The roadside photo was rephotographed with a digital camera to produce a digital file, which is a collection of data stored in a specific format with all the forms of computation that are now built into cameras. Or more likely, with the integration of a camera into a mobile phone to be networked, distributed, platformized, and computerized that presuppose  fibre optic cables, satellites, servers and routers.  Then we have  a transient photography’ — photography in motion — a network image in a virtual form with screens, algorithms and data flow in a computational culture where the mage can now be generated through text-to-image Generative AI systems using prompts (such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney).  This is the image-economy  we live in.  

Is the difference between these two approaches to photography important or significant?

We have moved a long way from the 20th century conception of  photography as film, negative, print as a modern mode of seeing.   The  historical period of the mechanical analogue has passed. It  is  a historical heritage medium whose passing is mourned.  Seeing photographically’ is a human-machine assemblage in which the photographer’s eye becomes disciplined to the apparatus in a manner that can be imitated. So what might photography be becoming in the new image economy that has emerged from a stabilized, mobile networked photography?

Does that mean we need to rewrite, or re-vision, photography’s place in the  contemporary world,  whilst  remembering what photography as a medium and a culture has been and what it has done? How do we think in terms of seeing photographically in this image economy with its computer vision in the AI-generated images where the look of photographs from any period or style can be generated with the right combination of prompts and parameters. Is seeing photographically seeing like a dataset, or seeing like those circulating fake images that render fake history?

The history of photography highlights how photography is a fluctuating constellation of technologies, institutions, practices, and forms and that technological change is entangled with historically different understandings of how camera technology mediates our perception of the world and our sensory experience. My use of digital technology (ie., camera, computer, software and platforms) is shaped by my cultural memory and set of habits and practices of analogue photography. This is reinforced by the image of the digital camera being designed and modeled to recreate the appearance of the analogue image. So the past analogue version of photography is being rearticulated and reproduced in accordance with the current needs, desires, and anxieties pf the many different users of photography in the new digital image-economy of the networked image.

It’s a continuum.