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What you get is what you see: Digital images and the claim on the real

Frank Kessler begins his text on digital images and the claim on the real with mentioning the former court cinematographer of Tsar Nikolas II, Boleslas Matuszewski, who in 1898 plead “for the creation of a repository for actuality films so that they can serve as historical documents for future generations.” A hundred years later, media historian Brian Winston got rid of Matuszewski's optimism and announced the following: “Digitalization destroys the photographic image as evidence of anything except the process of digitalization. The physicality of the plastic material represented in any photographic image can no longer be guaranteed.”

Therefore, it is clear that a “question arises of whether digital technology indeed weakens, impairs, or maybe even destroys the privileged (ontological, indexical) link between analogical photographic or cinematic images and the real.” Kessler proceeds to assess the roots of the problem, and designates three categories for it: technology, indexicality and practices.

Still, “the problem of manipulability did not arise with the advent of digital technologies, but has been an issue in photography all along.” Various debates around the subject have led to a self-critical questioning of traditional media practices, which is much needed at times in the visual fields of both photography and cinema. Kessler then concludes that “photography's claim on the real has always been rather fragile. Digitalization, in other words, not so much caused an obliteration of the privileged link between the photographic image and the real, but rather provoked a return of the repressed, namely a renewed awareness of the numerous forms of manipulation and intervention that constitute the very activity of producing and presenting (moving) pictures.”

To solve the issue, at least a general level of media literacy is needed for viewers and creators alike.