Lucian Wester - Annotation: What you get is what you see, Frank Kessler

What you get is what you see. Digital images and the claim on the real. Frank Kessler

A cinematographer around 1890 mentions that film has a stronger relation to the real than photography has because it can’t be retouched and photography can. Brian Winston says about one hundred years later that: ‘Digitalization destroys the photographic image as evidence of anything except the process of digitalization’. (Frank Kessler p.187) Film and photography got their claim on the real according to André Bazin by the fact that photography is a trace of light reflected of an object and fixed chemically upon a film. The semiotic Charles Pierce argues that photography is ‘ … both an icon, as they are ‘in certain aspects exactly like the objects they represent’, and index, as a result of their having a ‘physical connection’ to the referent.’ (Frank Kessler p.188). Frank Kessler asks the question if the digitalization of photography and film influents their claim on the truth? He splits it up in tree parts: technology, indexicality and practice.

Technology Many claims of photography to the truth are based on quantitative rather than qualitative arguments. For example that film can’t be retouched because it takes to long. And if we look into history we will find multiple examples of manipulation far before the digitalization of photography both in film and photography. The digitalization moreover gave us: ‘… a renewed awareness of the numerous forms of manipulation and intervention that constitute the very activity of producing and presenting (moving) pictures.’ (Frank Kessler p.190)

Indexicality Indexicality is in a sense the same as Roland Barthes ‘referent’; a photo is a trace of something that has been in front of a camera. There is of course a difference between: ‘object’s ‘having been there’’ and ‘the image depicts ‘how it was’’ (Frank Kessler p.191) In this view digitalization doesn’t effect the indexicality of a photograph, both digital and analog photo’s have referents. ‘The indexical image can hardly state anything else than that the profilmic ‘has been’; even for it to say ‘it has been there and then’ requires, in most cases, additional information of some kind’. (Frank Kessler p.192) What’s more important for the indexical image is the discourse. ‘… the ‘claim on the real’ no longer depends on the indexical image but on the status a viewer ascribes to that discourse.’ (Frank Kessler p.192) It’s the authority that the discourse brings to the images that makes them more truthful.

Practices Photography is more used as a social medium that in the analog age. Although some people see the digitalization of photography as a chains that infect the claim to the real of photography, because it’s easily manipulated, others say that nothing has chained. The truth argues Kessler is somewhere in between the both.