A Photographic Reality

    Upon reading the After Photography by Fred Richman, there came to mind the many ideas and different modes of looking at photography and its influence on the world particularly in the digital age. It is interesting to see how far photography has come from its earlier forms. It used to be that photography was moreso a process in which photographs were taken and the film was developed and thus photos were created. Then instant photos came about in the later years of the 20th century. Yet now in the digital age, photos are not only instant but they are able to capture even the most minute details. In fact digital photography now can be see not so much as process (though there are processes required for developing different types of film) but as the traveling of pixels and megabytes through a digital realm into a memory space. Digital photography also allows for pictures to be manipulated while in the camera and before the film is even developed.
     Yet what proved to be the most striking thought was when Richman talked about how photography created new realities as well as how our view of the world can also be consider photographic in some senses According to sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, "one never sees things, one always sees them through a screen". This poses an interesting idea of how our world, as we envision it, exist only as the reality that we ourselves are seeing. In other words, we can't see the world through one another's eyes, only our own. So what we see is a replication or mirror image of what actually exists--this replication being our vision. Richman goes further into that idea and asks the question "where, then is the "real" now?" From this he creates this idea that we are always looking at photographs or replications of reality. Whether it is an image of map which is a picture that replicates a picture of an actual place or places or even the images depicted from television shows and stations where a past reality (depending on when it was recorded or the 1 second delayed transmission of a live recording), we are always looking at reality through a screen.