a traditional photograph have no aesthetic significance: photography is an art form that merely happens to be representational. Digital imaging, by contrast, opens up the possibility of aesthetically interesting photographic representation because it gives rise to the possibility of pictures with the visual qualities of a photograph and the intentionality of representation that is characteristic of all representational arts. New technology has often enough in the past opened up new aesthetic possibilities - no where more so than in architecture - but whether digital imaging will fulfil its aesthetic promise remains an open question. At the present time there are a number of artists using this technology, but most of this work has much the same kind of experimental and derivative look that early ‘art’ photographs have. If the introduction of photography is anything to go by, it may be many decades before we see any significant works of digital imaging art. Nevertheless, a few general points can be made about the sort of use to which digital imaging would have to be put for such art to emerge. If, for example, digital imaging came to be used merely to make minor alterations to the initial photograph, such as the removal of one freckle or the heightening of tonal contrasts, it would make little sense to say a new representational art had arrived. We will arrive at aesthetically interesting representational art only when the digital imager exerts far more extensive control over the manner in which objects are represented, and does so with a purpose. (For illustration click here). When the photograph is digitally ‘re-painted’ the result may be a representational image capable of drawing attention to itself by virtue of both the 'what' and the 'how' of its representation. Unlike the painter, the digital imager interested in representation will not construct a picture by accumulation of marks on a surface, but rather, they will re-construct - i.e. re-shape, re-colour and re-arrange - the photographic elements they began with. Such wide-spread localized reconstruction puts the representational digital image into an intentional relation with its subject matter, making the representational thoughts embodied in the picture potentially interesting in their own right.

We can now return to the question raised earlier: if digital imaging gives us a new kind of picture, is it appropriate to think of substantially altered digital imagery as photographic at all? If we restrict the question to those digital images that are made with the intention of attracting aesthetic attention, then it is fair to conclude that digital images are a form of the photographic, even if they are not entirely correctly thought of as photographs. This is not as paradoxical a conclusion as it may at first appear. The claim that digital imagery is a form of the photographic medium is underwritten by the digital image’s origin in the photograph. Alterations to an already given photographic representation through digital imaging may change the aesthetic status of those representational properties, but this is more of an opening up of a new photographic possibility than it is a new form of drawing or an entirely new category of picture. The digital imager’s method of intentional alteration leaves an imaginative trail back to the picture’s photographic beginnings. This trail, I would suggest, provides the conceptual link that keeps digital imagery within the category of the photographic.

There are good reasons, however, for thinking that digital images are not really photographs. The causal process that defines photography underpins the treatment of photographs as evidence of what they depict. The possibility of precisely and systematically breaking that causal relation to the world makes digital imagery sufficiently different from traditional photography to suggest calling such a picture a ‘photograph’ is little short of intentional ambiguity.

NOTES
1 'Pixel' is a term meaning picture element. A computer screen is composed of hundreds of thousands of tiny spots of light whose colour or tone is determined by a numerical value. Each of these spots is a ‘pixel’ or picture element.

2 I believe the expression was coined by Roger Scruton in ‘Photography and Representation’, in The Aesthetic Understanding, London: Methuen, 1983. Scruton’s article is an extended argument against the aesthetic significance of photographic representation and the photographic medium in general. It deserves to be the starting place for anyone interested in the aesthetics of photography.

3 William King, ‘Scruton and Reasons for Looking at Photographs’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 32 July 1992, pp. 262-263